software engineer

account executive

attorney

senior software engineer

sales executive

Thomson Reuters

The Company
FindLaw has the potential to leverage it’s traffic and resources to produce some pretty great products. Unfortunately, it is mired with poor upper management, an apathetic attitude toward progress, and lack of creative inspiration. Extremely hierarchal in culture, peoples’ motivations for doing their jobs is self-preservation versus the greater purpose. There exists a culture of distrust, backstabbing, and chaos, which all prevent positive production from those who run it. There is no captain at the wheel of this dysfunctional ship.

The Office
The bulk comprises of unmotivated professionals who see the job as simply a paycheck and not an opportunity, and they would be right. There is a pervasive air of distrust, with many constantly looking over their shoulders. Complacency leads to most staff stagnating unmotivated at their desks. A cube farm would be an accurate description of the environment, with little to no stimulation from the sad walls highlighting the irrelevant achievements of yesteryear.

Senior Management
VP-level senior management is completely aloof of what’s going on outside their office doors, which are normally closed. There is little to no interaction between the rank and file, or even normal management, with the office VP.

Director-level management (ie. marketing, et al) is highly political and insecure with themselves, and there is no direction whatsoever. This is partially a product of a lack of leadership from the office VP, but also because of the general apathy, lack of empathy, general incompetence, and rampantly misplaced, micromanaging egos. Some in particular also seem threatened by the people working below them, leading to uncalled-for off-color comments. While some are simply lazy, others are are highly destructive to their projects and teams. They are out of touch (and out of date) at best and actively sabotage projects at worst. Institutional delays with laughable levels of indecision and waffling are the norm and as a result, they seek to throw somebody under the bus.

Managers are generally motivated to make their teams as successful as possible. Unfortunately, due to a lack of leadership and direction from the levels above, are often forced to compromise their team’s goals and tasks to appease fickle 180 degree project heading changes from management. Daily, and sometimes hourly, course changes are quite normal from their superiors, often undermining their ability to get things done.

Projects
Projects here are poorly managed and planned, and ill-conceived. Products are built for management and not the customers and there is absolutely no motivation to actually ship anything. The mantra here is “we ship slide-decks, not code.” Outsourcing is the rule in order to distance internal stakeholders from all liabilities. Decisions in the critical path are routinely changed on a daily basis, and directors often establish “horse races”, multiple (sometimes up to a half dozen) action plans that are expected to be executed with the winner being the first completed. Not only is that a waste of resources and cycles, it is completely unmanageable. Gratuitous, and very expensive, meetings with dozens of “stakeholders” (who insert themselves in order to stay relevant) run multiple times per day and run unnecessarily long, with nothing gained or learned and no action plan at the conclusion. This is simply another sign of poor senior management, and most meetings are scheduled with the only outcome of scheduling more meetings.

Opportunities
This is a dead end job with generally poor pay, opportunities, and benefits, and promotions are non-existent. Seemingly half of the office are contractors and the other half are full or part time peons; generally all are treated poorly by upper management. Tasks are mind-numbing and uncreative, and many unstimulated employees have sat in the same catatonic position for 5-10+ years. Career advancement and development is impossible and leaving the company is the only chance for ambitious people to improve their careers.

Conclusion
While I don’t believe FindLaw to be a malicious company with malicious people, there are definitely areas of improvement at the high level. Specifically, there needs to be far more accountability of the oligarchy, and recognition of those that prop them up and actually do the real work, which is generally unappreciated and often, goes completely unused. Having your work thrown out after committing time, thought, energy, and creativity to them is not motivating. FindLaw’s disconnection from the home office has a lot to do with the lack of accountability of their B, C, and D-player VP’s and directors, and it’s the CEO’s job to correct those issues. Unfortunately, he’s 3000 miles away in an ivory tower.

I've sold in the legal publishing business since 1992. I became a West rep in 1997 due to the merger of Clark Boardman Callaghan (my original employer, owned by Thomson Corporation), Lawyer's Cooperative Publishing and West. We were extremely excited about the opportunity to be associated with the best-known name in the business, West. We knew that it would be financially rewarding for us and it was. Over the years, many substitute free products have come to the marketplace and we've had to ward off the threats, but most of the attorneys understood that if you really wanted to feel secure about what you were doing, you should use West.

