ClearTerms

The Problem

Crisis procurement turns T&Cs into a safety risk

When speed forces fast onboarding of unfamiliar suppliers, nobody has time to read the contract, and that's where billions get lost.

£4 billion out of taxpayer money on something that would eventually be burned anyway. That's the situation the Department of Health and Social Care for England faced as they purchased invalid PPE as a result of poor procurement procedures. A large part of the incident is attributed to a lack of understanding of partnering companies, failing to identify risky clauses, weak quality guarantees and missing contractual protections.

Why This Is Important for the T&C Review?

1. Typical suppliers are in low supply. When current supply networks are unable to satisfy demand, emergency sourcing begins.

2. New vendors are quickly added. Delivery commitments, standards, and terms are unclear and unconfirmed.

3. Risk must be identified by procurement. Under time constraints, it is necessary to check expiration dates, minimum order quantities, substitute rights, cancellation terms, refunds, and liability provisions.

4. Waste results from missing clauses. Products are delivered late, inappropriate, non-refundable, or just worthless, and the money has already been spent.

Idea Explanation

ClearTerms is a browser extension that scans the text of Terms and Conditions, producing a thorough report to help support, not replace, the procurement process in the healthcare industry. The report contains the following:

• a trustworthy score indicating how much the company should be trusted

• a simple English summary for a quick glance

• and a section containing the risky terms explained

The text on the page is also highlighted in different colours so users can see each term in its context, and once the user hovers over the terms, a pop-up box appears explaining the term and why it should be treated with caution.

The tool does not replace a lawyer or procurement specialist. Instead, it acts as a first-pass review tool that helps users understand documents faster and decide whether further review is needed.

Implementation

The user interacts with the frontend through the browser extension. They can scan a webpage, paste text, or upload a document. The frontend sends the text to the backend, where it is cleaned, processed, and sent to an AI model such as Gemini 3 Flash.

The backend returns a structured summary to the extension, including plain-English explanations, clause highlights, and risk flags. A database could later store user accounts, scan limits, previous reports, feedback, and subscription plans.

Challenges

One challenge was deciding who the product is for. Clear Terms could help many people, but we refined the target users to individuals, small businesses and procurement teams, because these groups are more likely to have fewer, more junior staff who may not have enough experience with procurement procedures and less time to properly review the T&C.

Another challenge was creating a realistic business model. We explored pricing options and decided that a free beta and lower-cost plans would be more suitable for an early-stage product than high monthly procurement fees. Proposed pricing tiers are comparable to low-cost AI tools such as Grammarly and Summarizz, with lower scan limits because ClearTerms provides specialised Terms & Conditions review rather than a generic review.

Accomplishments

We developed ClearTerms from a general idea into a more structured product concept with a clear problem, target users, technical structure, and possible business model. We also clarified that the tool should be positioned as support for document review, not as legal advice.

We learned more about how an AI browser extension could work in practice, including frontend and backend design, commercial API use, running costs, scan limits, maintenance, and possible pricing tiers.

Next Steps

The next step is to build a small free beta version with limited scans, plain-English summaries, key clause highlights, and feedback collection. We need to refine our model and find a Procurment team willing to try it out.

Future improvements could include better risk categories, exportable PDF reports, team accounts, procurement checklists, document comparison, and a dashboard for organisations reviewing multiple supplier documents.