Best Practice: Evaluating associate performance
Asked and Answered
By John W. Olmstead, MBA, Ph.D, CMC
Q. We are a six partner litigation firm in Des Moines, Iowa. This year we hired two associates and they are our first. We have not provided them with the best mentoring or guidance - it has sort of baptism by fire. I would appreciate your thoughts on what we should be doing concerning performance management.
A. Baptism by fire is not the best approach for managing associate performance. It may work in the long term but in the short term it will result in excessive "spin time" and lost revenue and profits for the firm. Here are a few thoughts:
- To be effective, evaluation of associates must be meaningful.
- Evaluation for associates right out of school should be done every six months for two years and annually thereafter.
- Written criteria must be developed and communicated to everyone as the basis for evaluation.
- The associate should be evaluated by every lawyer with whom the associate works.
- The evaluation process should be developmental. Weaknesses must be openly discussed, with a plan devised to eliminate the weaknesses. Professional goals should be set each year.
- Personal plans should be completed each year and be part of the evaluation process.
- The evaluations must be timely.
Good luck with your program.
Click here for our blog on career management
Click here for articles on other topics
John W. Olmstead, MBA, Ph.D, CMC,(www.olmsteadassoc.com) is a past chair and member of the ISBA Standing Committee on Law Office Management and Economics. For more information on law office management please direct questions to the ISBA listserver, which John and other committee members review, or view archived copies of The Bottom Line Newsletters. Contact John at jolmstead@olmsteadassoc.com.
Member Comments (1)
You suggest your firm hasn't been the best supervisors.
Consider:
Using your two associates to write their job descriptions for the tasks they have been doing the past year, and then for what they believe they should be doing for the next two years. And include some measurable criteria, perhaps with the associated data for the past year. Then have their supervising attorney(s) review what the associates wrote and consider their comments--both positive (good criterion) and negative (I'd hope our associates would/could also do x, or include y measurement).
How does the firm evaluate its other members/employees?
If the firm hasn't been doing that, consider having everyone write a job description (pat year), and projected two-years, with proposed measurements.
Of course, how this evaluation does or does impact compensation, retention, etc is another matter. Or is it?
Daniel Kegan, <daniel@keganlaw.com>