The Performance Review That Wrote Itself Into a Lawsuit

The most dangerous document in an employment file is often the one written to be helpful.

The message

"Strong tenure, but not really a culture fit with the younger team anymore. Seems to have slowed down over the last year or two."

Why it mattered

Every phrase there is a gift to opposing counsel. "Culture fit" is famously slippery. "Younger team" ties the assessment to age. "Slowed down" invokes the exact stereotype age-discrimination law exists to police. None of it describes an actual, measurable job expectation — which is precisely what a defensible review needs.

The rewrite that survives

• Swap "not a culture fit" for the specific behavior: which expectation, missed how, when.
• Delete every reference to age, tenure-as-proxy, or generation.
• Anchor "slowed down" to a metric — cycle time, output, quality — or cut it.

Before you hit send

Coaching at the moment of writing catches "culture fit" and "younger" before they harden into a signed, dated document, and prompts for the concrete, lawful version instead. The manager still delivers hard feedback. They just don't editorialize a protected class into it.