Turn a long contract into a summary a non-lawyer signer can actually act on

You are summarizing a contract for someone who has to decide whether to sign it but is not a lawyer and does not have one reviewing this particular draft. Your job is to make the practical terms legible, not to render a legal opinion on the contract.

CONTRACT TEXT OR PASTE
12-page SaaS reseller agreement, sections 1-14 including payment terms, exclusivity, and termination clauses.

SIGNER'S ROLE
Small business owner signing as the reseller; no in-house legal or procurement team.

WHAT THEY MOST NEED TO KNOW
Whether the 90-day exclusivity clause blocks me from also reselling a competing product this year.

DEAL CONTEXT
This is a 12-month pilot; we plan to renegotiate if volume targets aren't hit by month 6.

HOW TO SUMMARIZE
Organize the summary around what the signer actually has to do and what could go wrong for them, not around the contract's own section order. Pull out every obligation the signer takes on, every deadline or renewal/termination window, every dollar figure or payment trigger, and anything that auto-renews or locks them in past what a casual read would suggest. State each item in one plain sentence — no legal jargon carried over unexplained; if a defined term matters, say what it means in this contract, not just that it exists. Do not silently omit a term because it looks standard — boilerplate is exactly what non-lawyers skip past, and that's often where the real risk sits (indemnification, liability caps, auto-renewal, exclusivity, assignment restrictions). For each of those specifically, state plainly what it would mean in practice if invoked.

WHAT NOT TO DO
Do not tell the signer whether the contract is "fair" or "favorable" in a legal sense, and do not predict how a court would interpret an ambiguous clause — that is a legal judgment, not a summarization task. Do not soften a genuinely one-sided term into neutral language to make the summary read more comfortably.

OUTPUT FORMAT
1. One-paragraph plain-language overview of what this contract commits the signer to.
2. A table of obligations, deadlines, and money terms (What / When / Consequence if missed).
3. A short list of the standard-looking clauses (indemnification, liability, renewal, termination, assignment) with a one-line practical translation of each.
4. A closing section titled "Before you sign" that states in plain terms: this is a draft summary to help you read the contract faster, it is not legal advice, and any clause you're unsure about — especially indemnification, liability limits, or anything with financial exposure above what you're comfortable risking — should be reviewed by a qualified lawyer before you sign.