Contract summary: what it is and how to create one

Contracts are packed with critical details, but they’re rarely designed to be read cover to cover by everyone who needs to act on them.

When leaders, finance teams, or operations stakeholders just need the essentials, trawling through dense legal language slows decisions and creates friction. A contract summary solves this by distilling the agreement down to what actually matters, making contracts easier to understand, share, and execute.

What is a contract summary?

A contract summary is a short outline that surfaces the key information from a contract. Contract summaries make it easy to find and digest these important details by capturing them in a succinct and readable way. 

This is particularly useful because contracts tend to be long documents with lots of legal jargon. A contract summary cuts through this noise, making it the perfect resource to share key contract data and obligations with other stakeholders.

When should you create a contract summary?

Contract summaries are usually created when you need to share an overview of a contract with a party that doesn’t have the time or expertise to read the contract in full. This party can be anyone from your CEO to another department that plays a role in the contract’s performance.

If created properly, a contract summary can deliver all of the key information to these stakeholders in a shorter, more concise format. 

What should a contract summary include?

There are no concrete criteria for what a contract summary should (and shouldn’t) include. However, there are a few things that are commonly covered in a contract summary, such as:

• Who the parties involved in the agreement are
• The type and purpose of the contract
• The contract duration (when it starts and ends)
• The contract value (if applicable)
• An overview of the parties’ obligations and responsibilities 

As a general rule, you should think about what the person receiving the contract summary or contract abstract would need to know about the contract. Details that are important to one stakeholder may not be important to another.

It's also important to strike a balance between brevity and clarity. You don't want to give the stakeholder too much information, as this defeats the point of a contract summary. But you also don't want to miss the key information required to do their job.

How to create a contract summary

The manual approach to creating a contract summary involves the contract owner reading through the contract in its entirety and capturing the important information in a separate document: the contract summary.

Some businesses will have set templates for contract summaries that need to be populated. Other businesses will share their summary in whichever format suits the context.

Problems with the manual approach to contract summaries

There are a few problems with this manual process, though.

The biggest problem is that it's time-intensive. Reviewing and summarizing contracts can involve a lot of admin work, and businesses managing lots of contracts will often find this taking up a significant portion of their team's time.

Even with a contract summary template in place, this work isn't quick or easy. In fact, using a contract summary template can often complicate things further as different contracts will vary in terms of what needs to be captured and in how much detail.

Higher risk contracts will naturally require a more detailed contract summary. Similarly, contract summaries shared with certain stakeholders will vary in their angle and the nature of the information shared. This means that the templates need to be adapted each time.

Summarize contracts in seconds with Juro's AI

Fortunately, there's a way for businesses like yours to generate contract summaries in a matter of seconds. This can be achieved by using Juro's AI contract collaboration platform.

With Juro's Legal AI, you can choose to summarize whole contracts or individual clauses. You can also provide additional context in your prompt about the stakeholder you'll be sharing the contract summary with and what you want it to cover.

You can even ask Juro's Legal AI to draft a summary in a specific format. For example, you could use a prompt asking AI to:

'Summarize the key terms in this contract in 200 words or less in an email format that I can share with my CEO'

This will generate a contract summary in your chosen format that can be copied and shared with stakeholders with ease.

Best of all, Juro's AI Assistant can summarize your contracts while also protecting the data within them. Unlike many other AI contract tools, Juro was built with privacy and security in mind.

Juro is SOC2 type 2 compliant and doesn't use the data you provide to train LLMs. Our powerful AI Assistant also works on servers in the EEA, so your data remains safe, secure and confidential.

To find out more about Juro's AI Assistant functionality and how it would work for your business, fill in the form below to book your personalized demo. To find out more about Juro's AI capabilities, check out this guide to AI contract management software.