Operations

Summarize Legal Documents with AI

Parties, obligations, dates, penalties — contract summaries for business readers, with defined terms and legal language kept exact.

Open in Structured Summary Prompt

Overview

Legal text punishes paraphrase: "shall" and "may" are different obligations, and a defined term carries its definition everywhere it appears. This setup summarizes contracts into the four sections a business reader needs — Parties & Purpose, Key Obligations, Important Dates, Risks & Penalties — at Detailed length (legal summaries that are too brief are wrong), under Strict Fidelity with Preserve Critical Quotes: obligations and penalty language keep their original wording, and anything the document doesn't cover says so instead of getting filled in.

How to use this resource

Summarize per document

One contract per run keeps obligations attributed to the right agreement.
Check the quote preservation

Penalty clauses and obligation language come back verbatim — the places where paraphrase changes meaning.
Mind the gaps

Strict fidelity writes "Not covered in the source" for absent sections — a contract with no termination clause should say so loudly.

Why This Works

Detailed length matches legal reality — compression that drops a clause is wrong, not concise
Verbatim legal language survives the summary → decision → dispute chain
The four-section skeleton mirrors what business readers actually ask of a contract

Best for

Business teams reading contracts without counsel present
Contract reviews where the summary gets forwarded
Documents whose defined terms carry exact meanings

Not for

Legal advice — a faithful summary is still not counsel
Building a contract register of extracted fields — that's the Extraction Prompt Generator

Use cases

Briefing stakeholders on contracts before signature
Surfacing obligations and penalties from dense clauses
Keeping "shall" as shall — not "should"

FAQ

Why does a contract summary mark missing clauses 'Not covered in the source' instead of leaving them blank?

'Not covered in the source' is the exact marker the fidelity rules require under any of the four headings that has no supporting text, instead of the model inferring or padding to fill it. So an empty Risks & Penalties or Important Dates block is data: the contract itself lacks that clause. You run the generated prompt in ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini; the marker keeps the absence visible.

How does this keep 'shall' from becoming 'should' when it summarizes a contract?

The quote rules flag commitments, numbers, and legal language as exact quotes that keep their original wording, so obligation verbs like 'shall' and 'may' come back verbatim instead of softened into 'should'. Penalty language and disputed claims get the same protection. The prompt tells whichever assistant you paste it into to preserve those phrasings; you still confirm each quote matches your document before forwarding.

When should I use the Extraction Prompt Generator instead of this summary?

They pull in opposite directions. Extraction lifts named fields — party names, effective dates, penalty amounts — from many agreements into comparable rows. This summary takes one contract and compresses it into four prose sections (Parties & Purpose, Key Obligations, Important Dates, Risks & Penalties), so a reader gets each obligation in its surrounding context rather than a stripped value in a cell.

Customize This Resource

Opens this setup in Structured Summary Prompt. Generate to get the full summary prompt — then adjust the structure, length, and fidelity rules.

Open in Structured Summary Prompt

Prompt Template

Copy it as-is, or use Open in Structured Summary Prompt to load it pre-filled and customize it with your own context.

TASK
Summarize contracts for a business reader who needs the obligations without the legalese.
Summarize the source text in the input. Do not write new content — compress what is there.

SOURCE
The source is a legal document or contract.
Reading guidance: Defined terms carry exact meanings — preserve them; obligations and penalties hide inside dense clauses.
Emphasis: Surface obligations, dates, and penalties.

OUTPUT STRUCTURE
Use exactly these markdown sections, in this order:
## Parties & Purpose
Who the document binds and what it is for.
## Key Obligations
What each party must do, per the text.
## Important Dates
Deadlines, terms, and renewal points.
## Risks & Penalties
What happens on breach or failure.

LENGTH RULES
- Prefer completeness over brevity: cover secondary points too, but never pad.
- Per section: 4–6 sentences each, with sub-bullets where helpful.
- Never pad a thin section — a short faithful section beats a full invented one.

FIDELITY RULES
- Do not invent information.
- Do not infer unsupported conclusions.
- Do not add missing context.
- Only summarize what appears in the source.
- Preserve numbers, dates, and names exactly as written.
- If a section has no supporting content in the source, write "Not covered in the source" — do not fill it.

QUOTE RULES
- Preserve critical statements as exact quotes: commitments, numbers, legal language, and disputed claims keep their original wording.
- Attribute each quote to its speaker or section when identifiable.
- Never paraphrase a statement whose exact wording carries weight.

OUTPUT RULES
- Return only the summary in markdown — no preamble ("Here is the summary"), no closing commentary.
- Use the section headings exactly as written above.
- Do not address the reader or the author — summarize the source.

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