Explain a Contract
Read a contract you're about to sign, in plain English.
PDFs and images are sent to a server to be read. Word, Excel and PowerPoint files are opened here and only their text is sent. Nothing is stored.
Drop the contract you're about to sign
A lease, an offer, an agreement, terms of service. PDF or Word, up to 8MB — you'll get the termination, renewal and payment terms first.
Reading it…
That didn't work.
- Why it exists
- Written for
PDFs and images are sent to a server to be read. Word, Excel and PowerPoint files are opened in this browser tab and only their text is sent. What is sent is used to answer that one request and is not stored. Nothing is kept after the answer comes back, there is no copy to come back to later, and no document here is ever used to train a model.
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About the Pathine Explain a Contract
A contract is written to be enforceable, not to be read. The parts that decide what happens to you are rarely the ones near the top: how it ends, how it renews itself if you say nothing, what you have agreed to cover if something goes wrong, and how much notice any of that takes. Drop the document here and those are what comes back first.
It reads leases, employment offers, supplier agreements, terms of service, NDAs and freelance contracts. Termination, auto-renewal, indemnity, confidentiality, payment terms, liability caps and notice periods are pulled out with the page they are on, along with any clause that is unusual for a document of that kind.
It explains what the contract says. It does not tell you whether to sign it, whether a clause is enforceable where you live, or what it is worth — those are questions for somebody who can be held to the answer, and what this gives you is the list of things to ask them.
When you'd reach for it
A lease before you commit to a year of it
Break clauses, deposit terms, what counts as damage, how much notice each side has to give, and what happens at the end of the fixed term if nobody does anything.
A job offer with more than a salary in it
Notice period, probation terms, restrictive covenants, intellectual property assignment, and what the bonus is actually conditional on.
A supplier or SaaS agreement that renews itself
Auto-renewal with a cancellation window is the single most expensive clause most small businesses sign, because the deadline to escape it lands eleven months after anybody last read the document. The dates list puts it in front of you.
A freelance contract you were sent this morning
Payment terms, who owns the work, what happens if the client cancels halfway, and whether you have agreed to unlimited liability for a fixed fee.
How to read a contract with this
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Drop the contract in
A PDF or a Word file, or a photo of a printed page. Up to 8MB. Word files are opened in this browser and only their text is sent.
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Start with the warnings and the dates
Anything costly, irreversible or easy to miss is separated out, and every deadline, renewal and expiry is listed earliest first, copied as the contract writes it.
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Check what it could not read
Signature pages, scanned annexes and schedules attached as images are the usual gaps. If a page could not be read it is listed rather than passed over.
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Take the questions to somebody qualified
The suggested questions are written to be asked out loud. That is the intended use of this page: turning an hour of reading into a short list for a professional who charges by it.
Common questions
Is this legal advice?
No. It explains what the document says and what to ask about it, and it is built to refuse the next step — it will not tell you whether to sign, whether a clause holds up, or what you would get in a dispute. A solicitor can be held to an answer and a web page cannot.
Will it spot a clause that is unfair?
It flags clauses that are unusual for the kind of contract it is looking at, and clauses that are costly, one-sided or easy to miss. Whether something is unfair in law depends on where you are and what you are, which is exactly the sort of judgement this hands to a person instead of making.
Is my contract uploaded?
A PDF is sent to a server to be read, and that is said above the dropzone rather than buried here. A Word file is opened in this browser tab and only its text is sent. Nothing is stored once the explanation comes back, and no document here is used to train anything.
It missed a clause I know is in there.
Check the unknowns list first — a scanned schedule or an annex attached as images is the usual reason, and it is reported rather than skipped quietly. Otherwise ask about it directly in the question box; the answer comes from the document, and it will say so if it is not in there.
Can it compare this against the last version?
Not yet. One document at a time. If you have both versions as text, Text Compare shows exactly what changed between them, which is the faster way to review a redraft.