With Thomson and Reuters merged together things have changed again. The legal practice model is changing such that electronically stored information has caught the attention of West and they're introducing versions of tools that can be used by attorneys to store and organize electronic evidence. The problem is that those sales take a longer time to develop and requires changing behavior and procedures within a fim. The pressure of the monthly number hits while you are trying to be more a consultant and less of a transactional hammer, and the question as always is "what have you done for me lately?".

After a disastrous and ill-advised move to pull away the solo, 2 and 3 attorney firms from the reps and change everyone's territories, I've heard recently that they gave them back. What you're seeing is too much influence by MBA's and CPA's and salespeople are usually the casualties. They've lost too many good reps and also too many accounts due to their bad business decisions and being insensitive to the market and their sales force.

There is a lot to learn in this job and the Home Office doesn't help, constantly harassing the same customers, giving their field reps a bad reputation walking in the door. The Home Office competes with the field rep, creating conflicts with the clients. Recent territory manipulations have created ill-will in a marketplace where relationships are crucial, especially to long-term sales opportunities, not to mention with the Small Law sales team. When you develop a relationship with a client and they suddenly pull you out of the territory because an outside consultant redesigned it, that just makes you disgusted, not to mention pulling away your existing pipline and income opportunities. Doesn't work too well for the customer either.

New Small Law management does seem to have a soul but will have a rough time overcoming the ill-will of the previous management team. Also constant influence of Thomson Reuters organization may make it difficult to turn things around since they are so numbers-oriented and not really as client-oriented as they say.

I'll start this review by stating that I am biased. Never have I felt more disrespected by any corporate entity and I loathe this company to the bottom of my soul. I've actually made a couple thousand dollars buying betting that their stock would go down (and it did) because of my experiences working there. 

The pay is okay but the hours are god awful. They have seasonal busy seasons that require overtime and they've structured your contract so you can't get a 1.5 rate. They built an entire department to micromanage you. Every 15 min block of your time is "optimized" and tracked. Even though you get PTO and Sick time, this can be denied to you if the company feels you are "essential" to the workforce that day. I know people who have vomited in the bathroom and have not felt comfortable enough with their managers to request to leave. I've seen callous rejections of time-off requests to take spouses to the hospital. And the free food, swag, and company culture training cannot hide the bleak prospects of their terrible business model. 

As a support rep, you are expected to take calls all day from geriatrics supporting legacy software products. Almost every software update breaks the program, so you have to deal with the vitriol from angry customers on a semi-weekly basis. No one else in the company seems to care that this is a common occurrence because they hire you to be the face of the company. You get to sit on the phone being the "face" getting metaphorically punched every day. People from sales will recruit you to help justify the lies they told to sell their sub-par product in the first place. 

But anonymous reviewer, you might ask, why doesn't the company just write better software? Well that's the main question, isn't it? It makes sense for a company to invest in a piece of software as long as possible. But after a few years writing updates, new updates become progressively harder to do because if the program is flawed to begin with, they are merely putting additional layers over these flaws. Each layer makes existing bugs and features harder to modify. This is why each update tends to break the program, because the underlying code is so complex, that it's impossible for one developer to truly understand how every little piece of it interacts. So why don't they just write new software instead of updating the old...? Well sir or madam, it might be because they're cheap and they don't care. That is probably part of it. But my theory is based on economics. When they charge around $20 per ten minutes for someone to call you to support their software, do they truly have economic incentive to do anything but draw it out? 

On a heavier note, they terminated a bunch of contractors a week or two before full-time status during the current covid-19 pandemic. These hopeful employees spent half a year doing the same job for less pay. Let go. During a pandemic. When they were just about to be eligible for health insurance. Disgusting.

