This article explains how to run effective appraisals for in-house legal teams by focusing on adaptable objectives, meaningful performance discussions, and structured development planning.
It argues that appraisals should not be a tick-box exercise but a forward-looking conversation that aligns individual contributions with team and organisational goals, supports continuous feedback, and strengthens capability, motivation, and long-term performance across the legal function.
Key takeaways
- Appraisals should prioritise future planning, not just retrospective evaluation of outdated objectives.
- Regular one-to-one meetings are essential to address performance issues before formal reviews.
- Individual contributions should be assessed in context, including impact on the wider organisation.
- Personal development should combine training, experience, mentoring, and broader business skills.
- Team-level appraisal metrics help align legal function performance with organisational strategy.
Appraisals, performance reviews, development evaluations – whatever your organisation calls them, most in-house teams will need to appraise legal team members regularly.
Often, the basic process is defined by your organisation, rather than designed for legal alone. It’s fair to say that it is frequently seen as something of a chore – an unwelcome piece of administration that takes up significant time and effort.
That perception is a shame. The key asset of an in-house legal team is its human capital – the intellect, experience, know-how and skills of team members. The smart GC will know that to use that human capital to best effect, it is important to be clear what is expected, how performance is monitored and reviewed, what development opportunities are available, and how individual accomplishments and capabilities fit with those of the whole team.
So how should you appraise your team?
Appraising Individuals
Setting the purpose of appraisals
At their simplest, individual appraisals are about reviewing personal performance against objectives set for the year. One of the fundamental problems with appraisals for in-house lawyers is that the role can change significantly during the year. The organisation’s needs are very likely to have changed - new projects, new business ventures, acquisitions and disposals, new legal and regulatory requirements, changes in staffing, restructures and reorganisations. The list is long and can fundamentally change what the in-house lawyer does in the year.
In that context, an in-house lawyer’s original objectives can become outdated, superseded by new tasks or by changes in the individual's role. Sadly, one does hear of situations where lawyers have worked hugely hard during the year on business-critical projects, but are assessed against their original objectives, and where the appraisal is scored, they are even given a middling score. Such an outcome isn’t helpful either for the member of staff, the legal team, or the organisation itself.
It can also be the case that the objectives are task-based, rather than skills or knowledge-based. The appraisal can then be very retrospective, looking purely at what has, or hasn’t, been done. This can be a real missed opportunity – but worse still, it can be very demotivating.
Far better to have the goal that the appraisal meeting should be for both the team member and the person conducting the review to leave with a clear plan for the coming year, both in terms of specific tasks and development activities, having had a full and open conversation about the year’s work, the individual’s career plan and goals, and a discussion of any challenges or barriers they may see.
The appraisal meeting must not be seen as an opportunity to bring up new concerns or issues with a person’s performance. These should be raised and discussed in regular – ideally monthly – one-to-one meetings between the individual and their line manager. It’s fine to review progress, quite another to come to the meeting with a charge sheet.
What to cover in the appraisal?
An effective appraisal meeting needs to cover four things:
- Progress against appraisal goals previously set (so long as they remain current and appropriate)
- What else has been achieved in the year, and in what context (so what has changed and how has the individual dealt with that)?
- What progress has been made against personal development goals?
- What new appraisal and personal development goals are to be set for the coming year?
Reviewing performance against goals
Looking at what has been achieved in the year, it’s common to ask for a self-assessment of performance against the appraisal goals or objectives, and that can be a helpful checklist for discussion. Equally, to ensure you are discussing what else has been accomplished in the year, why not ask team members to come to the meeting with a list of, say, the ten key things they have achieved in the period. The nature of in-house work may well mean that those are quite different from the original objectives and yet represent things that are critical to the team or the organisation as a whole.
Assessing additional achievements and context
You can also ask team members to indicate the impact of their achievements on the team and the wider organisation. In-house lawyers sometimes look only at what they’ve done in terms of their own task – for example, working on an acquisition or a project – but don’t highlight what their input has really achieved. If their work has closed the deal, identified and managed a key risk, or brought a new product to the market, that should be noted and recognised.
