I get it. You’re busy. So. Busy. When you think “it’s December already!” you do it with a sense of panic—not reflection. I don’t blame you. In fact, I’m right there with you.
Still, whether it’s part of your formal end-of-year self-evaluation, an annual ritual for your own edification, or a conveniently productive distraction from a project that’s got you stumped—now is a good time for personal assessment. It’s difficult to see your growth without establishing some benchmarks, and it’s difficult to build confidence without seeing that growth.
Numbers and stats are easy to measure. The soft skills that are so essential to your professional success? Not so much. In the legal world, your inclination to embrace change and adjust to new tech, timelines, and terms—in other words: your agility, flexibility, and adaptability—can help you grow faster and stand out in a high-stakes, competitive industry.
Are you open to new ideas or stuck in your own perspective? Do you build rigid workflows and goals or leave room for redressing as a project plays out? Do you welcome new perspectives and experimentation or shy away from change?
How do you measure all that? It goes a little something like this:
- Step 1: Give yourself the gift of time as the year draws to a close by sitting down with one or more of the exercises below. (None of them should take terribly long.)
- Step 2: Be sure to jot down some development goals for next year based on what you’ve learned here.
- Step 3: Give yourself a pat on the back and share your successes with your boss, your family, and your network. (You’ve earned it!)
#1: Review how your network has grown this year.
The people you work with have an outsized impact on how you work. For the same reasons that greater diversity makes for a more creative and engaged team, a more diverse network can help you expand your skills and learn more, faster. And once you’re learning more and hearing new perspectives, you can more readily adapt your strategies and plans to incorporate those insights and deliver better results.
How to Do It
One of the simplest ways to do this is with a little help from LinkedIn. Open the site and navigate to My Network from the top-level icons. Once you’re there, click Connections from the Manage My Network menu on the left. The resulting list of all your connections can be sorted by Recently Added, and each name will show “Connected X days/weeks/months ago.” Browse through your network to see who you’ve added this year.
For each person you’ve made a genuine connection with this year, take a moment to think about how you’ve interacted with them. How did you meet? What did you talk about (or hear them talk about, if they are a thought leader you admired and reached out to)? And most importantly: what did you learn from these interactions?
What to Do Next
For anyone you’re particularly grateful to have met, or from whom you’ve learned a lot, make a plan to reach out and thank them. People so deeply appreciate being appreciated. I bet you’ll make their day.
Next, look for themes in what you’ve learned from your new connections and how they’ve changed your perspective. Perhaps you’ve come a long way in your understanding of AI this year; maybe you’ve learned how to support a new client with a different sort of Legal Data Intelligence challenge. Whatever you notice, make these themes the basis of at least one goal for next year.
#2: Reflect on the ways you changed your habits—or even just changed your mind.
Doing the same work, the same way, day after day—it gets dull. Worse, it’s pretty unsustainable. Changing technology, data, regulatory, and cultural landscapes mean those who can’t find new opportunities and new tactics to work with will, sooner or later, be left behind. Taking note of how often (and how readily) you’ve changed your ways can help you keep leveling up.
How to Do It
Take an inventory of the tools and frameworks you use regularly and consider how that use differs from last year.
For example, do you use ChatGPT, Copilot, or another AI assistant? Is that new for you this year? If so, what made you want to give it a try? If not, go back and look through your prompt history. How have your interactions with this tool changed over time?
You can also examine internal frameworks, including things like communications templates or project intake forms. Are you working with new or modified versions of them? Why did those changes happen?
And finally: can you think of a time when you changed your mind this year? Maybe a misconception about a piece of technology, your preferences for what kind of projects to take on, or a new appreciation for your company’s broader goals stands out.
What to Do Next
If you’ve discovered that you’re stuck in the same routines you had a year ago, plan for some experimentation next year. Are any old habits causing you repetitive frustration? Boredom? How might some new technology (including, but not limited to, AI) help you try a new approach? How might your network be able to guide you on this adventure?
You don’t need to change every little habit just for the sake of it. But you do need to be willing to embrace evolving best practices and technologies; experimenting within your comfort zones is a great place to start building those muscles.
On the other hand, if you have identified a lot of changes, use this time to have a little retro on them. Have your new habits served you the way you’d hoped? Have you taken on too much change? If you have been pleased with a new practice, consider setting a goal to teach your team about it—that’s a prime development opportunity.
#3: Ask for feedback from your colleagues.
