Litera Top Performance reached end-of-life on 1 December 2025. Support, bug fixes, and security and compliance updates all stopped on that date. The last release was 13 July 2024, so feature development had already been over for roughly seventeen months before support followed.
That was more than nine months ago. Most firms have chosen a replacement by now. The part that tends to surface later is the review history, and it is worth checking what your firm actually kept.
What Litera offered as a replacement
Its end-of-life notice points customers toward two other products in its talent range: LawCruit and CE Manager. LawCruit is recruiting software. CE Manager handles continuing legal education compliance.
Neither runs performance reviews. There was no route within Litera's own catalog, which meant every firm had to run a selection process on a deadline someone else had set.
The export problem
The documented way to keep historical reviews was the Report Library: choose a report such as Performance Review Summary, set filters for process, office, department and position, generate it, then export to PDF.
PDF is a rendering format. It preserves what a review looked like. It does not preserve the data underneath in a form anything can read.
| What Top Performance held | What a PDF export preserves |
|---|---|
| Ratings per competency, per reviewee, per cycle | The printed value, not a field anything can query |
| Reviewer and reviewee relationships | Names on a page |
| Free-text comments linked to their ratings | Text, with the linkage lost |
| Cycle dates and process metadata | Whatever the report header showed |
| Year-over-year comparability | Nothing |
A firm that ran Top Performance for six years and exported to PDF has six years of documents and no dataset. Answering "has feedback to third-year associates in the litigation group improved since 2021" now means a person reading PDFs, not a query.
What this costs, in order of when you notice
Immediately: nothing. The current cycle runs in the new system. This is why the problem stays quiet.
At the first review cycle: the baseline. A new platform starts at zero. Any claim that scores went up or down has nothing to sit against, so the first year of results is uninterpretable on its own.
At the second or third cycle: the trend. Two years of data in a new system is a line between two points. The history that would have made it a trend is sitting in PDFs.
Whenever someone asks about a specific person: a partnership decision, a promotion case, or a dispute, and the record that matters is from 2022. It exists, but finding it is manual.
What you can still do
If your firm exported before December 2025, you have PDFs. Performance Review Summary output follows a fixed layout, so ratings can usually be pulled back out with a parser. What drives the cost is the number of distinct report formats used across the years, not the number of reviews. Scope it before writing the history off.
If your firm did not export, the data sits with Litera under whatever the contract says about retention. Support dates and retention schedules are set in different parts of an agreement and rarely end on the same day, so ask in writing rather than assuming the worst.
Either way, write down where the files are and who has access. The question usually arrives during a promotion round, which is a bad moment to start looking.
What to require of a replacement
The specific failure here was not that a product was discontinued. Products get discontinued. It was that the exit produced documents instead of data. Five questions are worth putting to any vendor before signing, including us.
| Ask | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| What formats does a full export produce, and can I run one today? | An export you have not tested is a claim, not a capability |
| Does the export include ratings as fields, with reviewer and reviewee linkage intact? | This is the difference between a dataset and a stack of PDFs |
| How long is data retained after a contract ends, and in what form? | Retention is a contract term, not a courtesy |
| Can historical data from another system be loaded in? | Determines whether your baseline survives the move |
| Who holds the responses, and under what agreement? | Decides who can answer the question in five years |
The fourth question is the one firms leaving Top Performance should press hardest, and the one most likely to get a vague answer.
Choosing what comes next
Replacement options for US law firms fall into three groups: legal-specific platforms, general HR performance tools configured for a firm, and independently administered programs where a third party holds the responses. Each answers the confidentiality question differently, which matters more for upward reviews than for downward ones.
We have written a direct comparison of SRA and Litera, and separate comparisons with PerformYard, vi by Aderant, Culture Amp, Leapsome, 15Five and Qualtrics. Read them against each other rather than one at a time. The differences that decide the outcome are about who holds the responses, not about feature lists.
Whatever a firm chooses, run a full export in the first month of the contract, while there is still time to argue about what it contains.
Sources: Litera, Top Performance End-of-Life notice and Product Lifecycle Policy, retrieved 12 September 2026.