Evaluating personal development progress
Personal development goals are also important, and it can be really helpful to have a framework to put them in context. Often, one sees that there’s a personal development section in an appraisal form, which is completed by suggesting that a particular course ought to be completed. Courses can be useful, of course, but aren’t the whole picture. Personal development is really a matrix of formal training, continuing professional development, personal and professional interaction, mentoring, and an understanding of the ‘glue’ of psychology, skills and techniques which allow them to be pulled together – all the time increasing professional effectiveness.
Setting future objectives and development goals
A good in-house lawyer’s skills are not simply ‘legal’ – and one of the advantages of practicing in-house can be that there is access to the wider range of opportunities offered by the organisation. Some legal teams have produced development maps identifying the knowledge, skills and behaviours that team members are expected to have at particular stages of their career, which coupled with a knowledge and behaviours framework is a great basis for thinking about personal development and producing an individual plan for success.
The plan can cover specific skills, training and activities, and what you need to know. Skills and training can be purely legal, or broader related learning – for example in managing others, understanding strategy and finance, project management and beyond, and the activities which support them. What you need to know can be even wider - for example about your legal team and its operation model, your organisation and its governance framework; how you behave and maintain your professional standards at all times; how you develop personally, professionally and ethically, and how you present yourself.
Encouraging open and balanced discussion
As importantly, the appraisal meeting represents the opportunity for a full and open conversation about how things have gone and why, and what the individual wants for the future. Often forgotten, but it’s also a chance to say thank you for the year’s work and contribution, and for the line manager to ensure they are motivating the team members. A proper appraisal meeting will take an hour – possibly two – and that may be the only chance you have for such a lengthy and focused conversation in the year.
Appraising the team
Aligning legal team objectives with business goals
It’s sometimes said that many lawyers prefer to work as a collective of individuals rather than as a team. Whether that’s a fair criticism or not can depend on one’s point of view, but there’s no doubt that it is helpful if there is a shared understanding of why the organisation has an in-house team, what it is intended to achieve, and how it can demonstrate progress toward that goal.
Measuring team performance and value
It can be useful to develop a formal legal strategy to cover these areas, and then to measure progress against them. If you can think about how your organisation measures itself, using some of those measures and metrics can be powerful, and if you can cascade specifics from the team goals into the individual objectives of team members, you can begin to demonstrate a very coherent plan showing how the legal team supports the goals of the organisation.
There is a range of factors you may like to consider measuring, which might include:
- Money
- Comparative cost
- What legal work is being done – and for whom?
- Compliance, penalties and costs
- Legal trends, developments, risks and opportunities
- People
- Process
- Technology
- Quality
- Team processes, and
- Value
You can find much more information about what and how you can measure and report these factors in CLL How to measure the performance of an in-house team [Link]
Some final thoughts
In a busy, task-focused legal team (and very few legal teams have the luxury of being anything but busy and task-focused), it is tempting to see appraisals as an unnecessary or unachievable burden – something to complete quickly under duress when the People team insists.
On reflection, though, appraisals can be seen very differently. They can be used to help every member of the team to excel, to achieve their fullest potential and to build new capability into the team. They can provide the foundation to demonstrate how the legal team is achieving its objectives and contributing fully to the success of the organisation as a whole. They can give valuable feedback on the morale and motivation of team members, on their personal goals and ambitions, and hugely improve retention and relationships.
Ensuring that both the team member and the person carrying out the appraisal take the process seriously and allocate enough time to prepare for the meeting, to review the material fully, and to consider what outcomes they want to achieve. We said at the start of this article that the key asset of the in-house team is its human capital. The appraisal process is a key tool to allow you to maximise its potential.
Further Reading
CLL Mapping a Development Plan with Development Map and Knowledge and Behaviours Framework