How to onboard a new contract reviewer

Train a new reviewer on contracts that are already closed, where the right answer is sitting in the file, instead of easing them in on live low-risk paper.

The usual approach is to hand them the playbook, sit them next to someone for a week, then start feeding them NDAs and small order forms because those are the ones that will not hurt anybody. It feels safe. The problem is that nobody ever tells them how they did. An NDA goes out, the deal closes, and no signal comes back. They could be missing the same entry every week for two months and the first person to notice will be you, at a renewal.

Build a worked example set out of closed files

Pull twenty contracts your team finished in the last quarter. Mix in a couple that went badly. For each one you already have the thing a new reviewer needs and cannot get anywhere else: the markup someone senior actually produced, and the version that got signed.

Give them the clean copy first, let them mark it up, then show them what your team did. Then hand them the next one. The Department of Education's practice guide on instruction recommends exactly this alternation, reading an already worked solution and then trying one yourself, and it notes you can taper off the worked examples as the person gets better. Ten of those in week one gives a new reviewer something shadowing does not, which is an answer key on every file.

Do not grade it as pass or fail. Sit with the two markups side by side and talk about the four places they differ. The differences are the whole lesson.

What your playbook leaves out

Your playbook says what position to take. It does not say when your team lets the position go, and that is a lot of what a reviewer needs to know by month three.

If you keep any record of departures from playbook, hand it over on day one. A vendor would not move and the deal was small. Security signed off separately. Volume made it a one-off. Fifty of those lines will calibrate somebody faster than any onboarding deck, because they are the only written trace of judgment your team has.

If you do not keep that record, start now, and let the new hire be the reason you start. One line per departure, in the same field, every time.

Start them on a short list

A forty-page playbook is not usable in week two. What is usable is a list of six or eight things to confirm on every file before it moves, with the location written into each item. "Check that the payment terms in the order form match the MSA" tells a new reviewer where to go. "Payment terms should be net 45" does not tell them there are two documents in play, and that habit of naming the location is what makes a playbook entry something software can apply too.

Short lists hold up under pressure. Hospitals in eight cities tried a simple checklist that WHO developed, and major complications fell from 11% to 7%. Contract review is not surgery and the stakes are nowhere close, but the mechanism carries over to anybody working fast through a queue.

Pick a number that says they are ready

Readiness usually gets decided by feel. Somebody's manager thinks they seem solid now. You can do better than that in about an hour.

Take ten contracts that closed a while ago and that the new reviewer has not seen. Have them review each one against five playbook entries you care about. Then compare, entry by entry, against what your team actually raised at the time. Count the entries they missed.

That count is your readiness number. Run it at week two and again at week six. If it is not moving, the gap is usually in the entries themselves, not in the person.

Where software helps and where it does not

The part of onboarding that does not scale is the senior reviewer's time. Our AI contract review workflow runs your playbook over a file and shows where the document did not match, which gives a new reviewer something to compare their own read against without booking an hour with somebody. It will not tell them what your team is willing to live with, and it will not replace the conversation about the four places two markups differ. That conversation is the job.

Set the archive up once. Twenty closed files, the reason log, the short list, and one readiness count you re-run at week six. The next hire after this one costs you a fraction of the time.

Try goHeather free and run one of your closed contracts through it to see what a worked example looks like.

This is legal information, not legal advice; consult a lawyer for legal advice.