Flexible hours and great management - Legal Support Assistant Public Defence Service Employee Review

Supportive management, good people and training opportunities

Low pay for very high workloads, outdated technology

Good for beginners. Safety of salary. Unlimited sick leave.

1. Coworkers can be very clique and disinterested in others whom they do not want to be interested in. Some people are treated appallingly and very isolated; particularly if older or "non-trads." 2. Slow and difficult to move up in PAL rating; not many of your files will go to trial that runs. Very demoralising and soul-destroying. The salaried model seems to actively discourage this when at the private bar the incentive is to move you up as quickly as possible. 3. Very hierarchical and narrow work; all turns on PAL rating; for example, despite having quite a bit of experience in parole matters they aren't interested if you don't have PAL2 despite Legal Aid allowing you to work on these with supervision. 4. Low-level work is often mind-numbing demoralising and soul-destroying. No real opportunity to junior more experienced lawyers like you would at the private bar except for trials but the method of handing these out of arbitrary and based on "doing your time" and seems to have quite a bit of favouritism involved. 5. No practical training; "training" is often just webinars presented by randoms that if of various (and often lackluster) quality. No ability to sit and watch full trials for example or no structured practical advocacy training. 6. Technology (Affinity) is appalling. No real PMS/DMS. Mostly still paper-based files that are often a mess. Hard to quickly see what is going on when covering a matter. No real interest by management in pushing hard to fix this; they just say "it's just how it is." So much wasted time and stress due to mountains of paper. 7. PDS seems to be largely forgotten about or ignored within MOJ.