What Contractward is not.

Contractward reads a document you send it and returns two things: a plain-language account of what the document does, and the clauses that are unusual, costly or one-sided for that kind of document, each quoting the sentence that triggered it.

That is a reading service. A solicitor does something different: they learn your situation, apply the law to it, advise you on your options, and carry professional duties and insurance when they get it wrong. Contractward does none of that. It has not met your landlord, read your previous correspondence, or asked what you can afford.

Nothing on this site, in any report it produces, or in any message from it is legal advice, and none of it should be relied on as a substitute for advice from a qualified lawyer in your jurisdiction.

Using Contractward does not create a solicitor–client relationship, a retainer, or any professional relationship between you and Contractward or anyone connected with it.

It follows that nothing you send and nothing you receive is protected by legal professional privilege. If privilege matters to you — because a dispute is live, or looks likely — take the document to a solicitor instead.

There is no score, no risk rating, no green tick, and there never will be. This is a deliberate product decision, not a missing feature.

Plenty of contracts with a costly clause in them are still worth signing, and that judgement needs things the document does not contain: how much you want the flat, what else is on the market, how long you can wait, what you can absorb if the clause ever bites. Contractward has none of that information. You do.

What you should get from a report is a clearer view of what you are agreeing to, and two or three specific things worth asking about before you sign. The decision stays yours.

Every automated reading tool has failure modes. Here are ours, stated plainly, because a tool that pretends otherwise is more dangerous than one that does not:

• Misreading. The reader is a large language model. It can misunderstand a clause, miss the interaction between two clauses that sit forty pages apart, or treat a defined term as an ordinary word.
• Missing context. It reads what you send. Schedules, annexes, side letters, the inventory, the tenancy prescribed information, a term incorporated by reference to a web page — if you did not send it, it was not read, and the report may be confidently wrong as a result.
• Photographs and scans. When you send a photo of the pages, the reader works from what it can see. Glare, a folded page, a thumb over a line, or faint print can all drop words. Quotes taken from a photograph cannot be checked against the source text the way typed text can.
• Baselines, not rules. “Standard” means what this kind of document usually contains. Market practice varies by region, by sector and by year, and an unusual clause is not necessarily an unlawful or unfair one — nor is a standard clause necessarily lawful or fair.
• Jurisdiction. The reading conventions lean towards the law and market practice of England and Wales. If your contract is governed by the law of another country, treat any comparison to “what is standard” with more caution than usual.
• The law moves. Statutes, regulations and case law change. A report reflects what the reader knows, not necessarily the law as it stands today.

One thing the product does do: every quoted sentence in a report is checked word for word against the text you sent before you ever see it. If it cannot be found, the flag is discarded and you are told how many were dropped. That catches invented quotes. It does not catch a quote that is real but misunderstood.

Contractward is most useful before the stakes get high. Once they are high, see a solicitor — and in several of these situations free or low-cost advice exists:

• You are facing eviction, possession proceedings, or a dispute with your landlord that has already started.
• You are being asked for a personal guarantee, or to put up property as security.
• Your immigration status depends on the job, the tenancy, or the arrangement in front of you.
• You are signing something you could not walk away from — a long tie-in, a large sum relative to your income, or a restriction on how you earn a living.
• Someone is pressing you to sign today, or telling you that you do not need to read it.
• You have already signed, and something has gone wrong.

In the United Kingdom, Citizens Advice, Shelter (housing), ACAS (employment) and the relevant ombudsman schemes all give free guidance, and many solicitors offer a fixed-fee first appointment.

Contractward does not accept a duty of care in respect of any decision you make on the basis of a report, and does not warrant that a report is accurate, complete or current.

This does not affect anything that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for any of your rights as a consumer. The full position is in the terms of use.

If a report has told you something that is incorrect, or this page describes a limitation badly, say so: support@contractward.com. Being told where the reading is wrong is the only way the baselines get better.