There are a lot of professions that allow you to work with documentation. However, reviewing documents is one of the most challenging tasks because of the necessary knowledge of fields of law. This blog will explain what a document reviewer does and how much money this specialist makes.
What Is a Document Review?
Document review is the process of achieving completeness and correctness of legal documentation. Document reviewers usually work with various documents, such as contracts, bills of sale, medical directives, loan agreements, and so on.
For instance, document reviewing is essential, especially for real estate companies. When a client is preparing to buy a home, it’s necessary to create and review all required documents — e.g. a sales contract. In any case, document review aims to find errors in documentation so that it can be edited before final approval.
Document Reviewer Requirements
Unfortunately, you can’t quickly start a career in the legal field. To review legal documents, you need the following qualifications:
- Education. Companies usually hire a specialist with a law degree because only experts can review legal documents as well as needed. Without a few years of education, it’s impossible to be aware of professional terminology and different areas of law. Since document reviewers are partially responsible for further transactions between partners, acquiring all required knowledge is obligatory.
- Certifications. Although it’s enough to have a law degree to start reviewing documents, you should also pay attention to extra courses and educational programs. If you want to manage a team of other document reviewers or work with complicated topics, take business management and technical writing courses.
- Practice. It’s always hard to practice before the first job. You can face a vicious circle when you don’t have work experience, but companies need 1-3 years of experience to hire you. Nonetheless, you can find an internship or create some sample documents to close this gap.
Document Reviewer Skills
Every document reviewer should possess essential skills as follows:
- Document analysis. It’s an essential skill for reviewers because they should quickly extract key information from an enormous volume of data. Such extractions will help to support arguments regarding the review process. Document analysis will also allow you to save time reading and finding only relevant documents.
- Teamwork. Explaining your edits to your colleagues is not an easy task. So if you don’t have strong communication skills, working as a document reviewer will be hard. In addition, such specialists may manage teams of other reviewers — without management skills, you won’t succeed. Besides, you always need to meet deadlines because the work of team members depends on your progress, too.
- Knowledge of legal terms. Document reviewers are experts in the areas of law, so they know how to use professional terminology properly. Moreover, it’s essential to understand formatting standards to review documentation containing hard-to-follow information. Using appropriate terms and implementing formatting standards will improve the documents a lot.
- Meticulousness. It’s essential to pay attention to every detail while reviewing. You should correct all inconsistencies and errors, which are missed by an author. Attention to detail will save time — if you usually miss mistakes you may reread the document multiple times until the end of reviewing.
- Knowledge of technical writing tools. Document reviewers should use professional software with outstanding features. For example, they can choose ClickHelp — a cloud-based platform for technical writers. Thanks to ClickHelp, you can use a specialized Reviewer Dashboard, add Review Comments or ToDo lists, and set topic statuses while reviewing a project.
Possessing these skills is worth a high salary. So let’s check how much money document reviewers make.
Document Reviewer Salary
According to Zippia, document reviewers earn about $26 per hour or $54 000 per year in the USA — it’s the average salary. The top 10% salary of such specialists is $103 000.
Of course, salaries depend on location, years of experience, and education. For example, the most favorable states for experienced document reviewers are New York, Alaska, and Connecticut.
Document Reviewer Job Description
You can find various job descriptions of document reviewers on the Internet. So let’s take an example of the responsibilities and qualifications for this role.
Responsibilities:
- Analyzing complex agreements, including vendor and commercial documentation, with scrupulous attention to detail while finding key information
- Reviewing a large volume of contracts accurately, working assiduously with the team to maintain the best quality work product
- Being a team player and working with project managers to meet deadlines and support project budgets
- Maintaining brilliant communication skills and a professional approach.
Qualifications:
- A law degree (Master of Laws or Doctor of Jurisprudence)
- Knowledge of contractual agreements, such as financial, vendor, banking, licensing, leases, sales, commercial, procurement
- Meticulous attention to detail and ability to work quickly while analyzing a large volume of contracts
- Critical thinking skills that will help you analyze and digest dense material
- Effective written and verbal communication in a remote setting
- Proficiency with computer software, including online review tools and the Microsoft Office suite; ability to learn professional tools
- A high level of expertise and outstanding business judgment are always appreciated
- Previous contract review experience is a plus but not required; recent graduates and those eager to learn are encouraged to apply.
Conclusion
It’s not easy to review documents — you should use professional tools, know legal terms, and analyze a lot of information. Nevertheless, the salary of such specialists is not low. So if you like handling complex tasks and read enormous amounts of documentation, this job matches your interests.
Good luck with your technical writing!
ClickHelp Team
Author, host and deliver documentation across platforms and devices