Limitation of Liability. Except with respect to claims arising from gross negligence, willful misconduct, or a breach of Section 12 (Confidentiality), neither Party shall be liable to the other for any indirect, incidental, consequential, special, punitive, or exemplary damages...

"Suneet, we're signing a new contract with the client. Can you review the agreement and provide feedback from a finance lens?"

I stared at the email for a few seconds and shook my head.

Part of my role as a finance business partner is reviewing agreements and flagging anything that could affect revenue, expenses, billing, or operational costs. On paper, that sounds straightforward.

I could read every word in the clause. I knew what profits and revenue meant. I could make a reasonable guess at consequential damages.

The problem was never the reading. The problem was knowing what deserved my attention.

The feeling wasn't unique to contracts at work.

I've changed my mobile phone plan at least twice in the last five years and never once read the legal terms. When I signed my mortgage six years ago, I made a sincere attempt to understand the agreement. I gave up on page three.

These documents contain all kinds of information. Some of it matters immediately. Some of it only becomes important when something stops going according to plan.

A payment term appears in one section. A key obligation shows up twenty pages later. A technical requirement hides in an appendix. A definition on page eight quietly changes the meaning of a clause on page seventy-three.

By the end, it can feel like you're carrying dozens of moving pieces around in your head and hoping you've connected the right dots.

For years, that was my process.

Read the contract.

Shake my head five times.

Do my best to understand the complicated language.

Hope I hadn't missed the one sentence that would come to bite me six months later.

Then a conversation with my manager changed the way I approached them. She enjoys experimenting with AI tools whenever she gets the chance. We were casually chatting and she said, 

"Suneet, I didn't have time to read through the RFP and used AI tools for a summary of risks and it was great."

That conversation left me wondering whether the same approach would work on contracts.

It turns out it does.

She shared the prompt she had used, and I applied it to the contract in front of me. The AI tool pointed out an ambiguity around startup costs. Depending on the interpretation, we could have been responsible for expenses I had assumed were covered elsewhere in the agreement.

It wasn't buried in legal language I couldn't understand. It was something I had read and simply hadn't paid enough attention to.

That got my attention.

The startup-cost issue wasn't especially complicated. What surprised me was that I had already read the clause. The AI tool didn't reveal hidden information. It helped me notice something I hadn't recognised as important.

That was enough to make me start experimenting further. If a general risk-summary prompt could catch something I'd missed, what would a more pointed question catch? For my next legal document, I started with questions rather than asking for a summary. The question that mattered most wasn't "summarise this document." It was: 

"If I had to brief my CFO on the risks in this agreement, what would I tell her?"

That one question changed the way I reviewed contracts.

This question has been the most important for me as I review legal documents. The interesting part is that as you feed more documents into AI tool, it builds up context from your earlier conversations. So it helps you prepare for meetings.

Different people can read the same document and walk away with completely different concerns. When we review documents with our lawyers, they rightly focus more on liability and regulatory exposure. An operations leader immediately starts thinking about workload and implementation.

When I'm reviewing an agreement as a finance business partner, my attention often goes somewhere else. Where could this cost us money?

And I don't necessarily mean the contract price.

Some of the most expensive commitments never appear as a dollar amount.

A reporting requirement can create work every month for years. Governance meetings require preparation and participation. Security reviews, audits, compliance activities, technical integrations, performance reporting, and service-level commitments all have a cost, even when no invoice is attached to them.

Individually, each requirement can seem reasonable.

Together, they can become a meaningful investment of time, people, and money.

That's one reason I find AI helpful. It helps me make sense of the information well enough to know who to go to and what to ask them. In most cases, I don't know the answers myself, but I know who does.

I fully realise that AI can make mistakes, and I don't treat its output as a conclusion. I don't expect it to make the decision. I expect it to help me ask the right questions.

In the past, I used to get scared when I got legal documents in my inbox. As a Finance Business Partner, I want to review the document not just through a Finance lens but through a full Business lens.

And honestly speaking, with AI, I am able to do that now. It is like a treasure hunt — figuring out the different pieces and feeling confident enough to ask the questions that matter.

(We have an office approved version of AI tools. As contracts contain sensitive information, it is important to remember that AI tools should only be used in line with the company’s approved data and confidentiality policies.)