Check your standard terms for unfair contract term risk

It is usually most relevant for businesses that use the same or similar contract repeatedly, especially where the other party has little room to negotiate the wording. That can include service providers, online businesses, consultants, software businesses, agencies and hospitality operators using standard customer terms. The legal risk often sits in the repeat-use nature of the contract rather than the label on the document. If your agreement is presented on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, or is used with consumers or smaller businesses, a targeted review can be worthwhile.

The review commonly looks at clauses that heavily favour one side, especially where the business can change key terms, avoid responsibility too broadly, suspend services at will, impose one-sided penalties, or control termination in an uneven way. Automatic renewal wording, broad indemnities, and clauses that let one party decide disputes or performance standards unilaterally can also raise questions. The point is not that every strong clause is invalid. It is whether the wording, in context, creates an imbalance that could be challenged, so the contract needs to be read as a whole.

You receive a legal review of the contract you provide, written comments on the unfair term issues identified, and redrafted wording for clauses that need attention within the agreed scope. This is broader than a quick spot-check because it combines issue identification with practical redrafting. We look at how the clauses interact with the rest of the agreement, not just whether a sentence sounds aggressive in isolation. If the contract has wider commercial or operational issues outside the unfair terms review, we can flag them, but additional work may need a separate quote.

Yes. This service can be used for different types of standard form contracts, including website terms, customer service agreements, supply terms and other repeat-use trading documents. What matters most is that the document is being used as a standard set of terms in your business. The review will depend on the wording in that contract and the way you actually use it in practice. If you have several different agreements, the fixed-fee usually covers the document agreed at the start, with additional documents scoped separately if needed.

No lawyer can properly say that. A review and redraft can help you assess and lower the risk areas in your standard terms, but the legal position still depends on the full contract, the way it is presented, the parties using it and how it operates in practice. A clause that looks acceptable in one setting may be more exposed in another. This service gives you a clearer view of the wording issues and updated drafting for the contract in scope, but it is not a promise that no challenge or complaint could ever arise.

Just submit an enquiry via this page or click the 'get started' button on our website to submit an enquiry. After you've submitted an enquiry, one of our legal consultants will review your enquiry within 1 business day and get in touch to get a better idea of exactly what you are looking for.

Then your legal consultant will send through an email with a bit more information about the services you need, along with a fixed fee quote setting out costs, scope of the service and timing. Have a read through it, and if you're happy with the scope, you can accept and sign our engagement letter online - easy!

Once you've formally accepted, we'll connect you with a specialist lawyer and they will work with you to complete your project. They will contact you by email or phone if they need to get in touch.

Sprintlaw works on fixed-fee pricing wherever possible, so you can review the scope and cost before you decide whether to proceed. For the UCT Review and Redraft service, pricing starts from $900.00.

After you enquire, a legal consultant will confirm what is included, the expected timing and whether any extra work is needed before you engage us.

We operate completely online, which means we can help you wherever you are in New Zealand. We have office spaces in Sydney, and in Melbourne, but our use of technology allows our team members to work remotely from around the world. Our legal team are mostly based in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. We also have a London office for Sprintlaw UK.

Our legal team is made up of experienced lawyers, who are specialists in various areas of law and hold an Australian legal practising certificate. None of our Sprintlaw lawyers are New Zealand qualified lawyers and they do not currently hold a New Zealand practising certificate.

They provide legal services working remotely from Australia via our 'legal consultancy' model, through which (under section 6 and section 35 of the New Zealand Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006) our Australian legal team are permitted to provide legal services to New Zealand businesses provided they do not provide services in certain 'reserved' areas of law. You can read our FAQ page to learn a bit more about our 'legal consultancy' model.

Given the strong similarities between Australian and New Zealand law, and the areas of law in which we practice (being small business and startup law), we do not view the fact that our lawyers have not qualified in New Zealand as having any substantive impact on the quality of our service. We are committed to ensuring that we provide high quality, affordable legal services to all our New Zealand clients.

Our legal team have all trained at leading firms, but have left the traditional corporate law world to join us on our mission to create a new and better way of delivering legal services. They have specialist expertise in technology law, intellectual property law, contract drafting and review, corporate law and commercial law.