Contract Review

Overview

Produce a practical review of a supplied agreement from the identified party's perspective, with source-linked findings, unresolved questions and negotiation options. Use multiple analysis lenses and optional permitted delegation without turning agreement between reviewers into proof of legal correctness.

Prerequisites

Obtain readable contract text or an accessible file, the user's role, review goal, and relevant commercial priorities. Identify known jurisdiction and transaction context without inferring them from a company name. Use the actual document tools available; Read support for one format does not guarantee DOCX, scanned PDF or encrypted-file extraction. Ask for an accessible export when necessary.

Instructions

1. Establish the document boundary. Use Glob to locate the supplied document set, Read to inspect accessible content, and Grep to find defined terms and cross-references within that set. Record title, version/date, source path, party roles, schedules, incorporated documents and amendments available. Keep originals unchanged. Identify missing pages, tables, signatures and extraction uncertainty. Maintain a section/page coverage map for long contracts; process accessible sections in bounded passes and reconcile definitions/cross-references. Do not silently summarize unread portions or call an excerpt a full review.
2. Build the clause inventory. Extract actual parties, dates, duration, obligations, payment terms, termination, rights, liability and dispute provisions with locators. Mark unstated facts unknown, distinguish signature date from effective date, and follow amendment/precedence language. Classify the agreement provisionally (employment, contractor, NDA, services, software/SaaS, terms, privacy/data processing, partnership, lease, or other) without forcing a fit.
3. Choose the execution mode. Direct analysis is valid. Delegate only if the session permits it and the named agent/tool is actually available. The declared Task tool is a legacy delegation alias; use the supported equivalent only for that permitted delegation. Read review-and-handoff.md when using delegation or combining multiple reviewers. The bundled agents are legal-clauses, legal-risks, legal-compliance, legal-obligations, and legal-recommendations; they are not five interchangeable parallel reviewers. Inventory precedes dependent analysis, and recommendations consume the actual available findings. Do not spawn agents merely because this skill mentions them.
4. Review through five lenses. Explain material clauses in plain language; assess commercial risks; examine relevant missing/partial protections; identify regulatory questions; compare actual obligations and negotiating positions. Preserve actors, conditions, exceptions, units, definitions and negations. Reuse applicable bundled skill guidance where available, including risk-analysis, plain-english, missing-protections and compliance-audit. Candidate topics are not clauses every agreement must contain. A missing attachment can prevent a finding about whether a protection is absent.
5. Separate evidence from conclusions. For every finding retain the exact locator and minimal necessary quote, observed wording, qualified possible effect, dependencies and unresolved facts. Check calculations against actual amounts/time windows and label conditional scenarios. Do not invent loss probabilities, fairness percentages, reading levels or a Contract Safety Score. Optional user-defined prioritization is a decision aid with a stated rubric, not a signing recommendation or calibrated legal-risk measurement.
6. Check authority and contradictions. Regulatory applicability/enforceability need the relevant facts and current jurisdiction-specific authority. This skill's toolset has no web research tool: use supplied verified sources or identify research still needed. Reject unsupported findings even if multiple reviewers repeat them. Reconcile inconsistent locators, definitions, versions and recommendations; preserve unresolved disagreements explicitly.
7. Synthesize a usable report. Rank supported issues by the user's stated priorities and explain the basis. Present proposed changes, tradeoffs, questions for the other party and matters needing qualified counsel. Distinguish an observed issue, proposed wording and an accepted decision. Do not claim the agreement is safe to sign, legally compliant or equivalent to a law-firm review. Present the report in chat; the current toolset lacks Write, so a suggested filename is not evidence a report was saved.

Output

Suggested filename: CONTRACT-REVIEW-{title}-{review-date}.md, with actual supplied identity and review date. Include:

• Executive summary with the most material supported issues and open decisions.
• Document metadata, coverage, missing material and analysis mode actually used.
• Clause inventory and plain-language explanation of critical provisions.
• Findings register: stable ID, locator, wording, possible effect, assumptions, status, priority rationale and proposed next action.
• Relevant gaps and applicability questions, with evidence status.
• Obligations/rights comparison, amounts and timing with calculation assumptions.
• Negotiation options, unresolved disagreements and research/counsel questions.

No overall safety grade or automated accept/reject verdict. Describe partial work as partial and identify any requested deliverable that could not be produced.

Error Handling

• Missing/unreadable document: identify the source and extraction problem; request an accessible copy rather than pretending the full text was reviewed.
• Missing context: continue textual analysis and label context-dependent findings provisional. Ask only for facts that materially change the review.
• Unavailable or failed agent: report the actual failure. Perform a permitted direct pass where useful, otherwise leave that lens unassessed; no invented run.
• Conflicting findings: return to quoted text, definitions and authority; reviewer count does not resolve a legal or factual disagreement.
• Sensitive contract: include only necessary excerpts and approved destinations; delegation does not imply permission for external uploads or disclosure.

Examples

Services agreement. The supplied Section 8 limits specified liability to fees paid during a defined period, but an unavailable schedule may contain exceptions. Quote Section 8, explain its scope and request the schedule. Do not label exposure unlimited or compute a loss forecast without the actual exception and fee facts.

Pasted NDA excerpt. Review the disclosure and recipient obligations shown, identify missing definitions/term provisions as not supplied, and explain how they could change the analysis. Report excerpt coverage and practical questions; do not assign an F grade because the pasted excerpt omits the rest of the agreement.

Resources

Read review-and-handoff.md for the actual bundled agent dependency map and evidence contract. Legal interpretation remains dependent on facts, current authority and qualified review; no attorney-client relationship or legal opinion is created by this workflow.