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Legal Mode · ProMax

You've read the same sentence four times.

It's late, the clause is nearly right, and you have stopped being able to see it. In a large firm somebody else reads it before it goes. Here, you are the somebody else.

A stack of annotated legal pages under a desk lamp late at night, a fountain pen resting on them and a hand at the edge of the page.
A close crop of a printed page with a phrase circled in blue ink, a question mark in the margin, and a fountain pen resting alongside.

Limitation of liability — redline

The party of the first part hereby agrees that it will not, under any circumstances whatsoever,covenants that it shall not, under any circumstances whatsoever, be held liable for damages of any kind arising out of or in connection with theits performance or non-performance of its obligations hereunder, except in cases whereunless such damages result from gross negligence or willful misconduct on the part of the said party.

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Why general writing tools are the wrong instrument

Every writing assistant is built to improve prose, and improvement almost always means shorter, plainer, more confident. Those are the right instincts for an email and precisely the wrong ones for a document that exists to survive being read adversarially.

A carve-out looks like a qualifier bolted onto a sentence. A defined term looks like an inconsistent capital. A hedge looks like a writer who has not committed. To a tool that has never seen a contract litigated, all three are noise — and removing noise is what it was built to do.

Legal mode is built the other way round: around the parts it is not allowed to touch. It will tighten your sentence. It will not quietly change what you agreed to.

What it will not do

Move a carve-out
Exclusions, exceptions and conditions survive word for word. They are the clause, not decoration on it.
Harden a hedge
"May be arguable" does not become "is arguable" because the shorter version reads better.
Merge testimony with conclusion
In a deposition summary, what a witness said stays separate from what you concluded from it.
Redefine a defined term
If you capitalised it and defined it in clause 1, it survives everywhere else exactly as written.
Give legal advice
It rewrites what you wrote. It has no view on whether you should have written it.

Don't take any of this on trust

Paste in a clause you have already signed off — ideally one with an exception in it. If anything moves that shouldn't have, you will know in thirty seconds, and you will not have had to take our word for a single sentence on this page.