Lots of confusion over the direction on the company for many years. They are receiving poor advise and making poor decisions based on the advise which has caused further loss for the company. Managers just follow along rather than questioning to provide real improvement and decisions made are made from those unaware of specific departments needs and potential for growth. Meetings are not truthful about GDP growth because of the positive spin they take and then being unaware there are surprise layoffs and management sadly doesnt bother to keep you informed finding out the month of...Management needs serious improvement and those unafraid to voice in order to make real improvements for the company but they get management that just says yes sir and no sir and then continue to fail due to decisions based on poor information and knowledge. The company puts unrealistic goals and management does not question how they got to those numbers then most of the department looks like they are failing, management just plays along then threaten to fire you as a scare tactic thinking this will somehow help - undue stress for not doubling your goal (yes double) from the year prior. After management learns of the error on the companies part (unrealistic goal) no apologies or back pay for lost commission due to their error. The company needs to go straight to the employees that are grinding to make cash who arent afraid to speak up and not the kiss ups management selects that are there to represent their poor handling of the department if you really want to see where the money is. Those grinding would know first hand. I will say on a positive note they do work hard on diversity and culture and are at the top for culture and diversity. Just wish they would get forward thinking entrepreneurs who are not afraid to share opinions, questions and suggests to help the company grow instead of being in a fairytale land with non-thinking management because of wanting to appease instead of improve. 

This company has all the right ideas, but putting it into actual practice - that's an entirely different story. The everyday work culture was very exclusionary and clique-ish, almost like a bad redux of "Mean Girls" except the mean girls were both genders, and nobody was good looking. Basically, there were pre-established "favorites" when I was hired, and I was never asked to join the group activities. Many times, we were split into groups ahead of time -- and all the misfits always ended up together, with the popular group running off to have drinks together and the rest of us left behind (literally). The big wigs all make everything look good during their monthly "town hall" meetings, but it's really just a dog-and-pony show to make them all look good to each other. Honestly, if it wasn't for all of the meetings and conferences and team-building stuff we were "required" to attend all day long, we would only have about 2 hours of work to do each day. Just another example of corporate life gone haywire. Way too much money in the coffers, far too many cooks in the kitchen, just pick a cliche, and this company has it. Going to Minnesota and staying in luxury accommodations and fancy food for a week instead of flying to the London office and having acceptable accommodations...like, really? This is just one example of the over-the-top, under-the-table type of behavior these people engage in, on a regular basis. Spending tens of thousands on orange t-shirts and coffee cups, ping-pong tables and yet not having fans or heaters available for each desk. Having to wait weeks to get ergonomic office and computer supplies, but all the sugary pastries you can ever dream of, every morning. Very disappointing, considering that Thomson Reuters is one of the global leaders in both the journalism and legal industries. Oh, and if you're trying to move up? Forget it. The crabs all want to keep you at the bottom of their barrel, so you're just stuck. Very sad, and very frustrating. Not recommended for anyone with goals, ambition, and the desire to be treated with respect.

A typical day was logging into our system and going over the days assignments which included a number of publicly traded Korean Co.  I would then prioritize various assignments by its importance and start my day.  Duties ranged from going over corporations financials (balance sheets, income statements, and cashflow statements), issued shares, outstanding shares, and treasury shares, and making sure the numbers matched and importing them into our database, then comparing it with the previous qtr or fiscal year end and writing and abstract on their performance to making sure stock splits/dividends/change in management were properly recorded in Thomson Reuters system, DoPlus, for our clients to use.  When assignments were low, I would ask supervisors for additional assignments for Corporations in other countries that reported in English.  I also taught new hires our system once they came out of training.  

I learned various accounting practices, specifically various line items in their financial statements.  I also learned their proprietary system DoPlus.  

Management was great, some more than other because some were more knowledgeable than others. 

My co-workers were amazing, I worked in the Korean team which included 2 other Korean analyst and 1 VP that I am still in contact with.  But working with other teams when assignments ran low allowed me to become close with the entire department.  

The hardest part of my job was the 1st month out of the 3 months training.  Mainly because it was learning the system.  The remaining 2 months were not bad at all because i was familiar with basic accounting and financial statements.

The most enjoyable part was working with my co-workers and having assignments loaded in our system where we were not micro managed.

