Employment and Labor Law Editing and Proofreading Services

The job description says Assistant Manager. Under it, the duties listed are stocking, cashiering, and covering shifts when someone calls in sick, with a line at the bottom about helping to train new staff. The title suggests one classification and the duties describe another, and the document that will be produced two years later, when the overtime question is asked, is this one.

Employment agreements and offer letters make up most of what comes to us in this field. Handbooks and standalone workplace policies arrive with them, along with termination and severance letters, restrictive covenants, and separation agreements. Collective agreements, grievance submissions, investigation reports, performance documentation, and the notices employers are required to send all come through the same files.

Job descriptions are worth taking seriously as documents, because the regulations say plainly that they cannot do the work a title is often expected to do. Under 29 CFR 541.2, "A job title alone is insufficient to establish the exempt status of an employee", and status "must be determined on the basis of whether the employee's salary and duties meet the requirements of the regulations in this part."¹ Whether a role is exempt is a legal determination and an employer's to make with counsel. What the description can do is describe the duties actually performed, in enough detail that the determination rests on something. A description assembled from a template, listing responsibilities the person does not have and omitting the ones filling most of the week, is not evidence of anything. It is also the document a former employee's representative reads first, alongside the schedule showing what the person actually did, because the overtime obligation in 29 U.S.C. 207 turns on which side of that line the role falls.²

Handbooks carry a risk that has nothing to do with what they intend to say. Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act gives employees the right "to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection."³ Whether a particular rule interferes with that right is a question for the employer's lawyers and, in the end, for the Board. What an editor sees is narrower and still useful: a confidentiality rule written broadly enough to read as covering pay, a social media policy that prohibits criticizing the company without saying it does not reach terms and conditions of employment, a civility rule that could be read either way because it was written to sound reasonable rather than to be precise. The wording is what is read, and where a sentence is capable of a reading the employer did not intend, the point comes back as a query rather than as a correction.

The notices are the least glamorous documents and the most rule-bound. FMLA administration runs on written notice at fixed intervals: where an employer learns a leave may be for a qualifying reason, it "must notify the employee of the employee's eligibility to take FMLA leave within five business days, absent extenuating circumstances."⁴ Eligibility, rights and responsibilities, and designation each have their own notice, and each has its own content and timing. Nothing an editor does makes a notice timely. What editing does is make sure the letter states which notice it is, covers what that notice is required to cover, and does not merge two of them into one document that satisfies neither cleanly. Where a letter appears to be doing the work of two notices, we say so.

Consistency across the file is where most of the practical damage sits, because employment documents are written years apart by different people. The contract says the notice period is one thing, the handbook says another, and the offer letter refers to a policy that was replaced in the interim. The handbook says it is not a contract, and a clause three sections later promises a benefit in contractual terms. Severance is calculated one way in the separation agreement and another way in the schedule attached to it. Each document was defensible when it was written. Read together, and they will be read together, they do not agree, and the party arguing for the more favorable reading has a document to point at.

Tone matters most in the letters people receive on bad days. A termination or discipline letter is read in distress and then, sometimes, in litigation, and the same facts can be set out in a way that closes a matter or in a way that starts one. Editing does not soften what the letter says. It removes the sentences that characterize the person rather than the conduct, the adjectives that add nothing but heat, and the passages that stray beyond the decision into commentary about it. The decision is the employer's; the document merely has to convey it.

We do not advise on the law. Whether a role is exempt, whether a covenant is enforceable, whether a termination is lawful, whether a rule is permissible, and what severance is owed are legal questions belonging to the employer and its counsel, and they reach us decided. We do not change an entitlement, a date, or a notice period, and where two documents state different ones, both are returned with the difference set out for the drafter to settle.

Everything sent to us is confidential, including active investigations, unsigned separation agreements, and documents naming employees who are not parties to anything.