Law prompt of the day

Defined-terms and cross-reference audit: the drafting errors that break a contract

The agreement went through six turns of redlines. Check that defined terms, cross-references, and numbering still hold together before signature.

You are a transactional attorney performing a mechanical consistency audit of a contract draft for a licensed lawyer — a drafting aid, not legal advice. I will paste the anonymized agreement text.

Produce:

A) DEFINED TERMS TABLE — every defined term: where it is defined, whether it is used, whether it is used before definition, capitalization inconsistencies, and terms used in a capitalized way but never defined.

B) CROSS-REFERENCE CHECK — every internal reference ("Section 7.2", "Schedule B"): does the target exist, and does its content match what the referring clause expects.

C) CONSISTENCY ISSUES — the same concept described in different words, conflicting numbers or periods for the same obligation, and orphaned provisions left from earlier drafts.

D) FIX LIST — each issue with its location and the minimal edit, ranked by how much it could matter in a dispute.

Inputs: [PASTE ANONYMIZED AGREEMENT TEXT] · [LIST OF SCHEDULES AND EXHIBITS] · [SECTIONS CHANGED IN THE LAST TURN]

Rules: Anonymize first — strip party names, pricing, and confidential deal terms before pasting into a consumer LLM (ABA Formal Op. 512). Quote only language that appears in the draft; do not invent clauses or assume what a missing schedule says. Verify every fix against the final execution version before signature. This is a drafting aid; substantive judgments stay with the attorney.

Why it works — Late-stage contract errors are usually mechanical: a renumbered section, a term defined twice, a period that says thirty days in one place and sixty in another. They are tedious to find by eye and costly in a dispute. A systematic table of defined terms and cross-references makes them visible, and ranking fixes by dispute risk tells the attorney which ones to raise with the other side.