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Junior here, and have heard rumors both ways.

If you are part of a larger working group, and send the partners of your group relatively few emails with deliverables (but the assumption is - hopefully - that you are contributing on the other matters that may be sent to the partner by someone more senior) how is the partner supposed to determine the quality of your work product?

Therefore, do midlevels or seniors report to the partner on associates' work product? I'm sure there isn't a formal feedback form, but am wondering if there is an understood arrangement where more senior associates provide feedback to the partner which may play a role in reviews etc.

At my firm, you pick your reviewers for every matter where you billed a certain number of hours, and it can be an associate (I think there's a minimum cutoff like 4th year+) or a partner. As a junior associate I designated a fair number of associates as a reviewer, but I more or less stopped doing so by the time I was a 4th/5th year and working primarily with partners.

I share my impressions of younger associates with partners - I give plenty of unsolicited positive feedback (usually because I like working with a junior associate and want the partner's blessing to keep using him/her), but typically only provide negative feedback when specifically solicited. I have never done a formal review of an associate at a partner's request and don't even know what that would look like in practice.

^Interested in this as well.

At my firm, only partners are tagged for reviews, but rarely do they interact with associates below a certain level. So, come review time, partners who haven’t worked very frequently with an associate they have to review will ask seniors/mids for feedback.

On an informal basis, when staffing a matter, partners will typically leave it to the junior partners or seniors/mids to staff juniors and will sometimes make recommendations based on what they’ve heard from others.

On work product, if someone’s work is bad, I will rarely throw that person under the bus, I just won’t staff him/her going forward. But if that person’s work product is particularly egregious, I’ll say something.