How do I check a contract before signing it?
Read for four things: what you must do, what you must pay, when it ends, and what survives the ending. Find each one on the page rather than trusting a summary, and check that the dates and amounts agree with what you negotiated.
The four things that actually matter
- Obligations: what must you do, and by when. An obligation with no date is still an obligation.
- Money: the amount, the currency, what triggers it, and whether it can change without your agreement.
- Term and termination: how long it runs, how either side exits, and what notice is required.
- Survival: which clauses outlive the contract. Confidentiality and indemnities usually do, and they are the ones people forget.
Read the definitions and the order of precedence
Definitions quietly change the deal. If "Services" includes "any additional services reasonably requested", the price is not the price.
The order of precedence clause decides which document wins when the schedule disagrees with the main body. In a dispute, that clause is often the whole argument.
Use a scanner to find, not to decide
A contract scanner can pull out the dates, the amounts and the clauses that usually carry risk, each quoted with its page number. That turns a forty-page read into a shortlist of pages.
It cannot tell you whether the deal is good. It does not know your counterparty, your margin, or what you agreed on the call. Treat its output as an index, then read those pages yourself.
Before the signature
Confirm the parties are named exactly as they are registered to be — a wrong entity name is a real problem at enforcement, not a typo.
Check every blank is filled. An empty date or amount field is an invitation for the other side to complete it later.
Then sign, and keep a copy of exactly what you sent. A Certificate of Execution records the hash of the source if the document may later be disputed.
Where this stops
This is not legal advice, and no scanner is a substitute for a lawyer on a document that matters. The free scan reads the file and quotes it; it does not interpret it.
A scanned contract with no text layer cannot be scanned for clauses. The reader can use page images, but the result is a transcription, and transcription errors in a contract number are expensive.
Is the contract scan free?
Yes, and it has no limit. It runs in the browser tab. Only the optional written AI summary is paid, and it is opt-in.
Does the scan upload my contract?
No. The analysis runs on the file in your tab. The one exception is the AI summary, which sends the first 30,000 characters only if you tick the box.
Can it tell me if a clause is unfair?
It can flag clauses that commonly carry risk and quote them with a page number. Whether a clause is unfair depends on jurisdiction and context, which is a lawyer's question.
What about a scanned contract?
A scan with no text layer has nothing to extract, so clause detection is unreliable. Have it retyped or use the page images, and check every number by eye.
This page is general information, not advice for your document. The tools do what they say on their own pages, and every limit is printed there.