About this template
A lawyer costs $400 to read it. You need to know which three sentences matter.
Fourteen pages of MSA from the client's legal team. You sign it unread, and eighteen months later you find the auto-renewal — or the uncapped indemnity, or that they own the templates you brought with you.
What comes back
Drop the document in ~/contracts/inbox/ and ask. The review opens with
NOT LEGAL ADVICE, then:
- Escalate? — yes or no, and why. Equity, a personal guarantee, IP assignment beyond the deliverable, a non-compete, or anything over your own stated value threshold sends you to a lawyer. It says so out loud and still does the review, so you walk in informed rather than blind.
- Findings — a table over the seven clauses that actually hurt small businesses: payment, termination, liability/indemnity, IP ownership, auto-renewal, scope change, dispute. Each one quotes the clause number, or is marked ABSENT — an absent indemnity cap is the finding.
- Severity with a mechanism. A RED has to name how it costs you money. The rules file forbids a RED with no mechanism, because that's an opinion wearing a colour.
- Redline asks — copy-paste sentences to send back, ordered by what a counterparty is most likely to concede. Lead with what you'll actually get.
- Missing — exhibits and schedules the contract references but nobody sent.
Written for an owner, not a lawyer
"If they cancel with 3 days notice you eat the cost of materials already ordered" — not "Section 8.2 allocates termination risk asymmetrically."
The guard is a file, not a promise
~/contracts/policy/REVIEW-RULES.md carries NOT_LEGAL_ADVICE, the seven-clause
checklist, the escalation triggers, and your own thresholds. The skill reads it
before every review.
Leave ## My thresholds empty and every value question escalates — safe, but
noisy. Fill it in and it gets useful.
What you supply
Your own Claude Code login. Nothing else. The review is local reading, so there's no third-party key and the document never leaves the VM.
Where this stops
It reads and drafts asks. It does not sign, return, countersign, or send. It won't tell you a contract is "fine", and it won't opine on whether a clause is enforceable — that's jurisdiction-specific, and the rules forbid it.
It is a reading aid. On equity, personal guarantees, IP assignment or non-competes, it points at a lawyer on purpose.
Verified on build: the skill, the working tree, the NOT_LEGAL_ADVICE guard and
the seven-clause checklist are present on a fresh fork. Running it on a real
contract is yours to do.