Beyond the Annual Review: Is Your Legal Team's Talent Strategy Ready for 2026?
Beyond the Annual Review
Is Your Legal Team's Talent Strategy Ready for 2026?
As 2025 draws to a close, the year-end review cycle is the ideal time to assess whether your legal team is ready for the challenges of 2026.
Too often, individual performance conversations dominate this phase, causing you to overlook the big picture. Your annual review can, in fact, reveal emerging gaps, team strengths, and structural needs, among other things.
Working on these can help you overcome various challenges that in-house legal teams in Australia face, such as demand growth and the need for stronger commercial partnerships.
You need to move from retrospective evaluation to proactive talent planning for 2026.
Using Review Insights to Map Capability Gaps
Mapping capability gaps is essential for identifying and addressing the skills your team lacks to achieve future goals. It sets your organisation on the path to sustained success in 2026.
Here’s how you can do it:
When you conduct your performance review, you’ll gain access to data on your legal team’s current capabilities. Manager and self-assessments can even enable you to understand if your team is over-reliant on certain individuals.
You can also use your HR database to gain further insight into each individual's expertise.
Once you’ve collected the data, create a skills matrix. Categorise competencies by role and proficiency for better analysis.
Next, list your organisational goals and determine the skills you need to achieve them. Consider technical legal expertise, commercial acumen, and tech-related skills like AI readiness.
Now, compare your skills matrix with the needs your organisation has in 2026 and identify the gaps. Categorise these based on their impact. The ones that have the potential for maximum impact need to be addressed first.
Depending on the type of gap and your current capability, you can fill it by strategic legal hiring, training, or restructuring. \
Identifying the Cultural and Leadership Qualities Your Team Needs Next
Annual performance reviews shouldn’t solely centre around the productivity and output of the team. You should also take a deep dive into the cultural and leadership qualities of your staff.
That’s because your team’s productivity or work environment could have taken a hit due to factors like:
Cultural friction points like hidden or subtle biases.
Communication style clashes, like being too blunt or unapproachable.
Gaps in leadership readiness, such as failing to manage changes better.
Collaboration challenges, like information silos and information hoarding.
Value misalignment between stated and actual employee experience.
Much like capability gaps, you should identify these subtle issues in your cultural and leadership qualities and start working on them.
You can initiate improvement through training programs, leadership coaching, or cross-functional assignments. Also, clearly articulate the desired team culture.
If necessary, implement the right set of tools for developing a powerful communication framework that fosters open dialogue.
Bring these aspects into your hiring process as well.
Focus on hiring employees who actively add to the culture and fill leadership gaps, rather than those who simply fit the current environment.
To achieve this, you can tweak your hiring process a little:
Make your mission visible everywhere. Candidates should know what they’ll work toward.
Conduct a psychographic assessment of candidates.
Welcome diverse candidates into your team.
Focus on candidate skills over traditional credentials. Create skill-based assessments to filter out candidates.
Include culture-add questions in your interviews.
Ask candidates how they can add value to the team.
Create rubrics to assess candidates against clearly defined competencies you’re looking for.
Building a Hiring Blueprint That Supports Mobility and Succession
The insights gained from annual reviews allow you to create a strategic hiring blueprint, shifting you toward proactive hiring and away from frantic moves that could impact stability. This is essential, given that employers take about 5 weeks to hire permanent staff in Australia.
This blueprint integrates succession planning, flight risk mitigation, and future leader cultivation. It helps align your talent strategy with future business goals. You’ll be able to build a strong bench, retain key employees, and hire before a position becomes vacant.
Let’s look at each of the components of this blueprint in detail:
Identify Future Leaders
Your legal team assessment can help you spot consistent high performers who demonstrate a readiness for challenging roles and greater responsibility.
Discussing long-term goals with these employees offers valuable insight into their career aspirations. Based on these interactions, you can design targeted development programs to cultivate them into future leaders.
Mentoring them from the onset enables them to gradually settle into the leadership role. It’s a much better approach than promoting them and then getting started with the training.
Find Potential Flight Risks
Annual reviews can also shed light on flight risks by showing you some early indicators pointing in that direction. Some of the signs you should look for include:
Dip in employee engagement or enthusiasm.
Mentions of burnout or overworking.
Dissatisfaction with current role or compensation.
Mentions of stagnation in the job role or lack of growth opportunities.
Employees feeling undervalued for their contribution to the team.
If you observe any such indication of flight, you should start taking proactive steps to retain those employees. You could offer them better pay/benefits, improve their work-life balance, provide clear growth paths, and build stronger relationships with them.
Hiring hesitancy can also contribute to this problem. 30% of employers reported an increase in their staff turnover due to delayed hiring. Hiring in a timely manner helps you avoid this situation.
Discover Roles Needing Succession Planning
Certain positions in your legal team are critical to its operation, and their absence could severely impact the department. This makes it necessary to have a solid succession plan and a robust talent pipeline in place to fill those roles.
Your annual reviews will help you pinpoint these roles.
For each position, list down the key competencies needed and look for shortcomings among the incumbents or backups. Those gaps can be filled through either internal training or by hiring new legal professionals.
Finally, examine your talent pipeline to understand which areas have weaker or non-existent backups. Addressing these gaps is essential for a seamless transition in the future.
Power Up Your Hiring Process With Annual Reviews
Your annual review cycle can help you in more ways than one. You clearly understand where your team stands and also gain an insight into how you can develop a forward-looking legal talent strategy for your team.
When you partner with us, we’ll help you build a rock-solid legal hiring strategy for 2026, strengthening your capabilities and setting your team up for long-term success.
Connect with us now to learn how we can build a recruitment strategy (and execute it) for your team.