The AI contract review I run before I sign anything

I just had a client conversation where they wanted to post a speaker’s talk in full on YouTube for public viewing at the kickoff meeting. If I hadn’t properly reviewed that, it could have been a serious issue for the speaker, who rightfully is protective of their own content.

Part of my job at Silicon Valley Speakers is protecting speakers' fees, IP, and likeness in event contracts. Like most vendors, we have our own standard contract, but aren’t always able to use it.

Most companies want to work off their own contract, their own paper, the clauses it already knows are safe. In reality, that's rarely how it goes. More often than not, you're the one signing on someone else's terms.

So how do you work with a new partner, client, or vendor, get the deal through, and still make sure you're protected?

That's the tightrope every event pro walks. You want the booking to happen, are on a time crunch, but you can’t let an excited "yes" talk you into a clause that costs you later. You're the first line of defense before anything reaches a lawyer. And if you're on a small team, there is no line behind you. The whole weight sits on your shoulders, usually at 11 PM, on a PDF you've read four times and still don't fully trust.

That's exactly why I built the Event Contract Auditor. Of all the free tools I've shared, it's the one event pros mention to me the most.

It reads your contract and flags the risk in plain English, in about two minutes. You tell it which side of the table you're on, paste the agreement, and it comes back in three tiers: red for deal-breakers worth renegotiating, yellow for terms worth pushing back on, green for the unusually good terms you should protect. For each one it quotes the exact clause and names the change to ask for.

Here's roughly what comes back:

🔴 Recording & IP: grants perpetual, unlimited rights to record and redistribute. Ask for a 90-day window and approval over edits.
🟡 Cancellation: you owe full fee if you cancel, they owe nothing if they do. Make it mutual, on a sliding scale by notice given.
🟢 Payment: 50% deposit on signing, balance net-15 after the event. Favorable. Don't trade it away.

Even on contracts I think are clean, the Auditor still surfaces three or four clauses worth a second look. It won't replace your legal review. It makes you a far sharper first read, the person who catches the problem before it ever reaches legal, instead of after you've signed.

Try it here: Event Contract Auditor →

Not on ChatGPT? I turned the same review into a one-page walkthrough you can run in Claude, Gemini, or Copilot in the next five minutes:

One honest note, the same one I'd give a friend. This is a sharp first read, not a lawyer. For anything high-stakes, get real counsel, and strip personal and confidential details before you paste any contract into an AI tool.

One last thing, because people ask: should you have AI write your contracts too?

For reviewing, AI is the right tool. For generating, it's the wrong one, and using it to spin up a fresh contract every time is a genuinely bad idea. AI rewords things slightly on every run, and with legal language, a quiet change you didn't notice is exactly the kind of mistake that costs you. You don't want a document that comes out a little different each time it goes out.

Do it the other way around. Write your contract once, get it reviewed by a lawyer or your legal team, and lock that version. Then use plain automation to drop your deal details into that approved template, the way a mail merge works. It's a fixed rule, so it produces the identical, vetted document every single time. AI reads contracts. Automation reproduces what a human has already signed off on.

Till next time,

Noah

Do More With Less Using AI

PS:  When you're working with a brand-new partner on their paper, what's the one clause you always check first?