Last month I ran a documentation review for a SaaS founder and found the same pattern I now check for first: the marketing site and the Terms of Service describe two different products. The marketing site wins the demo. The Terms wins the procurement review. When they disagree, the deal dies in legal — silently, weeks after you thought you'd won it.
Here's the check I run, the three contradiction patterns that show up almost every time, and the fix language that closes each one. (Documentation review, not legal advice — your lawyer still gets the final word.)
The check
Open your pricing page and your Terms side by side. Read every claim on the left, then find the clause on the right that either supports it, contradicts it, or ignores it. Three buckets: supported, contradicted, silent. The contradicted bucket kills deals. The silent bucket is where enterprise buyers' legal reviews stop and ask questions nobody on your team can answer quickly.
Pattern 1: The feature that outgrew the contract
A team ships a payment flow, an AI feature, a data export — the contract never mentions it. I reviewed one product whose newest feature moved customer money with zero coverage in the Terms: no settlement timing, no error liability, no reversal policy. The feature was months old. The clause it needed didn't exist.
The test: list your features released in the last two quarters. Search your Terms for each by name and by function. Anything with zero hits is a question your buyer's counsel will ask in writing, with a deadline.
Fix language shape: one paragraph per feature — what it does, who bears cost when it errs, what the customer's recourse is. Not fifty clauses. One honest paragraph beats silence.
Pattern 2: Badges that outrun the liability section
Compliance badges on the pricing page are table stakes now. But badges imply promises — continuous compliance, audit rights, breach liability — and the liability section almost always caps remedies at "fees paid in the last 12 months." A buyer's counsel reads the badge as a promise and the cap as a contradiction.
The test: for every badge, ask "if this were breached, what does the contract actually owe me?" If the honest answer is "last year's fees," the badge and the cap need a sentence reconciling them.
Fix language shape: a scoping sentence under the badges — what the certification covers, what it doesn't, and where liability lives. Buyers don't need the badge removed; they need the badge to survive cross-examination.
Pattern 3: The privacy story and the pipeline
"We never sell your data" on the homepage. Meanwhile the Privacy Policy describes a processing pipeline the homepage never acknowledges — third-party model calls, analytics hops, a subprocessor list that grew four vendors since the policy was written. Neither statement is a lie. Together they read as one.
The test: reconcile the homepage's data promises against the Privacy Policy's data flows, line by line. Anything processed that the promise doesn't clearly permit is a finding.
Fix language shape: update the promise to name the pipeline: "Your data is processed by X and Y for Z. We never sell it." Specific beats sweeping.
The section nobody writes (and procurement always wants)
After the findings, include the verified-consistent section: the claims that DO line up with the contract, checked and listed. Procurement reviews are adversarial by process, not by nature — showing them what you've already verified moves the review from "discover everything" to "confirm three things." That's the difference between a two-week legal cycle and a two-day one.
Running it yourself vs handing it off
The side-by-side read takes an evening and is worth doing regardless. What you get from a proper review is clause-level references, the fix language drafted, and timestamped snapshots — the version of the check you can forward to counsel without redoing it.
I run these as documentation reviews — $99, 72 hours, marketing-vs-Terms with fix language for each finding and the verified-consistent section included. The details are here, and an anonymized sample is here. Pay after delivery if it's useful.
The uncomfortable summary: your contract isn't weak because a lawyer was lazy. It's weak because the product moved and the documents didn't. That's a fixable gap — and it's cheaper to fix before the enterprise deal reaches legal than after.
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