Review a contract against your checklist

Build an agent that reads an attached contract and produces a structured extract and a list of deviations from a checklist — not an opinion on whether to sign. The fixture is a short synthetic services agreement with two planted problems and one clause missing outright. This is a procedure to run, with one recorded run as a reference.

What you need

• A running installation with a model profile.
• The skills capability, bound to a review-checklist skill. This page installs the gallery's legal/document-review-first-pass — see skills for writing your own instead. The gallery also carries legal/contract-clause-library, for looking up an approved clause and its fallback position once you have one to check against; this fixture does not need it. A ready-made legal/contract-reviewer agent template combines both.
• No sandbox. An attached text file is read from the prompt directly; see file processing.

Prepare the input

A short services agreement, invented for this page, saved as services-agreement.txt and attached in chat:

MASTER SERVICES AGREEMENT

This Agreement is made between Acme Consulting Ltd ("Provider") and Nimbus
Retail Ltd ("Client"), effective 1 January 2027.

1. Term
The initial term is 12 months from the effective date.

2. Services
Provider will deliver monthly analytics reporting as described in Schedule A.

3. Fees and Payment
Client will pay Provider 5,000 EUR per month, payable within 30 days of
invoice.

4. Confidentiality
Each party will keep the other's confidential information confidential
during the term and for 3 years after termination.

5. Liability
Each party's liability under this Agreement is unlimited.

6. Termination
Either party may terminate this Agreement for uncured material breach on 30
days' written notice.

7. Renewal
This Agreement automatically renews for successive 12-month terms.

8. Assignment
Neither party may assign this Agreement without the other party's prior
written consent.

Two planted issues: clause 5 caps nothing (uncapped liability), and clause 7 renews automatically with no notice window to stop it. One clause is missing outright: nothing in the agreement names a governing law or a jurisdiction.

Build the agent

1. In Skills → Skill gallery, install document-review-first-pass from the legal shelf.
2. Create an agent in Agents → New agent and select your model profile.
3. In Toolbox, enable Skills and bind the skill you just installed.
4. Set the instructions below, then Publish.

You produce a structured extract and a list of deviations from the bound
review checklist skill. You do not advise, do not conclude a clause is
acceptable, and do not redraft. Everything you produce is checked by the
person who reviews it before it is relied on.

Use the document-review-first-pass skill for what to extract and how to flag
deviations. Cite the clause number for every extracted term and every
deviation. Flag anything the checklist expects that the agreement does not
contain.

Run it

Attach services-agreement.txt to a new conversation and send:

Review this services agreement against the checklist.

Check the result

Check	Reference
Liability	Flagged as deviating — no cap, cl. 5
Renewal	Flagged as deviating — no opt-out notice window, cl. 7
Governing law and jurisdiction	Flagged as missing entirely, not invented
Every extracted term and deviation	Cites a clause number
Tone	States facts and deviations; does not conclude the agreement is safe, risky, or fine to sign
A question asking whether to sign	Declines to advise, and points back to the fee earner who reviews the output

Read the deviations against the source clauses yourself. A deviation that cites the wrong clause number, or a missing-clause list that invents an item the agreement actually has, both read as thorough in the chat.

Recorded on v0.0.504, 25 September 2026

Model: Claude Sonnet 4.6 through OpenRouter. The extract named cl. 5's liability as "unlimited" with "no exclusion of indirect/consequential loss," cl. 7's renewal as having "no opt-out/break notice mechanism," and listed "Governing law & jurisdiction" as absent under both the deviations and a separate missing-items table, alongside indemnities and change of control — items the checklist expects that this short fixture never included. It closed by stating the extract "requires verification by the fee earner responsible for this matter before being relied upon." Cost: 0.0249 USD.

The run was recorded on 0.0.508, when the gallery installed this skill as "Document review first pass" and the instructions named it that way. The first attempt failed before producing anything: the model called load_capability with the id document-review-first-pass, which did not exist then — a bound skill's id is its exact stored name — retried with a second wrong guess, and the run ended with "the agent could not finish this turn," for 0.0083 USD spent on the two guesses. Since 0.0.509 every gallery skill is named in that hyphenated form, and a new skill's name has to be, so the id the model writes is the one that exists (#1911).

When it goes wrong

• The run fails with "could not finish this turn" before any output. A call to load_capability named a skill id that does not exist. On 0.0.509 and later this points at a skill installed earlier, which still carries its gallery title as its name: install the skill again from the gallery, which adds it under the hyphenated name, and bind that one.
• The agent tells you whether to sign. Tighten "you do not advise" and test it directly with a follow-up question — a checklist tool that answers "yes, this is fine" the moment somebody asks is answering past its brief.
• A deviation has no clause number. The instructions ask for one on every item; a missing citation on an otherwise correct finding is still worth flagging, since the next reader cannot check it without one.
• The missing-clause list invents something the agreement has. Read the source directly. The checklist expects roughly a dozen standard items; a short fixture will always be missing several, and the model has to get the ones that are genuinely absent right, not just produce a long list.
• Two agents bound to the same skill give different checklists. The skill is one row, shared by name; check nobody has an unpublished proposal pending on it under Skills. See an agent can propose a change; a person makes it.

Record the trial

Keep the exact agreement text, the reply, the agent version, the skill's own version, and the model. A person still checks every citation against the source and decides what to do about each deviation — the agent's brief is to surface them, not to close them.

Next steps

Add legal/contract-clause-library once you have an approved position to check clauses against, so a deviation can be reported with the actual fallback rather than only "this differs from standard." For a longer agreement with several documents to cross-check, knowledge search answers a different question than this page: retrieving a passage from a large corpus, rather than reviewing one attached document end to end.