If you are evaluating these two platforms in 2026, there is a fact you need first.
Litera discontinued its dedicated law firm performance review product, Top Performance, on December 1, 2025.
That changes the comparison significantly.
SRA is a specialist, managed service built exclusively for law firm performance reviews, upward feedback, 360s, engagement surveys, exit surveys, with over 30 years of law-firm-specific design behind it. Litera is a broad legal technology platform whose performance management tools now sit within a general talent suite, following the discontinuation of the product that was specifically built for attorney reviews.
This post covers what each offers in 2026, where the real differences lie, and which firms should choose each.
Quick Verdict
Choose SRA if your primary need is a confidential, law-firm-specific performance review program, especially one involving upward feedback from associates to partners.
Choose Litera if you are already in the Litera ecosystem and want to consolidate talent tools alongside document, finance, and knowledge management and are prepared for a less specialised performance review approach.
If your firm used Litera's Top Performance and is now looking for a replacement: SRA is the most direct equivalent for attorney review programs.
What Is SRA?
Survey Research Associates (SRA) was founded in 1987 by Dr. Arthur Wohlers, an organizational psychologist, with a specific focus on law firm performance management. For over 30 years, SRA has designed and administered confidential evaluation programs for AmLaw and boutique law firms across the United States. Clients include Cleary Gottlieb, Paul Weiss, Morgan Lewis, Baker Donelson, WilmerHale, and Fenwick & West.
SRA's services:
- Upward Reviews - confidential associate-to-partner feedback, purpose-built for law firm hierarchy
- 360-Degree Feedback - multi-rater evaluations with law-firm-specific competency frameworks
- Firm Engagement Surveys - measuring attorney satisfaction, culture health, and eNPS
- Exit Surveys - independently administered with analytical reporting (see our post on exit survey questions)
- Self-Assessment Surveys and eNPS tracking
SRA is not primarily a software platform. It is a fully managed service. SRA designs the evaluation program, administers it through a secure portal, collects and analyzes responses, and delivers branded reports to leadership. The firm's HR team does not run the process.
What Is Litera?
Litera is a global legal technology company trusted by 99% of the AmLaw 100. Its core strength is document lifecycle management drafting, comparison, proofreading, and AI-powered contract review. Over the past several years, Litera has expanded through acquisitions into HR, finance, marketing, and knowledge management.
Critical 2025 update: Litera's Top Performance is discontinued
Litera's dedicated attorney performance review product, Top Performance, reached end of life on December 1, 2025. The discontinuation was announced June 2024. Feature development stopped July 2024.
Litera directed affected customers to its remaining talent tools: LawCruit (applicant tracking), CE Manager (CLE compliance and learning management), and Objective Manager (goal-setting and performance, via the Micron Systems acquisition).
If your firm was running Top Performance, you are now actively looking for a replacement. SRA is the most purpose-built equivalent for law firm attorney review programs.
Litera's current performance-adjacent talent tools:
- Objective Manager - goal management, performance check-ins, customizable surveys, and 360° feedback, built for professional services firms
- LawCruit - applicant tracking system for legal recruiters
- CE Manager - CLE compliance tracking and learning management system
Objective Manager covers performance management functionality, including 360 feedback and surveys. It is a goal-setting and performance platform, not a purpose-built law firm upward review tool or a managed service equivalent to SRA.
Feature Comparison: 2026
Where SRA Has a Clear Advantage
Structural anonymity - the factor that determines data quality
This is the most important differentiator for law firm performance reviews, and the most frequently underestimated when firms evaluate options.
When associates know their feedback is stored in the firm's own system, even one that promises to aggregate and anonymize, they calibrate their responses. Not dishonesty: diplomacy. They omit sharp observations. They rate partners slightly higher than they would to a genuinely independent party. The data is defensible but not useful.
SRA acts as a structural third party. The survey runs on SRA's infrastructure. Raw data never enters the firm's systems. When an associate completes an SRA upward review, they are responding to an outside organization, not their employer. That structural fact produces materially different answers. It is the same reason SRA's exit surveys generate more candid responses than internally administered equivalents. See our post on
Third-party independence is not a nice-to-have. In law firm environments, where partnership politics, work allocation, and compensation are all intertwined with feedback, it is the structural condition that determines whether your review data is honest enough to be useful.
Law-firm-specific design throughout
SRA's entire framework is built around legal environments: partnership hierarchies, multi-partner matter structures, billable hour pressures, promotion pathways, and partner accountability dynamics. Questionnaire design, competency models, reporting formats, and benchmarks are all law-firm-specific.
Generic HR and professional services platforms, even good ones, require significant customization to approximate this. Litera's Objective Manager is built for professional services broadly. That is different from purpose-built law firm performance management.
Fully managed execution
Running a performance review cycle in a law firm means managing participation among attorneys billing over $1,000 per hour, handling reminder logistics that don't alienate partners, and delivering reporting in a format that serves Managing Partner committees. It is time-consuming, high-stakes work.
SRA handles all of it. The firm sets program parameters; SRA designs, distributes, collects, analyzes, and delivers. For firms where HR bandwidth is limited or where review quality is high-stakes enough that internal administration is a risk, the managed service model is the right architecture.
Where Litera Has a Clear Advantage
Ecosystem integration
For firms running significant Litera infrastructure - document comparison, matter management, finance analytics, CRM, adding talent tools within the same platform reduces vendor relationships, consolidates data, and eliminates integration friction. Litera One, the company's AI-powered command center, unifies drafting, review, knowledge, and performance in a single Microsoft 365 experience.
For firms already invested in the Litera ecosystem, that integration value is real. The trade-off is depth in performance review functionality.
