In-House Counsel

Tips For The Dreaded In-House Self-Evaluation

Regardless of how you might feel about having to do one, if a self-evaluation is a part of your process then it’s worth doing well.

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evaluationNot every company asks their employees to write a self-evaluation. But as a law firm associate, I had to write one, and now that I’m in-house, it is a part of my team’s process. If you have never done one before, it can be daunting. But even if you have written a self-evaluation before, it can be a dreaded task, especially if you haven’t prepared. Here are some tips that have worked for me.

Research The Criteria

To evaluate yourself (or anyone for that matter), you need to know what the criteria are. How are you being measured or judged? Is it according to skills developed or results achieved? Is it based on a client satisfaction survey or whether your work aligned with company core values or furthered company goals? How are wins defined by your legal department, quantitative or qualitative? And what does excellence or meeting objectives or not meeting objectives look like? The more clarity you have on the process, the better you are able to prepare. It may also be helpful to have a mentor at your company to ask questions if you are not comfortable going to your manager directly.

Keeping A Done List

A best practice is to keep a running list of what you’ve been working on throughout the year and do your best to update it weekly or monthly, using calendar reminders. The method behind this madness is because it can be even more difficult or extremely time-consuming to try to remember a year’s worth of work at the end of the year, especially when you have a looming deadline to submit a self-evaluation. While it may take some time to create the habit of updating your running “done” list, the list itself doesn’t have to be complicated.

One way this can show up is to have a page in your OneNote or in a Word document where you make a list of all the categories you want to keep track of — trainings, arbitrations, mediations, projects, etc. — and update it periodically. The categories will depend on the criteria as well as the kind of law you practice. My categories as an employment lawyer likely differ from my intellectual property colleagues.

Another way to keep a running list is to take a sheet of paper, divide it into quadrants, and simply jot down what you work on each quarter (fiscal or calendar) in shorthand. This is also helpful to discern at a glance which quarters tend to be busiest for you. Note that your shorthand needs to be descriptive enough that you will remember it a year from now.

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If you haven’t done this all year, don’t give up! Go ahead and take the time to review your calendar to create a running list of all the work you’ve done. Then consider grouping the work in ways that make sense for your evaluation.

Know Your Audience

The last tip is to consider your audience. Is it simply your direct manager? If so, do you think they will prefer bullet points that may be easier to read? Or do they need paragraphs written in third person so that those paragraphs can cut and pasted into your company system? Is your audience an entire committee? Do what you can to tailor your self-evaluation to your audience’s need and use case.

Invest The Time

Regardless of how you might feel about having to do a self-evaluation in the first place, if it is a part of your process then it’s worth doing well. Invest the time to create a system that works for you as well as the time to write well. Do what you can to provide specific examples that show how you have been been a value-add.

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Meyling Mey Ly OrtizMeyling “Mey” Ly Ortiz is in-house at Toyota Motor North America. Her passions include mentoring, championing belonging, and a personal blog: TheMeybe.com. At home, you can find her doing her best to be a “fun” mom to a toddler and preschooler and chasing her best self on her Peloton. You can follow her on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/meybe/). And you knew this was coming: her opinions are hers alone.

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