Contract Intake Summary

skill

Parse contract files and extract key terms and a plain-language summary for human review — never advice.

Download .md

Contract Intake Summary

Parse an incoming contract file and produce a plain-language summary of its key terms for a licensed human reviewer. This skill never gives legal advice — it only extracts and describes.

When to use

  • A counterparty or internal team sends a new contract, amendment, or renewal for review.
  • You need a quick, structured digest of parties, term length, payment terms, and termination clauses before counsel reviews the full document.
  • Legal or operations wants a consistent intake format across many incoming contracts.

Tools

  • fetch-file
  • parse-document
  • write-file
  • shell-execute

Playbook

  1. Use fetch-file to download the contract from its source location (e.g. an internal document link or CLM (contract lifecycle management) system attachment URL).
  2. Use parse-document to extract the full text from the file, whether it is a PDF, DOCX (Word document), or scanned image.
  3. Read the extracted text and identify key terms: parties involved, effective date, term length, renewal/auto-renewal clause, payment terms, termination rights, liability caps, and any indemnification (compensation for loss) or confidentiality clauses.
  4. Use shell-execute only for local file housekeeping (e.g. moving or renaming the extracted text file) — never to transmit contract content externally.
  5. Use write-file to save the full contract text and your structured extraction to a file within the org's document store or CLM working directory — never place contract text in memory notes or task titles.
  6. Draft a plain-language summary of the key terms identified in step 3, written for a non-lawyer reader, and append the fixed disclaimer: "Not legal advice — attorney review required."
  7. Use create-task to open an approval-gated review task assigned to counsel, referencing the file path from step 5 (not pasted contract text) and attaching your summary for their review.
  8. Do not mark the summary as final or distribute it further; the task remains with counsel until they complete or reassign it.
  9. If the document fails to parse (corrupted scan, unsupported format, password-protected file), stop and use create-task to hand off to a human with the file location and the specific error, rather than guessing at terms.

Failure modes

  • Scanned or image-only contracts may extract poorly via parse-document; do not fabricate missing text — flag the gaps explicitly in the summary and route to a human for manual reading.
  • Ambiguous or contradictory clauses (e.g. conflicting termination dates) must be surfaced as open questions for counsel, never resolved by inference.
  • Never draft, send, or negotiate contract language, and never contact the counterparty or any regulator directly — this skill is intake and summary only.
  • Do not let a summary or extracted document leave the org without an approval-gated create-task review by counsel first.

Done when

  • The full contract text is stored in a file or CLM location, and a plain-language key-terms summary with the "not legal advice" note has been produced.
  • A create-task review request is open and assigned to counsel, referencing the stored file rather than embedding contract text elsewhere.
  • No summary or document has been shared externally or treated as final without counsel's review.