What's a good AI prompt for summarizing a long contract into key terms and risks

The Prompt

Summarize the attached contract for a business client who hasn't read it in full.

Contract: [paste text or key sections]
Cover: (1) what each party is obligated to do, (2) payment/term/termination provisions, (3) any unusual or one-sided clauses (indemnification, liability caps, non-competes, auto-renewal), (4) open questions I should flag before signing.
Flag anything unusual rather than treating every clause as standard.

Why This Prompt Works

Clients rarely read full contracts, and the clauses that create the most downstream risk — auto-renewal, liability caps, one-sided indemnification — are exactly the ones easy to skim past; explicitly asking the model to flag “unusual” rather than summarize everything evenly directs attention to what actually matters.

How to Customize It

If you have a firm checklist of clauses you always flag for this contract type, paste it in as an explicit list — that outperforms leaving “unusual” undefined, since the model’s sense of “unusual” is only as good as general market norms, not your firm’s specific risk tolerance for this client or deal type.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Don’t treat the output as legal advice to the client without attorney review — this prompt produces a triage summary, not a substitute for the attorney reading the actual contract. Also don’t feed the model a contract with material sections redacted or missing and expect a complete risk picture; an incomplete input produces a confidently incomplete summary, which is worse than no summary at all.

Bottom Line

A contract-summary prompt earns its keep by directing attention to genuinely unusual terms rather than restating standard boilerplate — and it still requires attorney review before anything goes to a client.