The most depressing place I've ever worked. - Caseworker Duncan Lewis Solicitors Employee Review

I was warned before I started this job by a previous employer of mine not to work at DL: everyone he knew who had worked for them had hated it. But how bad could it be? I’ve never been actively unhappy in any job I’ve had before. Spoiler alert: I quit. Its business model is that it employs hordes of 'caseworkers' and takes on as many clients as it possibly can - many of them vulnerable - for as much legal aid money as it can scrape up. It prioritises chargeable hours targets for its staff above all, including work quality, often resulting in inflation of numbers given to the LAA verging on the dishonest (in my experience). Clients are passed around like hotcakes between staff members Rules, policies, and targets are excessively detailed to the point of treating fee-earners like naughty children. I think it is an attempt to mimic management of other more successful firms, but DL fails to mimic the quality of staff and culture which exist in those other firms. As a consequence, the rules achieve nothing except breeding frustration. I've since worked at a top City firm, and it was incredible how comparatively relaxed it was. For some staff members, their time at DL is a stepping stone. For others, you get the impression it is where they've ended up because they wouldn't pass muster elsewhere. One particularly gets this impression for non-legal staff. The IT induction presentations was the first and to date only time I've ever encountered someone in the workplace who came across as actively unintelligent. I don't say this to be rude, I say it because it made me realise that prior to working here I just took for granted the idea that all colleagues in a firm from the ground up would be able to do their jobs to a good standard. DL let me know that need not be the case. HR in particular has a reputation for incompetence / disrespect towards staff, as does management. IT is okay – they do the best with the systems they have. Speaking of IT, the "bespoke" case-management system 'Indigo' is terrible to the point of being humorous. You learn in the IT induction day that it was created specifically to meet the needs of DL employees. To this day I have no idea what employees they could possibly have spoken to, but I suspect they may have been high at the time. Some people within DL are nice, hard-working, and competent. But the firm’s amoral sweatshop vibe dominates everything. By the time I left (for a City firm), I had forgotten what it was like to actually look forward to going to work in the morning; to work in a pleasant office with pleasant people. The quality of work and level of responsibility I got at the new job was lower, but it didn't matter, because I was happy for the first time in months. Life is too short to work somewhere you're not happy. Very few people at DL seemed to be happy. I quit some time ago so I’m probably forgetting important details, and the intensity of my feeling has dulled. But heed my overall message – whoever you are, you can do better than DL, and you deserve better.