I still send the important ones to a lawyer, but this tells me where to look first.
The workflow
- Paste the contract text
- Ask Claude for the riskiest clauses
- Get a plain-English explanation of each
- Take the flagged ones to counsel
Result: A prioritised list of what to actually read closely.
The prompt
Review this contract. List the 5 clauses most worth a closer look, explain each in plain English, and note what I would push back on. This is not legal advice. Contract:
[PASTE]A note on what follows. The workflow, the prompt and the result above come from the member. The notes below (why the prompt works, what to watch for, how to adapt it) were written with AI help.
Why this prompt works
To be clear about what this is: triage before I spend money on a lawyer, not a substitute for one. Asking for exactly five clauses is what makes it triage. Without a number I got a polite walkthrough of all twenty two sections, which is the reading job I was trying to shorten. Plain English does the second half of the work, because the risk usually hides in a defined term, and restating a clause in ordinary words is what exposes whether it actually bites. "What I would push back on" turns a summary into a list I can send to counsel with my own position already sketched. That saved me more in fees than anything else here. I paste the whole thing, definitions included. Excerpts made it noticeably worse.
What to watch for
- Clauses interact and it reads them one at a time. A cap three pages later can undo something it flagged, or a carve-out can reopen it.
- Missing clauses never get flagged. It reviews what is there, so an absent liability cap stays invisible unless you ask.
- Dates and notice windows. Auto-renewal maths is exactly where it is weakest, and that is the clause that costs you.
- It does not know your jurisdiction unless you say so, and half of what a clause means depends on that.
How to adapt it
- Pick a side:
I am the customer. Flag risk from my side only, and stop hedging. - For the gaps, ask the inverse:
What standard protections for a customer are missing from this contract? - Before sending to a lawyer, add
Output a table: clause, section number, quoted text, my concern.Cheaper to review than prose.
What good output looks like
Section numbers and quoted words, not paraphrase. If I cannot find the sentence it is talking about in ten seconds, I ignore the point. The five should be five different kinds of risk rather than five angles on the payment terms. Everything rated high risk means it is summarising, not triaging. And whatever it says, the version that matters is the one a lawyer reads.