First-draft contracts and document review in minutes
Solid first drafts of engagement letters, NDAs and terms from your own precedents, and a flag on the clauses in incoming contracts that deserve a lawyer’s eye.
The problem
How it works by hand
Routine legal documents put small businesses in a bad trade: pay solicitor rates for an engagement letter that is ninety percent boilerplate, or reuse a contract from 2019 and hope nothing important changed. Incoming contracts are worse. They get skimmed, signed and filed, and the clause that bites you was on page seven the whole time.
A worked example
What a working version looks like
Your existing contracts, the good ones, become a precedent library. When you need a new document, you give the system the deal specifics: parties, scope, fees, dates. An LLM drafts from your own precedents, keeping your clauses and your structure rather than inventing generic terms, and marks every passage it changed so review is fast. For incoming contracts, the system reads the document against a checklist you set with your lawyer, liability caps, payment terms, IP, termination, auto-renewal, and produces a plain-English summary with the clauses that deviate from your norms flagged for legal review. The lawyer still decides. They just stop doing the legwork.
The exact tools change per business. The shape does not.
What it needs
Honest inputs, nothing exotic
- 01Your best existing contracts and letters as the precedent base
- 02A checklist of what you care about in incoming contracts, agreed with your solicitor
- 03A solicitor or legal adviser who reviews the flagged items
- 04A clear rule on which documents always get full legal review regardless
The payoff
What you get back
Routine documents go out the same day instead of waiting on a quote or a template archaeology dig. Incoming contracts get read properly, every time, and your legal spend concentrates on judgement instead of first drafts.
Do it yourself
How you would build this yourself
No course, no upsell. This is the order we would build it in, with the tools named, and a prompt to start from.
- 1
Pick your best version of each document type, engagement letter, NDA, terms, and strip out the deal-specific bits. That is your precedent library and it takes an afternoon.
- 2
For new drafts: give Claude the precedent plus the deal specifics and have it draft from your clauses only, marking everything it changed. You review the marks, not the whole document.
- 3
For incoming contracts: agree a checklist with your solicitor (liability caps, payment terms, IP, termination, auto-renewal) and have Claude read each contract against it, flagging deviations in plain English.
- 4
Keep the lawyer on everything flagged, and keep a rule for which documents always get full legal review regardless. The point is to stop paying for legwork, not to stop paying for judgement.
Here is my standard [engagement letter] with placeholders for the deal-specific details, and here are this deal’s specifics: [parties, scope, fees, dates]. Draft the new document using only my existing clauses and structure, fill in the specifics, and list every change you made and why. Separately: read the attached incoming contract against this checklist [liability cap, payment terms, IP ownership, termination, auto-renewal] and give me a plain-English summary with anything that deviates from my norms flagged for my solicitor.
Copy it into Claude Code, fill the brackets, and it will plan the build with you before writing a line of code.
We would rather show you how than bill you. The whole ladder of free help, answers, guides and the weekly build-along, is on the do-it-yourself page.