The Promotion Process at Chung and Dasgupta, Llp

Management Case: The Promotion Process at Chung and Dasgupta, LLP

1. Assess the strengths and weaknesses of the performance evaluation process at Chung and Dasgupta. Thinking as both partner and an Associate, what do you think is most critical in ensuring the process succeeds?

While reading the case we can see that Chung and Dasgupta LLP, our law firm has a real history and his creation is not only the result of two people who want to do business but about two people to who happened something that they don’t want to see it happened to anyone else. First of all, the company have a good approach in order to track performances and has established good rules, and everyone knows about the rules of the game. They specifically have “the development coach” to be in charge of that and we also know that the performance evaluation process represents 30% of the partners’ time. But unfortunately while doing this performance evaluation, there is some problems, some small things who are not done in the right way or that can be done otherwise. So let’s develop the most important strengths and weaknesses of this performance evaluation form.

The Strengths of this method are the following:

ü The fact that the company has a DC is a good idea, and the DCs are partners so it’s experienced people and they perfectly know this business, so they can asses the performance in a perfect knowledge of the subject, then we know that the partner’s time is dedicated at this task around 30% of it, so the performance evaluation process is done in good conditions.

ü The fact that the DCs talk to paralegals, office assistants, and people outside the firm, such as clients and expert witnesses, to get their feedback on the Associate’s performance is a good idea because they diversify the sources so they can double check the information in order to have accurate ones.

ü One of the good strengths, is that they DCs don’t have a formal form of evaluation, because they don’t want the process to be over-engineered, this can help to keep always the objective of assessing the performance in the best possible way possible and not only to fill a form at certain period of time and this will can be illustrated by the following sentence “We really rely on the DC to ask the right questions of the right people to get an accurate assessment of how an Associate is performing.”.



ü Then, we can see that there is around 10 criteria, this is a very valid point, because when you have a certain amount of criteria and you don’t have a formal form you have no other choice than to do it accurately and in good conditions, so that can help to reduce the risk of subjectivity while doing the evaluation, and the partners or DCs have to rely on touchable points. For example, for the writing ability, the DCs have to read