Document review attorney job description template: duties, requirements and pay range

A document review attorney posting has five working parts: duties, bar admission, skills and software, pay and benefits, and the project's shape — dates, hours, who supervises.

Each gets its own block in the template below.

If the decisions before the posting are the open question — own payroll or agency reviewers, first-pass or privilege tier, sourcing, screening — our guide to how to hire a document review attorney covers them; this page is about writing the posting.

And if the mechanics of a posting itself — sections, length, structure — are what you need, our guide to writing a law firm job posting covers them; what follows is the document review version.

Core duties.

Write the calls the project pays for.

A document review attorney reads the production and makes the protocol's judgment calls, and the posting should show which calls those are and where they stop.

Duties that stay inside the role:

• Reviewing documents for responsiveness, privilege and confidentiality under the project's written protocol
• Applying coding and tagging decisions consistently across the document set
• Escalating privilege, confidentiality and conflict questions to the supervising attorney rather than resolving them outside the protocol
• Documenting coding decisions so the project's quality-control sampling can check them
• Meeting the project's deadlines and quality metrics
• Keeping client information confidential in every document they touch

Name the reporting line in this block, not in fine print — "reports to [named attorney]" — and say where the protocol ends and the supervising lawyer's call begins.

If the seat includes a privilege pass or privilege-log work, write that in: those are the judgment calls that change who you screen for, and a posting that hides them recruits the wrong tier.

Qualifications and bar admission.

The license is the requirement to word precisely.

Ask for "[State] bar admission in good standing" — the state where the work happens, not a generic "licensed attorney" — and verify it at the source rather than from the resume: lawyers are licensed by a state agency in each state, and that agency can confirm whether a person has a law license and may practice there; the ABA keeps a state-by-state directory of those agencies.

Whether the review work you are staffing requires admission in your state is governed by your state's own rules — our research found no blanket national answer — so put that question to your state bar's ethics counsel before you publish the requirement.

Beyond the license, require only what the project actually needs: years of litigation or review experience, the platform, the coding tier.

Requirements the project does not need shrink the pool without improving the review.

The candidate's-side picture of the role — the day, the platforms, the pay reality — sits in our document review attorney career guide.

Skills and software.

Name the review platform and split the list into must-have-on-day-one versus willing-to-train.

The skills that decide a review are protocol discipline, consistent coding calls, deadline reliability and the judgment to escalate; platform experience is the part you can choose to train.

If you screen with an exercise, keep it short and run it on a mock document set: the EEOC says a required test must be necessary and related to the job and must not exclude people of a protected group or people with disabilities, and the FLSA defines "employ" to include "to suffer or permit to work" — a candidate doing real, usable review work for the firm may be an employee owed wages, which is what makes a short exercise on mock material the safer design.

Pay range and benefits.

Two decisions live in this block: the number and the disclosure.

On the number, start from the honest gap: our research found no primary source that publishes document review attorney hourly rates by market, so there is no published market number to paste into the bracket.

The closest federal series is the lawyer occupation as a whole: in the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) May 2025 release, Lawyers (SOC 23-1011) had a national median annual wage of $159,670, or $76.76 an hour.

Read it as the all-lawyers proxy it is — the series covers employees and excludes the self-employed, so a reviewer paid as a 1099 contractor is not in it — never as a document review rate.

Setting the number for your market and your engagement is a hiring decision, not a posting decision: our guide to hiring a document review attorney benchmarks it, and the national figures, with a link to the all-lawyer state tables, sit on our document review attorney salary page.

On the disclosure, post a range you believe.

California defines "pay scale" as a good-faith estimate of the salary or hourly range the employer reasonably expects to pay on hire, with penalties running $100 to $10,000 per violation.

In the jurisdictions our research verified from statute or the state agency, posting the range is already the law: California, Washington and Illinois (employers with 15 or more employees — in Illinois, jobs performed at least partly in the state or reporting to an Illinois supervisor), Minnesota (30 or more employees in the state), Massachusetts (25 or more in the state, effective October 29, 2025), New York State (four or more employees), New York City (a good-faith range in job advertisements since November 1, 2022), Colorado, Connecticut (effective October 1, 2026) and Virginia.

Washington, Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado and Connecticut also require a general description of benefits in the posting, Illinois lets a hyperlink to a public page carry the pay scale and benefits, and Minnesota bars ranges that are open-ended.

California goes further than its posting rule: the pay scale is due to an applicant on reasonable request regardless of employer size.

Nevada works the other way — the wage or salary range goes to an applicant who has completed an interview, not into the posting.

Other states and cities have rules we did not read; check with your state labor agency before you post.

One wording caution travels with the range: how you describe the engagement — salaried, hourly, project — interacts with overtime classification, and classification is a duties-and-salary question, not a title question.

