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Few people love employee performance reviews, but attorneys have a leg up on many other professions. Using your research, writing, and verbal communication skills, you can turn a review into an opportunity by building a case for your value to the firm.
Attorney performance reviews can help you align yourself with firm goals and values, identify and move toward professional goals, and stand out as an associate who has the capability to learn from experience, take advantage of professional growth opportunities, and represent the firm.
It all starts with early and detailed preparation, understanding what your firm expects from the evaluation process, and developing clear and specific goals.
A law firm associate performance review isn’t a task to power through off the top of your head—to be meaningful and useful for the attorney and the firm, preparation is a must on both sides.
Start by identifying annual timelines well in advance to allow adequate time for gathering and reviewing feedback. To get a fully informed picture, collect and compile feedback from:
When you ask for feedback on your performance, include specific requests about legal matters, time periods, or projects known to the reviewer. Ask for both positive and improvement-track input, such as how time, talents, or expertise:
Just as discovery is critical to building strategic arguments for legal matters, preparation is king for annual review cycles. Once you understand your firm’s schedule, process, and tools, build them into your calendar and collect vital data and constructive feedback for reviews as a regular part of your work process.
No matter what the profession, basic marketing and sales skills will come into play at some point, starting with job interviews and performance evaluations. If you’re not currently involved in client acquisition or business development for your firm, honing these skills through the self-assessment process is useful practice.
Position yourself in your best light:
While you’re marketing yourself within the context of an employee performance evaluation, don’t avoid mentioning errors or issues that you’ve encountered. Instead, identify how you’ve corrected or changed direction, or otherwise turned them into growth opportunities. How did you follow up on setbacks? What have you learned this year as an attorney from both victories and not-so-successful outcomes?
Trying to track down and reconstruct everything you’ve accomplished or contributed to for the past twelve months is a monumental effort. Instead, keep ongoing digital and paper files where you toss in notes, off-the-cuff feedback, and details pertinent to your next review. This could include:
On the whole, plan on a presentation that includes:
Both the attorney and the reviewer should come to the table with ideas of growth needs and potential actions to uncover advancement opportunities for lawyers. These might include:
It can be difficult to fit in training and improvement goals around day-to-day deadlines and legal matters. To help prioritize and accomplish them, use the “SMART” yardstick of writing goals to be:
For example, goals could include:
Seek law firm mentorship from a senior attorney, scheduling monthly chats starting this quarter.
Billed hours remain a staple in any legal performance evaluation, but truly effective attorneys know that hours alone don't tell the full story. To present a more complete picture during your performance review, consider adding metrics that reveal the real value of your contributions:
Including these figures in your self-assessment or deal sheet demonstrates not only your productivity but also your strategic awareness—traits that resonate with firm leadership during employee evaluations. Some of the most impactful indicators of performance don’t appear on a timesheet. In fact, the traits that often separate good lawyers from future leaders are qualitative and culture-driven:
Highlighting these qualitative factors during your legal performance review shows that you’re not just completing tasks—you’re contributing to the overall improvement of the firm’s operations and employee development. Your role as an attorney is multi-dimensional. The more your evaluation reflects that complexity, the better positioned you are for advancement, leadership opportunities, and long-term growth.
If you’ve been honing your oral advocacy skills representing clients’ needs and interests, you’ll be in an excellent position to employ them for your own benefit at review time. But remember, it’s a two-way street—plan to listen as well as advocate for yourself.
Being transparent and candid can be a challenge during an attorney performance review, but it’s critical for both parties. No one can address unmet needs—or always understand what’s going right—without laying out the details.
A useful approach is to couch constructive criticism between larger doses of positive feedback and praise. While at first glance it may seem patronizing to have a ratio of 4:1 or higher between kudos and criticism, it’s a balanced tactic when you consider negativity bias—the universal tendency for negative events and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones.1
Openness and honesty are vital from the starting point of review prep through to your final asks, which means:
Active listening is sometimes characterized as the process of repeating back what you’ve heard. For social scientists, it involves three stages:
In practice, active listening means starting and continuing an exchange with the intent to gain a deeper understanding of both message and context, responding appropriately and with emotional intelligence. An attorney performance review is most effective when both parties:
An annual performance review offers dedicated time with a firm leader entirely focused on your needs, performance, and goals. There is no better opportunity to position yourself, make an impression, and enlist support.
Come to the table with clear professional goals that:
The conclusion of a job performance review shouldn’t involve a sigh of relief and tossing the paperwork into a folder to look at the week before your next review. Instead, set yourself up for success with the following steps.
Document a detailed action plan to pursue over the following weeks, months, or quarters. This may include:
External accountability can be a valuable aid in staying on top of goal steps—but even if your working process is entirely independent, including your supervisor or others in progress updates can be a useful way to maintain your work profile (and associate it with good news when you check off goalposts).
Consider scheduling follow-up meetings, perhaps quarterly, to discuss your action plan progress and allow for additional feedback. Ask mentors, peers, and supervisors periodically for feedback—in addition to connecting to your current action plan, you’ll be a step ahead with the next performance review.
An attorney performance review is a success when both parties have prepared in advance, communicate openly about both positive and critical feedback, listen actively, and establish an action plan with clear and specific goals.
It also helps to know what your external options are during an annual review process. You may find that your professional goals don’t stop at your firm’s front door—that’s where E.P. Dine comes in. We offer candidates at all career stages the resources and guidance to explore their law career opportunities. Learn more about our associate lawyer hiring and other services today.
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At E.P. Dine, we are committed to delivering content that is not only relevant and insightful but also rooted in professional integrity and expertise. To achieve this, every article published on the E.P. Dine blog undergoes a meticulous review process by qualified professionals with deep knowledge and experience in the legal field and legal recruitment.
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