Most lawyers look forward to performance reviews about as eagerly as they do a colonoscopy. People I know regard them as either a waste of time or a torture session. If the review is positive, the employee.

is usually told to keep up the good work, except do more—and faster! And when it's bad, it's an assault and a setup for a future firing. (Arguably, every review is a pretext for firing, since there are always areas for employee “improvement.”)

I'm not alone in my antipathy toward reviews. Samuel Culbert, a professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, has made a career of bashing this corporate ritual. The author of “Get Rid of the Performance Review” and “Beyond Bullsh*t,” Culbert has called reviews “a curse on corporate America” and a “dysfunctional pretense” of objective measures.