Haug Partners Reviews

The partners are unprofessional and attorneys and staff are regularly forced to listen to their inappropriate comments as well as their racist, sexist or political diatribes. The firm is terrible for women. The firm's "Executive Committee" has no women on it. In fact, the firm only has three partners who are women (two of whom recently made partner coincidentally after the firm was ranked "worst place for women to work." Women have been sexually harassed with no recourse and maternity leave policies are terrible. Men, however, are not even offered paternity leave at all. No respect or flexibility is given for attorneys who have families including young children. Associates are often forced to work in ways that are not consistent with their own working styles Partners act like they "own" their teams of attorneys, not allowing them to work in their offices, but rather forcing them to sit all day in a conference room together. This is terribly inefficient for legal writing, research and other tasks that require deep concentration and ideally quiet. Attorneys are constantly disturbed and thus routinely work nights and weekends when they can finally work in peace. The partners generally promote inefficient billing of their clients. Entire teams are asked to participate in every meeting and call, resulting in exorbitant bills for work that could have simply been handled by one or two attorneys. Partners don't have the attention span to review work product or brainstorm strategy on their own, so instead the attorneys must sit through hours of partners reviewing their drafts or thinking aloud (rather than doing their own work and resulting in numerous attorneys billing just to watch the partner doing what he should be doing on his own time). Finally, firm policies are paternalistic and patronizing. Attorneys may work from home only under the most extreme circumstances, not even being allowed to do so when they are sick. Sick days and vacation days are taken out of the same pool. Employees routinely come to work sick so that they do not need to use a PTO day. There is no accommodations allowed for life outside of the firm.

High turnover rate. The management, which includes managing partners, have absolutely no idea what they're doing. They're bleeding talent because of it. They want associates to believe that the firm is at the top of the heap and competitive with big law, when clearly it is not. Their compensation doesn't even match the Cravath scale and their benefits don't make up for it. After 3rd year they also go Black Box with their compensation model. They want you to believe that you can choose which office to work in but, again, this is a lie. Nearly everyone is pushed into the NYC office at some point even if they prefer DC or Boston. They work people into the ground and then drop them with no logical explanation, which is probably why so many people are making a lateral move to other firms. The management believes they're all hotshots, yet they consistently lie to associates about the firm's financial health to try and retain people. Just look at all of the recent people on LinkedIn who've left the firm, both attorneys and support staff. This is unusual for a place this size. Maybe it's because they started forcing their workers back into the office in NYC during summer 2020 when COVID was still a huge threat to everyone's safety.. and one of their own partners died from it! Overall, the management here is disrespectful, dishonest, and way out of their lane. I highly recommend that others avoid taking a job here. This advice applies to everyone but I feel like it's important to say that you should especially pay attention if you're a woman - even after a scathing diversity report came out on this firm years ago, there is still a severe lack of female partnership. Note that they made offers to all of the 2020 male summer associates and but dismissed multiple female summer associates (I worked with one of them directly and thought she did better work than most of them, so this could only mean one thing). Then in 2021 they brought in twice the number of male summer associates than females. All of this information should be a huge red flag for any woman reading this review.