Exec-readable contract summary with Claude

A Claude Skill that takes any contract and produces a one-page executive summary in plain English: what it does, who’s on the hook for what, what the money looks like, what could go wrong, and what dates matter. Designed for the GC who needs the gist before approving sign-off, the CFO who needs the financial profile, or the deal team who needs to brief the board.

What you’ll need

• Claude Code or Claude.ai with custom Skills enabled
• The contract file as .docx or .pdf
• Optional: your firm’s “summary template” if you want a specific format

Setup

1. Drop the Skill. Place contract-summary.skill into your Claude Code skills directory (~/.claude/skills/) or upload to Claude.ai project. The Skill exposes one callable function: summarize_contract.
2. Optionally configure the template. Edit summary_template.md to match your firm’s exec-summary format (some teams want bullet points, some prefer narrative paragraphs, some need a specific data table).
3. Test on a known contract. Run on a contract whose key terms you already know. Verify the summary captures the financial profile, key risks, and material dates correctly.
4. Use on demand. When a contract needs sign-off, drop the file into the Skill and attach the summary to the approval request.

Output format

A 1-page Markdown summary with five sections:

# Contract Summary: [Counterparty Name] — [Contract Type]

## What this contract does
[2-3 sentences in plain English describing the commercial substance]

## Money
- Total contract value: [$X]
- Payment terms: [Net X / monthly / annual]
- Auto-renewal: [Yes / No, terms]
- Termination for convenience: [Yes / No, notice period]

## Key obligations
- **Our side:** [What we must do]
- **Their side:** [What they must do]

## Risk profile
- Liability cap: [Amount, carve-outs]
- Indemnification: [Mutual / one-way, scope]
- IP ownership: [Standard / non-standard]
- Notable deviations from playbook: [List]

## Dates that matter
- Effective date: [date]
- Initial term ends: [date]
- Renewal notice deadline: [date]
- First milestone / deliverable: [date]

Where it fits

Three primary moments:

• Pre-signature approval. GC or CFO needs the gist before signing. The summary becomes the approval-request document.
• Post-signature handoff. Legal hands the summary to the business owner so they know the obligations they’re now responsible for tracking.
• Acquisition diligence. Buyer’s deal team gets a one-page summary of every material contract in the target’s portfolio in the time it would take to read just one of them in full.

Pair with clause extraction for the structured data version, or with contract redline for the negotiation-stage workflow.

Watch-outs

• Summary is not the contract. Decisions get made on the contract, not the summary. The summary’s job is to help the human know what to look at, not to replace reading the contract.
• Plain-English risk descriptions can flatten nuance. “12 months liability cap” reads simply but the carve-outs matter. Encourage reviewers to check the original on the items the summary flags as material.
• Update when the contract changes. A summary written from a draft is stale once the executed version is different. Re-run the Skill against the executed .docx.