How to analyse a contract with AI before you sign it
Twelve pages landed on you this afternoon and they want an answer tomorrow. It isn’t a merger or a criminal matter: it’s a lease, an employment contract, a client agreement, a supplier’s terms. The ordinary kind.
And the usual thing happens: you understand the words but you have no idea what clause seven is costing you.
An AI genuinely helps here. But it helps with some things and not others, and mixing them up is expensive.
What it’s good for
Translating. The thing it does best, and it’s not trivial: taking a clause written for a lawyer and telling you what it means in plain language. “Expressly waives the jurisdiction that might otherwise apply” means that if there’s a dispute, you’ll be travelling to the other side’s courts.
Finding what isn’t there. A contract’s problems usually live in what’s missing, not in what’s written. A services agreement with no notice period. A lease with no rent-review clause. An agreement with no liability cap. Asking “what’s standard in this kind of contract that doesn’t appear here?” is one of the most useful things you can do.
Preparing the conversation. Not to decide for you: so you walk into the meeting knowing what to ask. That’s the difference between signing and negotiating.
What it is NOT for
Telling you whether it’s lawful. A contract can be perfectly clear and contain a clause that’s void. That depends on the applicable law, the jurisdiction and sometimes on how courts are reading it this year. No AI knows that with certainty, and the ones that answer confidently are the most dangerous.
Anything with a lot riding on it. If you’re signing something that commits your home, your company or several years of your life, the AI is the step before a lawyer, not the substitute. An hour of review costs far less than finding the problem two years in.
We apply that line inside the product itself: faced with a question that amounts to binding legal advice, the jury doesn’t rule — it refers you on. Not out of commercial caution, but because there’s no honest answer to give.
The seven questions that actually work
These are in order. The first ones give you the map; the last ones give you ammunition.
- “Summarise this contract in ten lines, as if explaining it to me — I’m not a lawyer.” Map before detail.
- “What are my three main obligations, and the other party’s three?” A balanced contract has columns of similar length. If one is much longer, you’ve learned something.
- “What happens if I want out? How much notice, and what does it cost me?” The exit clause is the one nobody reads and the one that always ends up mattering.
- “Which clause would hurt me most if things go badly?” This is the good one. It forces reasoning about the bad scenario, which is what a contract is actually about.
- “What’s missing here that’s standard in this kind of contract?”
- “Is anything worded ambiguously, in a way that could be read two ways?” Ambiguities are rarely accidents: they tend to favour whoever drafted.
- “Give me three specific questions to ask the other party before signing.” So you leave the reading with something to do.
The check you can’t skip
Before trusting any answer, verify that it read your contract and not one like it. It’s more common than you’d think for an AI to answer about what documents like that usually say, without ever opening yours — we go through it in what happens when you give an AI a PDF.
The test takes ten seconds: ask about a detail that only exists in your document. “What exact figure appears in clause four?” If it gets it right, carry on. If you get generalities, everything else it told you is worth about as much as a horoscope.
Why one opinion isn’t enough
With a contract, two careful readers don’t flag the same clauses. That’s true of people and it’s true of AIs: one fixates on liability, another on deadlines, another on jurisdiction.
Ask one and you inherit its bias without knowing it’s there. Ask several and what emerges is more interesting than any single answer: where they agree (that probably matters) and where they don’t (that’s probably the ambiguous part).
It’s exactly what The Judge is for: several AIs read the same contract separately and a fixed judge tells you where they agree, where they don’t, and how confident it is. Disagreement isn’t a system failure — in a contract, it’s usually the precise spot the trouble will come from.
And if it really matters
Take the contract and your three prepared questions to a lawyer. Half an hour well spent instead of an hour explaining what it’s about.
That part an AI does better than you at eleven at night.