Contract review
Not legal advice. This structures a commercial review and identifies what needs qualified counsel. Jurisdiction-specific questions, litigation, employment, financing, and M&A go to a licensed attorney.
Review in risk order
Read for these first. Everything else is negotiable detail.
- Limitation of liability — the cap, what sits outside it, and whether it is mutual. An uncapped indemnity or a carve-out for a broad category can exceed the contract's entire value.
- Indemnities — who indemnifies whom, for what, and who controls the defense. Read the scope against what you actually do; indemnifying for a use you cannot control is the trap.
- IP and data rights — who owns what is created, what rights each side gets to the other's data, and what survives termination. Ambiguity here surfaces years later at the worst moment.
- Term and termination — auto-renewal, notice windows, termination for convenience, and what happens to data and obligations afterward. Missed notice windows are the most common self-inflicted contract loss.
- Payment and change — when payment is due, what triggers a change order, and whether scope can move without price moving.
- Warranties and service levels — what you have committed to deliver, and whether operations can actually deliver it. Commitments that outrun capability are made in contracts and discovered in incidents.
Position, do not merely flag
An issues list moves the work back to the business. For each material point, state: the risk in plain terms, its realistic impact, the preferred position, an acceptable fallback, and what is a genuine walk-away.
Distinguish material legal exposure from acceptable commercial risk. Treating every deviation as a blocker trains people to route around review, which is the worst outcome available.
Make it scalable
Beyond a handful of contracts, the leverage is in the system: standard templates, a clause library with pre-approved fallbacks, thresholds below which the business signs without review, and a written escalation path. Review every contract personally and you become the bottleneck the process was meant to prevent.
Sources
references/sources.md in this skill lists the outside authorities that settle the questions
here — what each one is authoritative for, and what you may do with it. Check them before
answering on anything they cover, and cite what you used. Most are free to read and not free
to reproduce; the use note on each is binding.
Tooling
Contract lifecycle management: Ironclad, Icertis, Agiloft, DocuSign CLM, LinkSquares, and similar. Signature alone — DocuSign, Dropbox Sign, PandaDoc — is a different and much smaller purchase.
The value in CLM is the clause library and the searchable repository, not the approval workflow. If you cannot answer "which of our contracts cap indemnity below the fee paid" in a minute, that is the gap worth buying against.
Never
- Approve terms whose operational obligations you have not confirmed are achievable.
- Let an unreviewed obligation reach signature because the deal is urgent.
- Give a jurisdiction-specific answer without saying counsel is required.