A typical day at Thomson Reuters allowed me to job shadow the various department heads within the Creative Services department, sit in on creative meetings and contribute feedback on the different advertising campaigns, interact with clients who have asked for our services, as well as create brand identities of the various projects I was assigned. I learned an exceptional amount about what it takes to make the Creative Services department at Thomson work and how each person involved throughout the creative process plays an important role to bring the final product from ideation to completion.
My supervisors provided me with enough guidance to set me in the right direction while challenging me to discover creative solutions on my own. However, when I did need some assistance my supervisors and co-workers were great resources and very helpful. I would say that the hardest part of the job was narrowing down my ideas to present at creative process meetings. After brainstorming I would come up with at least 50 different ideas and would then have to self-critique what I felt were the weaker and the stronger ones so that I would have solid material to bring to the table for reviews. I enjoyed my entire experience interning for Thomson Reuters. Creating concepts, working with other co-workers, attending meetings and conducting professional presentations for my superiors was challenging and exciting and allowed me to grow as a designer and acquire unique real-life experiences. The experiences I had at Thomson Reuters allowed me to apply what I have learned at Iowa State and accelerate my learning process of what it takes to work in a corporate Creative Services department.

When I first joined many moons ago there was a common goal of getting the job done and maintaining a desirable work/life balance.

Fast forward to a very poorly executed merger(Thomson bought Reuters at some ludicrous multiple) and it didn't take long afterward for the wheels to come off the truck.

Fear, do whatever Bloomberg & Factset are doing(that is, besides offer a high quality product..lol) and throw out the old and bring in the "new".

That is except for management where the mantra is "keep the old guard around who basically know nothing about the financial markets but excel at the all important game of office politics."

All, and I mean all, promotions and advancement are based around the hiring party feeling comfortable that you have their "back". In other words, those that are "leading" this once great company place having pawns around them as more important than someone who might ruffle feathers for the betterment of the overall company.

There's no "this is better for the company" attitude at TR. It's all about infighting and sniping behind each others backs so as to hopefully avoiding the fate bestowed on the many thousands recently let go in the past few years. 

Very unfortunate as this used to be a great place to work..both compensation and benefits offered have declined greatly in the past number of years.

I learned a lot from Thomson Reuters.  Both on the customer facing and sales facing sides of the business.  In my first position at TR, I was more client facing and communicating with each one about the status of each product they outsourced to us.  I would manually track and move each order through the process of completion and also calculate the hours each employee spent on each document to provide for their monthly incentives.  I got to put my knowledge about Management Information Systems to use by working with the IT division and collaborating with programmers to make a more fluid system of tracking and invoicing the services that the company provides.  I trained a team in Hyderabad, India to assist in more work the company was taking on.  After, I was able to work on other projects.  I then moved on to my second position with the corporation.  As an analyst for the sales team, I provided the rep with a custom price for our clients to use our services.  Monthly reports on new sales, new clients, and lost clients were provided in excel format.  The hardest part of my 1st position was juggling all of the service orders in a daily deadline submission to the Securities Exchange Commission.  The hardest part of my second position was getting clarification from the sales team on what they were requesting.  My co-workers were very easy to work with.  The most enjoyable part of my job was seeing signed contracts from my sales team to generate more business for the company.

Thomson Reuters looks good, has a nice campus, and a lot of pretty signs claiming to be inclusive, family oriented, and all about the worker.  Truth is that this place is oppressive to the point of being a hostile work environment and the extreme micromanagement punishes the workers for doing their job and serving the clients.  You don't have a manager or supervisor, you have a team leader.  Your team leader just listens to your phone calls all day/night and constantly belittles your performance even when the client is taken care of, happy and satisfied.  I've seen people almost urinate themselves because they're scared to take themselves out of the phone queue long enough to run to the bathroom.  PTO doesn't roll over year to year but whenever you request to use it, you'll be denied.  It required a 2 hour PowerPoint meeting/presentation just to cover how to clock in and clock out because they will literally dock you over for any/every reason possible.  There is literally no HR presence at all and no one you can talk to about anything.  They have 15 different websites and logins making everything impossible to find and use and you have no time allotted during work hours to do the research yourself for even basics like benefits.  The work itself is fine, the benefits are good, but the oppressive work culture, mandatory overtime, extreme and unnecessary micromanagement, and things like 30 minute lunch breaks during 16 hours shifts make TR a nightmare organisation to work for.

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