Contract review
A folder of vendor and customer agreements, none of which say the same thing in the same place. The question is rarely “what does this contract say?” — it is “which of these forty auto-renew, and when do I have to act?”
What a row is
One contract. If a contract has amendments, side letters or an order form that changes its terms, those belong in a bundle with it so the row answers as the agreement rather than as a document — an amended notice period read off the master is simply the wrong answer.
The starting columns
This is the Legal & Procurement preset, offered when a new table has no columns:
| Column | Type | Prompt |
|---|---|---|
| Effective Date | Date | What is the effective date of this contract? |
| Renewal Terms | Text | Summarize the renewal terms of this contract (e.g. auto-renewal, notice period). |
| Liability Caps | Text | What is the liability cap specified in this contract, if any? |
| IP Assignment Clauses | Text | Extract the intellectual property (IP) assignment clause, if present. |
What it looks like filled in
| Row | Documents | Effective date | Renewal terms | Liability cap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Managed hosting MSA.pdf | 01 Apr 2024 p.1 | Auto-renews annually, 90 days notice p.11 | 12 months of fees p.19 | |
| Logistics framework.pdf | 15 Nov 2023 p.2 | Fixed 3-year term, no auto-renewal p.8 | £500,000 p.24 | |
| Order form.pdfAmendment 1.docx | 01 Jan 2025 Order form, p.1 | Auto-renews monthly, 30 days notice Amendment 1, p.2 | Fees paid in prior 6 months p.16 |
Setting it up
- Create a workspace for the review and upload every contract in scope. Reading is charged once, so upload the whole folder rather than the ten you think you need.
- Bundle each contract with its amendments before building the table, so the rows are agreements from the start.
- Create the table and take the Legal & Procurement preset. Delete the columns you do not need — an unused column is not free once you run it.
- Run two rows. Open each cell and read the cited clause. This is where you find out whether “liability cap” is being read off the indemnity rather than the limitation of liability.
- Fix the prompts, then run the rest.
Columns worth adding
- Governing law as a category column with your jurisdictions written out plus “Not stated”. As a text column you get forty spellings of England and Wales; as a category you get something you can group by.
- Notice period in days as a number column, separate from the renewal text. The prose column tells you the shape of the clause; the number column is the one you sort by to find what needs acting on this quarter.
- Assignment on change of control as yes/no — the question that matters in a transaction and is almost never in the same place twice.
What to check before relying on it
Contracts repeat themselves, and that is the failure mode here: recitals, definitions, operative clauses and schedules can all mention a term with different force. Two habits fix most of it:
- Tell the prompt where to look — “from the operative clauses, not the recitals” — when a term is defined in one place and applied in another.
- Work the low-confidence list first. On contracts it correlates strongly with the clause genuinely being ambiguous, which is worth knowing regardless of the table.
Roughly what it costs
Forty contracts averaging 30 pages is 1,200 pages, so 1,200 credits to read them — $12, once, for good. Four typed columns across forty rows is 160 credits, about $1.60. Adding a fifth column later costs another $0.40, because the reading has already been paid for. See how credits work.
The preset’s prompts are illustrative starting points, not legal definitions, and nothing here is advice about your contracts.