Your client's contract is not your data to upload

There is a step in almost every AI contract review tool that nobody wants to talk about. Before you get a single insight, you upload the document.

For a personal lease, fine. For a client's master services agreement, it is a decision with someone else's name on it.

What you are actually agreeing to

When a contract goes to a cloud reviewer, three things become true at once. The counterparty's commercial terms sit on a third party's servers. Your client's name and pricing sit there with them. And the terms under which they sit there are written by a company that is not you and can change them.

Most of those terms are reasonable. Some permit processing for service improvement. Almost all of them require you, if you are handling client data, to add that provider to a processor list you may have told your client was shorter.

The practical problem is not that the provider is untrustworthy. It is that you have taken on a disclosure obligation in exchange for a faster read of a PDF.

The version of this that has no step

Run the analysis where the file already is. The document is read on your machine, the clauses are graded there, and nothing is transmitted.

There is no upload to disclose, no processor to add, and no retention policy to read — because there is no third party in the sentence. When a client asks where their agreement went, the answer is nowhere.

What a useful review looks like

A tool that says "this contract is risky" has told you nothing you can act on. The findings worth having name the section, quote the sentence, and say in plain language what it means for you:

• Auto-renewal traps — rolls over for another 24 months unless cancelled inside a short window, often with an uncapped price rise
• Unlimited liability on your side while theirs is capped at fees paid
• No termination right, or one that costs the full remaining term
• IP assignment where you thought you were licensing
• One-way indemnities covering costs outside your control

Quoted, they are something you can take back to the other side. Unquoted, they are a score you have to trust.

We built this into Guard, and wrote up how it works on the contract review page. It runs locally, and the free tier includes enough scans to test it on an agreement you already signed — which is the honest way to evaluate it.