Federal rules treat an employee holding a valid law license who is actually engaged in the practice of law as an exempt professional, and the federal salary-level and salary-basis requirements do not apply to that lawyer — but the title "document review attorney" on a timesheet settles nothing by itself.

Confirm the classification with employment counsel before you write "salaried exempt" into a posting.

Before the posting goes live, confirm the rules that move.

Posting-range laws differ by state, city and employer size and keep changing — confirm yours with your state labor agency or employment counsel, and the bar-admission and UPL questions with your state bar's ethics counsel.

The ethics rules named on this page are ABA model rules; the versions that bind your firm are the ones your state adopted.

Adapting the template for a small firm.

In a small firm the seat can be broader than one production: a reviewer who also handles motion drafting, discovery responses or hearing preparation between review waves.

Write that breadth honestly instead of dressing it up — candidates judge the job from the duties block, and an honest list saves you from re-posting a month in — and keep every added duty inside what a lawyer admitted where the work happens may do.

Say whether the seat ends with the project or continues onto the bench, and name the lawyer who supervises the review either way.

Adapting for a specific practice area.

Let the matter write the duties.

A litigation production puts responsiveness, privilege and coding-consistency language first; a regulatory or internal investigation puts confidentiality, escalation and interview-preparation support first; a transactional due-diligence review puts issue-spotting against a checklist first.

What does not change with the matter is the structure: the written protocol, the named supervising attorney, and the escalation line stay in every version.

Adapting for a remote reviewer.

A reviewer who will work from a state where they are not admitted raises the question ABA Formal Opinion 495 (December 16, 2020) addressed: under it, a lawyer may practice the law of their licensing jurisdiction while physically in a state where they are not admitted, if that state has not deemed the work unauthorized practice and the lawyer does not hold out as locally licensed, advertise a local office, or offer local legal services.

That is an ABA opinion, not your state's rule — whether a remote reviewer's work is permitted where they sit is a question for your state bar's ethics counsel, and for the other state's, before you post the seat as remote.

Four wordings sink otherwise good document review postings.

Each is fixable before you hit publish.

1. Titles and duties that misstate licensure.

ABA Model Rule 5.5 — a model rule; the binding version is the one your state adopted — says a lawyer must not practice law in a jurisdiction in violation of its regulation of the profession, or assist another in doing so, and that a lawyer not admitted in a jurisdiction must not hold out or represent that they are admitted there.

The posting is where a mismatch starts: title the seat "attorney" only for reviewers whose admission you have verified with the state's licensing agency, and keep the requirement line as "[State] bar admission in good standing" rather than a generic "licensed attorney."

Whether your review work requires admission in your state is governed by your state's own rules — put it to your state bar's ethics counsel before you publish.

2. Preference wording that screens by who people are.

The EEOC says it is illegal to publish a job advertisement that shows a preference for, or discourages applications from, people because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information — its own example is an ad seeking "recent college graduates," which may discourage people over 40 from applying.

Write about the work, not the person: cut young, digital native and recent law-school grad.

Keep application questions to what is essential to decide whether a person is qualified — the EEOC treats questions about race, sex, national origin, age or religion as irrelevant to that decision — so skip the graduation year and let the license-verification step, not age, confirm seniority.

3. Salary-history questions.

The state laws we read bar seeking an applicant's salary history: California (Labor Code 432.3, all employers), New York (Labor Law 194-a), Illinois (820 ILCS 112), Massachusetts (G.L. c.149 s.105A — which allows confirming history only after an applicant volunteers it or after an offer with compensation has been made), Connecticut (which bars asking unless the applicant volunteers their wage history), Virginia (Code 40.1-28.7:12) and Nevada (NRS 613.133).

Ask for expectations instead — California's law expressly allows an employer to ask an applicant about their salary expectation for the position.

Other states and cities have rules we did not read, so check yours before the interview stage.

4. Vague everything.

Review documents as needed, fast-paced review environment and other duties as assigned with no task list leave strong candidates unable to tell whether the seat is a first-pass coding project, a privilege pass or a catch-all — and in Minnesota the law adds its own reason to be specific: posted ranges may not be open-ended.

The fix is the duties block above: the protocol's calls, the platform, the project's dates, and the lawyer the reviewer reports to.

After you post.

Set a review cadence before the posting goes live and hold to it — review projects run on deadlines, and applications that sit unanswered past them cost you the reviewers you wanted.

If the project's dates, hours or pay change, update the posting rather than explaining the difference in interviews.

And before yours goes up, browse the live document review attorney jobs on this board to see the pay framing and duty lists you are competing against.

This page is employer information, not legal advice. Posting laws, classification rules and ethics rules change and vary by jurisdiction — confirm them with your state labor agency, employment counsel and your state bar's ethics counsel before you post.