Examination of self is an important and valuable exercise, but it’s important to remember that your reflection is a mirrored image of reality. It’s accurate, but you should account for the fact that your viewpoint can flip things.
Gathering feedback from your colleagues is a great way to ensure you’re getting a clearer picture. Plus, if you have the humility to take constructive criticism with grace, you’re much more likely to be able to recognize problems and pivot when things aren’t going quite right.
How to Do It
Just ask! Reaching out to a teammate for feedback is as easy as asking, “Hey, can you let me know, from your perspective, how I’m doing on X this year?”
That may be easier said than done, but it’s also not as difficult as you might think. Here are some tips to help make this outreach more fruitful:
- Identify some trusted colleagues with whom you’ve worked on numerous, or very important, projects. This should be recent work—don’t ask people to dig up ancient memories.
- Send your request in an email, or via a feedback-oriented HR system if one is available to you. To ensure the quality of feedback received, you’ll want to make this a formal outreach—not a random ping or a spontaneous question at the end of a Teams call.
- Be specific about what kind of feedback you’re looking for. You should also give a soft deadline (e.g., “Do you think you can get this back to me by January 8?”) to help your colleague plan this favor into their own work schedule.
- If you prefer to anonymize feedback so your colleagues feel freer to share more constructive input, ask your manager for help. They can filter things for you or provide other ideas on how to go about this in an anonymous but healthy and productive way.
What to Do Next
Take some time to internalize your colleagues’ feedback. Consider their perspectives. Where do you agree? Where do you disagree? Where do their insights and ideas align with your goals—and with what you’ve learned so far about your agility this year?
You should also be mindful of how you receive their feedback, positive and negative. Your receptivity to new challenges is a big part of what you’re exploring throughout these exercises; how you handle others’ perspectives on your performance is a great barometer of that openness.
#4: Read your emails and deliverables from this time last year (or even earlier in your career).
I love this pastime. Revisiting memories and conversations from another era of your career can be a lot of fun—and it can be super insightful, too. Whether it’s in how your tone and confidence have evolved in client communications, or even just the cleanliness of your writing, reviewing your past and present messages and documents will show you how you’ve grown—and where you still have room to improve.
How to Do It
Just jump in. If available to you, use Copilot to help you dig up conversations and documents from a year ago or more. Think about a few key long-term clients and contacts, search for their email addresses, and reread some of the old threads. You can also scroll back through old LinkedIn posts, dig into folders and files from 12+ months ago, or review strategy documents and other key deliverables from previous years.
What to Do Next
Think about what you’d do differently if you were to recreate these items right now. Where do they still sound like you? How has your style changed? Why?
Clear, intelligent, and thoughtful communication is an essential skill for any profession. Once again, if you notice that your style hasn’t changed at all over the years—it’s probably time to consider how you can evolve and improve.
Usually, though, this is a great exercise for observing just how far you’ve come. By nature, the quality of your work improves over time. Notice how it has improved, how you’ve learned and changed in order to make that improvement, and take some well-deserved pride in that.
#5: Examine your unmet goals for the year.
At the end of the year, we all love to dwell on the goals we crushed. It’s fantastic and important to celebrate those wins and shout out those numbers. But it’s also important to take a look at the goals we missed—and why we missed them. This helps with goal setting for the year to come, but it can also show you the quieter ways you’ve succeeded.
How to Do It
Pull up your written goals from the start of the year. Focus on the ones that weren’t met—but not from the perspective of assuming failure. Sometimes our goals don’t come to fruition because circumstances outside of our control make them impossible. Other times, we pivot away from them to meet more important, immediate needs.
Dissect those missed goals and consider where they went off the rails. Did you make a lot of headway but not quite bring things across the finish line? Did a strategic pivot make that goal obsolete? What other factors—budget, technology availability, customer requests—contributed to the breakdown?
What to Do Next
The fact that you didn’t finish some planned work this year doesn’t mean you didn’t work at all. As you’re reviewing your incomplete goals and where their progress fell off track, trace those trains of effort to their ultimate destination. Most likely, you pivoted from those items to other, emergently important things. What were those things? Document your successes with them as evidence of just how well you performed this year, even on unexpected projects.
Additionally, consider whether those diversions were net-positive experiences or were more like fire-extinguishing exercises. If there are operational goals you can set for next year to help prevent the latter distraction from happening again, write them down. They’re as good as gold.
Sam Bock is a member of the marketing team at Relativity, and serves as editor of The Relativity Blog.
