Summer paralegal expectations
Just started summer job as a rising 2L at a small med mal defense firm and I’m wondering if my experience is universal or not. There was zero onboarding, first 3 days I did a medical chronology and had to constantly ask paralegals questions abt how to use their internal filing system with zero instructions, essentially just told to make a touch timeline for a specific case. Then on my 4th day I’m asked to do a pain timeline based on an 8 year history with a 12,000 page document (not 1200). So I get started and I finish doing abt 1000 pages in 3 hours. The senior partner walks in my office last 5 minutes of the 4th day and starts asking abt what I’ve read and kind of makes it out like she thinks my notes r wrong even though I’m just transcribing the medical notes so they’re not. Then she asks me if the 12k document will take me 5 hours. I couldn’t tell if she was messing with me like what. Not big law, like maybe 20-25 employees. Is this unusual? What do people normally experience at firms and are expectations/instructions usually more clear? Did u have any sort of onboarding or were you billing hours on the first day?