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Duane Morris Essay

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Since the late 2000s, the law firm Duane Morris has transformed itself from a local law firm to a significant global player. Duane Morris once functioned like a U.S. monopoly where partners and clients stayed forever, has evolved into competitive full legal-services machine by spanning the globe. Throughout its expansion of new U.S. and international offices, Duane Morris has remained committed to preserving its collegial, collaborative culture that has attracted and maintained many talented attorneys. Its culture has contributed to the firm's success. Although it’s not easy to maintain the collaborative culture as the company continues to grow, but it’s worth for Duane Morris to do so.

The collaborative organizational culture at Duane Morris …show more content…

On the other hand, at some big law firms where works are hoarded, colleagues actively undermined and attorneys jump ship for competitors offering higher salary bumps. The high turnovers can lead to instability. However, Duane Morris has successfully managed to gather a group of attorneys who share responsibilities. The collaboration allowed multiple attorneys with differing expertise to work together and help each other. In this case, the company is able to take on increasingly sophisticated client works, which in turn let Duane Morris charge higher prices to offer more decent salary to their employees. Second, the culture focuses on equality and building a democratic organizational structure, which facilitate the internal collaborations. Duane Morris is structured as a hybrid of Organic Structure and Matrix Structure. Partners are happy to push down and give more responsibility so that the decisions can be distributed to lower levels. Meanwhile, the works at Duane Morris are highly differentiated and attorneys have their own specialized arrears. Everyone is available to reach out through both the top-down and down-top communications, which build integrating mechanisms. Besides, the “No …show more content…

Their rigorous hiring standards help the company to hire ideal candidates who are collegial, task-oriented, a team player, and most importantly, consistent with the culture. Therefore, the processes of onboarding and integration can be easily conducted. However, the extensive processes of financial report, analysis and compensation are least scalable. The sophisticated compensation system at Duane Morris encourages collaboration rather than fights over origination credit and the hogging of work. When the company calculates an attorney’s profitability, the person’s contributions in detail, from any mentoring roles taken to the person's ability to generate new business, market the firm, or assume administrative roles, and any other value the person added are all discussed. A self-evaluation is also required to comprehensively consider the performance of an attorney. In this way, the system was highly evidence-based and data-driven. Besides, all attorneys have opportunity to appeal the compensation determination when the employee consider is unfair. This multitiered compensation system is very flexible and complex. When more aspects needed to be considered in order to guarantee fairness and transparency, the process is harder to

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