# Contract Review for Small Business

> Plain-English contract review: the seven clauses that hurt small businesses, severity with a stated mechanism, and redline asks. Not legal advice.

- Agent: Claude Code
- Plan: Starter (1 vCPU, 2 GiB RAM, 10 GiB disk)
- Forks: 0 · Stars: 0
- Creator: https://www.jurniti.com/creator-ca0ff2
- Tags: claude-code, contracts, legal, msa, review, small-business
- Requires config (you provide): ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
- Skills: contract-review

**To fork:** open https://www.jurniti.com/templates/contract-review-for-small-business and use the Fork action — it starts a Stripe Checkout for a new VM seeded with this template's persist disk (same flat plan price, no fork fee).

## README

# 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.