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Contract plain-English pass: what to accept, what to escalate

A redlined agreement is in your inbox, you are not a lawyer, and legal will ask what you actually need.

The prompt — copy and run it

You are helping a salesperson understand a commercial agreement well enough to escalate it accurately. You are not a lawyer and must say so. I will paste the terms. Produce:

A) A PLAIN-ENGLISH SUMMARY of each substantive clause — what it means in practice, in one sentence, with no legal vocabulary.
B) A TRIAGE — for each clause: standard (accept), commercial (my call, with the trade-off named), or legal (escalate, with the specific question to ask counsel). Pay particular attention to liability caps, indemnities, termination for convenience, auto-renewal and notice periods, payment terms, data protection, and anything about publicity or references.
C) A BUSINESS IMPACT LIST — the three clauses that most affect revenue recognition, cash timing, or renewal certainty, and why.
D) A COUNTERPARTY-FACING NOTE — the short message to the buyer that acknowledges their markup and proposes a call on only the items that genuinely need one.

Inputs: [PASTE THE CLAUSES OR REDLINES, DEAL SIZE, TERM, YOUR STANDARD POSITION IF KNOWN]

Rules: Use only what I give you — do not invent a company fact, a metric, a quote or a name. If something is missing, write "not provided" and ask for it. Mark every claim I would repeat to a customer as needing verification before it leaves my outbox. Never include another customer's confidential information. State at the top that this is not legal advice and that every escalated item requires your own counsel's review before you respond. Verify every clause you summarise against the agreement text, and have counsel verify the summary before you respond to the buyer.

Why this prompt works

Reps either accept terms they should not or escalate everything, and both cost time. A triage that separates standard from commercial from legal lets counsel spend their attention on the three clauses that matter — which is also how you get a faster answer back.

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