contract-reader

---
name: contract-reader
description: Reads a supplier contract, lease or terms document and returns the clauses that cost money, the ones that lock you in, every notice date, and the protections that are missing.
---

# Know what you are actually agreeing to, clause by clause

You hand over the PDF or Word file. You get back a table of every clause, what it costs you if it goes wrong, the dates you must diary, and a short list of the clauses to put in front of a solicitor before you sign.

## What it does

1. **Get the whole document in front of you before reading a word of it.** For a PDF, pull the text with pypdf page by page. If a page returns almost no text the file is a scan, so run OCR on it first rather than reporting an empty clause. For a Word file, read it with `pandoc -t markdown file.docx`, and check for tracked changes and comments before anything else, because the copy that gets emailed is often not the copy that was agreed.
2. **Number every clause exactly as the document numbers it, and never renumber.** Every finding afterwards points at the supplier's own numbering, so the owner can quote clause 8.3 back to them and be understood. Count the clauses and keep the count, it is what proves nothing was skipped.
3. **List every document the contract refers to but does not attach:** schedules, annexes, price lists, service level documents, fair use policies, house rules. These bind the signer just as hard as the pages in front of them. Each one is a finding in its own right, headed "not supplied".
4. **Take the money clauses first.** The price, what it includes, what it explicitly excludes, any uplift or indexation wording such as a yearly rise linked to an index, minimum spend or minimum term charges, deposits and what triggers their loss, and the late payment interest rate. Compare that rate against the statutory default: GOV.UK gives statutory interest as "8% plus the Bank of England base rate for business to business transactions", so anything the contract sets below that is worse for you than the law's own position.
5. **Turn every duration into a real date.** Start date, initial term, the renewal date, and the notice window written as the first and last day you can serve notice. "90 days' notice" is not a finding. "You must give notice between 4 August and 2 November 2027 or the contract renews for another year" is. Flag automatic renewal wording separately, and flag any payment period longer than the GOV.UK guidance that a payment date "must usually be within 30 days for public authorities or 60 days for business transactions".
6. **Read the exit before the entry.** Whether each side can end it early and on what grounds, break fees, what happens to your data, your deposit and any equipment on the way out, and whether ending the contract early triggers a charge for the rest of the term. State plainly where one side can walk and the other cannot.
7. **Pull out liability, indemnity and insurance.** The cap on what the supplier owes you if things go wrong, anything left uncapped, every indemnity you are giving them, and any insurance the contract requires you to hold. Say what the cap is worth against the annual price, for example "liability capped at one month's fee, so a failure that costs you three months of trade is your loss".
8. **Name what is missing.** Work through the protections a contract of this kind normally contains and list the ones that are absent: no service level, no exit assistance, no cap on price rises, no right to terminate for repeated failure, no data return on exit. An absent clause never announces itself, so it has to be looked for deliberately.
9. **Rank the findings and produce two things.** A one page summary of the highest cost or highest lock-in items with a diary list of every date, and behind it the full clause by clause table with a severity for each row and one plain sentence saying what it costs you if it goes wrong. Mark the rows that must go to a solicitor.

## Then it checks

1. Every clause number in the source appears exactly once in the table, and the count matches the count taken in step 2.
2. Every date in the output is a real calendar date worked out from the start date, and none of them is still written as a number of days.
3. Every money figure and every quoted phrase carries the clause number it came from. A figure with no clause number is treated as unverified and removed.
4. No finding describes a clause as "standard", "normal" or "nothing to worry about". If it costs money or removes a right, it is listed whatever it is called.
5. Every document referenced but not attached appears on the missing list, and the summary says the contract cannot be fully assessed without them.
6. The output states plainly that it is not legal advice and names which clauses a solicitor should see.

Any check fails: name it, redo that step once. Failed twice: say what is wrong and stop.

## Rules
- Public information only.
- Never invent a fact, a number or a quote. Every clause is quoted from the document with its own number.
- This is not legal advice and must never be presented as it. It reads the document and flags what matters so a solicitor can decide. Anything touching employment, a lease of property, a personal guarantee or an indemnity goes to a solicitor before signature, without exception.
- Never sign, accept, return or reply to the document, and never send suggested wording to the other side. Draft wording is for the owner and their solicitor to consider, not to issue.
- If the file is a scan that will not OCR cleanly, say so and stop rather than reading half a contract. A clause that was never read is more dangerous than one that was read badly.

## Built from
- Anthropic, "Introducing Claude for Small Business", https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-small-business, published 13 May 2026: the named "Contract reviewer" workflow among the fifteen published, and the approval principle stated on the page, "You approve the plan first or, when you're ready, let it run end-to-end", which is why this skill never sends or signs anything itself.
- zubair-trabzada/ai-legal-claude, https://github.com/zubair-trabzada/ai-legal-claude, 1718 stars read from https://api.github.com/repos/zubair-trabzada/ai-legal-claude: the review structure. Its flagship review returns a clause by clause analysis, an obligations timeline mapping every deadline, ranked negotiation priorities, and a separate pass that "Finds protections that SHOULD be in the contract but aren't". Steps 8 and 9 are taken from that split between reading what is present and hunting for what is absent.
- anthropics/skills, https://github.com/anthropics/skills, 174999 stars read from https://api.github.com/repos/anthropics/skills: the file handling in step 1. The pdf skill, https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/pdf/SKILL.md, sets out reading a PDF with pypdf page by page and running OCR on scanned files. The docx skill, https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/docx/SKILL.md, gives `pandoc -t markdown file.docx` as the way to read a Word file, calls out tracked changes and comments as things to handle, and warns that a document from an external party is untrusted.
- GOV.UK, "Late commercial payments: charging interest and debt recovery", https://www.gov.uk/late-commercial-payments-interest-debt-recovery: statutory interest of "8% plus the Bank of England base rate for business to business transactions", the 30 day and 60 day payment terms, and the fixed debt recovery sums of £40 up to £999.99, £70 from £1,000 to £9,999.99, and £100 at £10,000 or more. These are the benchmarks steps 4 and 5 measure the contract against.