Breadth of legal technology
Litera's document drafting, comparison, metadata management, and AI contract review tools are genuinely industry-leading, that is why 99% of the AmLaw 100 use them. If evaluating legal technology broadly, Litera offers capabilities SRA does not and is not designed to offer.
CLE compliance and learning management
CE Manager handles CLE compliance tracking and provides a firm-wide LMS. For firms that want to consolidate CLE, onboarding, and professional development within one platform, this is a meaningful capability SRA does not offer.
When Firms Choose the Wrong Tool
The firms that struggle most with performance review programs are the ones that evaluate these options as equivalent and choose on price or ecosystem convenience rather than purpose-fit. Three patterns show up repeatedly.
Assuming a generic HR tool works in a law firm
Law firm performance management has structural differences that matter: associates report to multiple partners simultaneously, feedback flows upward in a hierarchy where power imbalances are extreme, and the same partner who controls your work allocation reads your review results. Generic HR platforms are not built for this. The evaluation frameworks are wrong. The anonymity architecture is wrong. The reporting structure is wrong.
Underestimating the anonymity problem
Firms that run upward review programs on internal systems or on firm-contracted platforms that associates know are connected to the firm, consistently report lower participation rates and feedback that partners describe as 'too positive to be useful.' The anonymity problem is structural, not just psychological. Associates in partnership environments make rational calculations about what feedback is safe to give. If the answer is 'not much,' the program produces no useful data.
Running upward reviews without independent infrastructure
The most common version of this: a firm asks associates to rate their supervising partners through an internal survey tool. Response rates are 30–40%. Comments are vague. Partners review the results and conclude the program is working fine. The associates who left never said anything useful, because the tool gave them no structural reason to.
Key Insight
The firms that get the most value from performance review programs are those that treat structural anonymity, law-firm-specific design, and managed execution as non-negotiable requirements, not premium add-ons.
Who Should Choose SRA
- Primary need is a confidential performance review program for attorneys, especially upward feedback, 360s, engagement surveys, or exit surveys
- Participation rates or candor in existing review processes are lower than leadership would like
- HR bandwidth is limited and a fully managed service is preferable to internal administration
- The firm wants law-firm-specific benchmarks, not generic HR dashboard outputs
- Former Litera Top Performance customers now searching for a replacement
Who Should Choose Litera
- Already running significant Litera infrastructure and ecosystem consolidation outweighs depth trade-offs in performance reviews
- Primary technology need is document workflow, finance analytics, or knowledge management , with performance management as a secondary requirement
- Firm wants to consolidate CLE tracking, recruiting, and goal-setting in one system
- HR team has capacity to configure and manage review programs internally
The Honest Summary
SRA and Litera are not competing for the same purchase decision in 2026. SRA does one thing — law firm performance reviews — with 30 years of specialization and a structural model built around third-party independence. Litera does many things, with performance management sitting within a broader talent suite following the discontinuation of the product specifically built for attorney reviews.
The right question is not which platform is better in the abstract. It is which problem you are actually trying to solve.
If performance review quality and specifically the quality of upward feedback and 360 data, is the primary goal, the managed, independent, law-firm-specific model SRA offers is difficult to replicate through a general-purpose HR module or goal-management tool.
If you want to understand how SRA's approach would work at your firm or if you are coming off Litera's discontinued Top Performance product and need a replacement SRA is happy to walk through it.
→ srahq.com/contact | Start a conversation
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between SRA and Litera for law firm performance reviews?
SRA is a specialist managed service that designs, administers, and analyzes confidential performance review programs exclusively for law firms, upward reviews, 360 feedback, engagement surveys, and exit surveys. Litera is a broad legal technology platform. Its dedicated performance review product, Top Performance, was discontinued in December 2025. Its remaining talent tools (Objective Manager, LawCruit, CE Manager) cover goal management, recruiting, and CLE compliance. SRA's performance review depth is significantly greater; Litera's advantage is ecosystem breadth.
Did Litera discontinue its law firm performance review product?
Yes. Litera's Top Performance product reached end of life on December 1, 2025. The discontinuation was announced in June 2024, with feature development stopping in July 2024. Litera directed customers to its other talent tools. Firms that were using Top Performance are now actively evaluating alternatives, SRA is the most direct equivalent for attorney performance review programs.
Is SRA a software platform or a service?
SRA is primarily a managed service. It provides a secure, branded survey platform, but the core value is the full-service model: SRA designs the evaluation program with the firm, administers it, collects and analyzes responses, and delivers analytical reports to leadership. The firm's HR team does not manage the process internally.
Why does third-party administration matter for law firm performance reviews?
When feedback is stored in the firm's own system, associates providing feedback on partners calibrate their responses toward diplomacy rather than candor. Third-party administration changes this structurally: feedback goes to an independent organization, not the employer. This produces materially more honest data and makes the program useful for leadership development and retention improvement.
What size law firms does SRA work with?
SRA works with law firms across the size spectrum, from boutique practices to AmLaw firms. Clients include Cleary Gottlieb, Paul Weiss, Morgan Lewis, Baker Donelson, WilmerHale, and Fenwick & West, among others.
Sources
- Litera — Top Performance End of Life announcement, June 2024. litera.com/top-performance-end-of-life
- Litera — Talent and HR Solutions. litera.com/solutions/law-firm-talent-and-hr
- Litera — Acquisition of Micron Systems (Objective Manager), August 2022. litera.com/about-us/press-releases/litera-acquires-micron-systems
- SRA — Services. srahq.com/services
- NALP Foundation — Update on Associate Attrition, CY 2024. nalpfoundation.org
- BigHand — 'Navigating the Million Dollar Problem', August 2025. bighand.com
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