Legal
Contract review with Claude
Reviewing an incoming contract against your own standards is a task Claude handles well, because it is a comparison problem rather than a judgement problem. You supply the playbook, Claude finds the deviations, and a lawyer decides what to do about them. What follows is the setup that gets you there with the fewest moving parts. It assumes you are working from documents you already have, not from a template library you need to build first.
Compiled from public documentation. Not independently tested.
What you need
- Claude.ai
- Claude Cowork
- Claude for Word
Skills, plugins and connectors
skill
docx skill
From anthropics/skills. Reads and edits .docx as Open XML, including tracked changes and redlining, so a marked-up file comes back as a real Word document rather than a summary.
skill
pdf skill
From anthropics/skills. Extracts text from contracts that arrive as scanned PDFs.
product
Projects
In Claude.ai. Holds your playbook and standard clauses so you are not pasting them into every conversation.
The order to do it in
- 01
Create a project with your playbook
Create a project and upload your clause playbook: your standard positions, your walk-away terms, and two or three previously negotiated contracts that show what you actually accept in practice.
- 02
Install the document skills
In Claude Code: /plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills, then /plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills. In Cowork the document skills are available without installation.
- 03
Ask for a deviation table first
Upload the incoming contract. Ask for a deviation table first, not a redline: every clause that differs from your playbook, what it says, what you normally require, and how far apart they are.
- 04
Read the table before anything else
This is the step people skip and it is the one that catches a misread definition before it propagates into thirty edits.
- 05
Request the redlined .docx
Ask for a redlined .docx with tracked changes for the deviations you want to push back on. The docx skill produces real tracked changes, so the file opens in Word as a normal marked-up document.
- 06
Ask for a plain-language cover note
Ask for a short cover note explaining the changes in plain language. It is the part that takes a lawyer the longest and the part Claude does most reliably.
Roughly what it costs
Fits inside a Pro plan for occasional contracts. Long agreements with many attachments consume a session quickly, so heavy weekly use points to Max. Anthropic does not publish token counts, so treat this as a shape rather than a number.
This guide is compiled, not tested. If you have run this workflow, tell us at info@claudenetwork.com.