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Find a clause in a pile of contracts in seconds

· 2 min read · RPTX LLC

Notice periods, renewal dates, liability caps: a practical way to find the clause you need across dozens of contracts, with the page to cite, without uploading confidential agreements.

Someone asks "what's our notice period with that supplier?" and the answer is somewhere in forty PDFs, some signed and scanned, some exported from Word. You know roughly what the clause says, not what it's called, which file it's in or which page.

Why Ctrl+F isn't enough

Contracts say the same thing in many ways. A notice period might be "terminate upon sixty (60) days' written notice", "either party may end this agreement by giving two months' notice" or "the term renews unless cancelled 30 days before expiry". A search for "notice period" finds none of them.

Contracts are also exactly the documents you shouldn't upload to a random website: they're confidential, often under NDA, and full of names and prices.

A faster way

  1. Put the contracts in one folder (copies are fine).
  2. Open askfolder.com/app and drop the folder in. It's read in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
  3. Ask the way you'd ask a colleague:
    • "how much notice to terminate"
    • "does it renew automatically"
    • "limit of liability"
    • "governing law"
    • "late payment interest"
  4. Each answer is the passage itself, its file and page, with the matching words highlighted, ranked so the closest match comes first.
  5. Open a passage to read the whole clause in context, or copy it with its citation ("Supplier-agreement-v3.pdf, p. 7") straight into your email.

Because AskFolder searches by meaning as well as by words, "how much notice to terminate" also finds "either party may end this agreement by giving two months' notice".

Scanned and signed copies

Signed contracts are often scans: pictures of pages with no text. AskFolder reads them with text recognition in your browser, in English and ten other European languages; Free reads the first 3 scanned pages of a folder and Pro reads them all.

Keep a folder ready

If you come back to the same contracts every week, Pro can save the folder in your browser. It opens already read, in a moment, from your own computer's storage, and it's gone when you delete it.

A note on advice

AskFolder finds what your documents say; it doesn't tell you what they mean legally. For a decision that matters, read the clause it found in full, and ask a lawyer.