Contract Consistency Checker

About the Contract Consistency Checker

A contract can be fair and well negotiated and still go out with a blank where the price should be, a clause that refers to “clause 9.4” when there is no clause 9.4, a definition nobody uses, or “₹5,00,000 (Rupees Fifty Thousand)”. Those slips are what a careful second reader looks for, and they are easy to miss in draft 7 at midnight.

Paste the contract or choose it as a Word document or PDF, and the checker goes through it the way a proofreader would: placeholders and blanks left in, defined terms that are never used, never defined, defined twice or written in another case, party roles from another template (“the Vendor” in a contract between a Supplier and a Customer) and company names written two ways, cross-references to clauses, articles and schedules that do not exist, gaps and repeats in the numbering, amounts, periods and percentages whose words and figures disagree — Indian lakh and crore as well as thousands and millions — and typing slips such as “the the” or a bracket that never closes. Every finding says where it is and shows the passage; Show in text takes you to it. The free preview shows every count with the first findings of each check; the full report, the PDF, the CSV and Copy summary need a Premium pass. The contract is read on your device and never uploaded.

Common uses

• A last check of a draft before it goes to the other side, or before signing.
• Reviewing a contract built from several templates, where roles, defined terms and numbering often clash.
• Checking a counterparty’s draft for blanks and inconsistencies before you negotiate its substance.
• Teaching junior lawyers and students what a proofreading pass looks for.

What it checks

• Placeholders and blanks: [●], [•], [ ], [insert …], [Name], merge fields such as {{name}} or «name», XXX, TBD and TBC, Word’s “Click or tap here to enter text”, blank lines and dotted blanks (but not the blank lines of a signature block or the dots of a table of contents), and any other square-bracketed text, which usually marks an option still to be settled (the notices a signed copy keeps, such as [Signature page follows], [Reserved] or [Intentionally omitted], are left alone).
• Defined terms: definitions written as “Term” means …, “Term”: … at the start of a line, (the “Term”), referred to as the “Term”, or Term means … at the start of a definitions clause. It counts each term’s uses (plurals included), and flags terms never used, defined more than once, used in lower case or another case, and capitalised phrases used like defined terms (“the Effective Date”) that are never defined. A pointer such as “has the meaning given in clause 9.1” is not counted as a second definition.
• Parties and names: role words such as Vendor, Client, Licensee or Contractor used when the parties are defined under other names, and company names written two ways (Private Limited and Pvt. Ltd., a missing letter).
• Cross-references: clause, section, paragraph and article numbers, sub-clauses such as 5.2(a)(ii), ranges such as “clauses 3 to 5”, and schedules, annexures, exhibits and appendices. References to sections of statutes (“section 74 of the Indian Contract Act”) and to the clauses of another document (“clause 14.2 of the Principal Agreement”) are left alone.
• Numbering: numbers skipped, repeated or out of order at every level — 1, 1.1, (a), (i) — with each schedule numbered on its own.
• Words and figures: amounts, periods and percentages written both ways, in either order — “30 (thirty) days”, “Rupees Five Lakh (Rs. 5,00,000)”, “ten per cent (10%)” — and figures whose commas are in odd places.
• Typing slips: a word repeated, and brackets or quotation marks opened and never closed.

Word files, PDFs and pasted text

Most contracts are numbered by Word itself, so the numbers 5.2 and (a) are not part of the text: copy and paste often drops them, and without them no cross-reference can be checked. Choose the .docx file instead and the checker works the numbers out the way Word shows them, from the document’s own numbering definitions, heading styles included. Tracked changes are read as if accepted, and the status line says how many there were. From a PDF it reads the text layer and joins the lines of each paragraph again; a scanned PDF has no text layer, so run PDF OCR on it first.

Amounts in lakh and crore

Indian contracts write amounts in lakh and crore — “₹1,25,00,000 (Rupees One Crore Twenty-Five Lakh only)” — and the checker reads both the words and the Indian grouping of the digits, as well as thousands, millions and billions, paise and cents, and currency words such as rupees, dollars, pounds and euros. When the words and figures disagree, the finding shows both numbers, with the figure written in the Indian and the international way.

What it does not do

It checks wording and structure, not substance. It does not say whether a clause is fair, lawful, enforceable or in your interest, whether a limitation of liability is high enough or whether anything is missing from the deal — for that, use the Contract Review Checklist and, for anything that matters, a lawyer. The checks work by pattern, so they can miss a slip written in an unusual way and flag something that is intended; read each finding and decide.

Limitations

• The checks are written for contracts in English. Other languages, and English contracts with unusual numbering (1-A, §5), are checked only in part.
• Defined terms are found in the usual forms (“Term” means, “Term”: at the start of a line, (the “Term”), referred to as the “Term”, Term means at the start of a clause). Terms that are defined only by bold type, without quotation marks, are found only in the last of those forms.
• Headers, footers, footnotes, comments and text boxes of a Word file are not read, and a scanned PDF must go through OCR first.
• Very long documents — more than two million characters — are checked only up to that point.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot. Loads the Word and PDF readers and the PDF engine from this site the first time they are needed. Your contract is read on this device and never uploaded.