Freelance contract review
Whether you are hiring a contractor or being hired as one, the same handful of clauses decide who owns the work, when you get paid, and what happens when the brief changes.
One free review a month. No card required.
Why this one is worth reading twice
Freelance agreements go wrong quietly. The work gets done, the invoice goes out, and only then does anyone read the payment terms closely enough to notice they are Net 60 with an approval step that has no deadline attached. Scope is the other recurring problem: a description broad enough to sign quickly is broad enough to argue about later, and without a change-order clause the argument has no process to resolve it.
What ContractClerk flags
Who owns the work
Work-for-hire language assigns everything to the client on creation. Contractors often want to retain rights to underlying tools and reusable components; clients often want more than they need. Either way, silence here is the worst outcome.
When payment is actually due
Net 30 from invoice is not the same as Net 30 from approval, and "on completion" without a definition of complete is not a payment term at all.
Scope, revisions, and change orders
Look for a defined number of revision rounds and a written process for out-of-scope work. Without one, scope creep has no natural stopping point.
Termination and kill fees
If the client can cancel at any time, the contract should say what is owed for work already done. A kill fee or pro-rata clause is what turns a cancellation into a settlement rather than a dispute.
Contractor status and control
Clauses dictating hours, location, and supervision can undercut independent contractor classification, which carries tax and employment consequences for the hiring business.
Questions
- Does this work for both sides of the agreement?
- Yes. The review explains what each clause means and which side it favours, which is useful whether you are the contractor reading a client’s paper or the business reviewing a contractor’s.
- Can ContractClerk write the contract instead?
- On paid plans, yes. There is a freelance/contractor template among the 19 available, and you build the contract by answering questions rather than filling in a form.
- What file types can I upload?
- PDF and Word documents, including scanned PDFs — those are read with OCR. You can also paste the text directly.
- Is this legal advice?
- No. It is AI-assisted review to help you understand what you are signing, and it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Worker classification in particular varies by state and is worth a professional opinion.
Read it before you sign it
Paste the text or upload the file. You get a clause-by-clause read in plain English, usually in under a minute.
Start freeContractClerk gives AI-assisted contract review, not legal advice, and using it does not create an attorney–client relationship. For anything high-stakes, have a licensed attorney look at it.