How accurate are ROF and Legal Cheek rankings/Glassdoor reviews?

[Numerius Negidius]

Do they provide a somewhat accurate picture of employee satisfaction with firm culture?

I am doing a vac scheme with Freshfields and I must say I have found their poor performance on ROF and reviews on Glassdoor about toxic culture to be rather off-putting...

Obviously this is not the only thing I am considering, but I am looking at a few firms which are otherwise hard to distinguish

 

[TCLA Community Assistant]

Do they provide a somewhat accurate picture of employee satisfaction with firm culture?

I am doing a vac scheme with Freshfields and I must say I have found their poor performance on ROF and reviews on Glassdoor about toxic culture to be rather off-putting...

Obviously this is not the only thing I am considering, but I am looking at a few firms which are otherwise hard to distinguish

I don’t know if anyone could say it is accurate.

ROF is full of people purposely being obtuse and provocative.

Glassdoor might be more accurate (in my opinion) but will still be open to skewed data. In the same way that sometimes you cannot trust reviews on Tripadvisor or the like, Glassdoor has the same issues. People tend to post reviews at two extremes of the spectrum.

Let’s put it this way, Freshfields will monitor Glassdoor much more than ROF.

FWIW, I was at Freshfields for four years. I loved the first two years of it (literally thought it was the best job and workplace in the world) and hated the final two years of it. I saw the very best of the firm and the very worst.

It is a great firm to work for generally though - I personally think it was the best of the 5 I have worked for in-house. But it has a very corporate culture and exceptionally high expectations - no matter how nice some people are and how great the opportunities are, the pressure is often intense and that can often create a toxic culture as people respond to those pressures in different ways (that won’t be unique to FBD though).

That’s just my opinion though - many people will have different experiences and different views because of them.

As you are doing a vac scheme, you have one of the best opportunities to find out what the culture is really like (although be mindful that you are schmoozed a horrendous amount during a vac scheme, and life as a trainee will be very different).

 

[Nicktim]

I can't really speak to the reason the ROF scores are as they are but I did an in-person VS at FF in 2019 so just thought I'd chip in with my personal perspective. I had similar reservations about the culture before joining because of some of the things I'd read online but was quite surprised just how normal people were. There were some people who clearly didn't have time to speak to vac schemers but I just avoided those people and didn't encounter anybody particularly rude or notice anything that would suggest a toxic culture. Obviously I had a very small sample size and I was placed into a very friendly team who weren't as busy as others, but none of the other vac schemers experienced any overt toxicity even in the busiest teams. I think it would appear there are a few bad eggs at the firm (probably the case in most big firms), but the horror stories seem to be the exception rather than the norm and the leadership team at the firm seem to be genuinely trying to make cultural changes.

As Jess has said above though, sometimes on a vac scheme it can be hard to get a true impression because you are encouraged to leave no later than 5:30pm and a great deal of investment and planning goes into giving you a good impression of the firm which is very different to the experience you'll have as a trainee when the free food and drink stops and the hours change!

 

[Kola]

The problem with ROF is that the site's own culture is pretty toxic. It is filled with lawyers and trainees trying to come up with ways to deprecate a firm which, while being admittedly quite funny sometimes, doesn't really provide an accurate representation of a firm outside of some exceptions. This is further complicated by the fact that ROF don't reveal their sample size. We don't know if the data they collected is from 1 or 30 trainees, so the lack of transparency is a real issue. I'd take 98% that ROF says with a grain of salt.