Checking a claim about a document you have

The easiest verification there is, and nobody does it

When the source is a document in front of you, checking is nearly free: a text search and ten seconds of reading. Yet this is where people check least, because an answer about a document you supplied feels safe. The model has the document. What could go wrong?

Four things, and they have distinct signatures.

1. The quote is not in the document

The simplest failure and the easiest catch. Search for a distinctive five-word fragment of the quote. If it is not there, nothing else in that answer is trustworthy either: treat one invented quote as evidence about the whole passage, not as an isolated slip.

Use an exact phrase search, and search for a middle fragment rather than the opening, since openings get paraphrased more often than the body.

2. The quote is real and the interpretation reverses it

The most dangerous, because the checkable part checks out.

Watch for negation especially. “The supplier shall not be liable except where negligence is established” is easy to summarise as either “not liable” or “liable when negligent”, and those are different contracts. Anything with unless, except, provided that, save where, notwithstanding deserves a second read of the original sentence, not the summary of it.

Scope is the other one. A clause that applies only to Schedule 2 items, only during the initial term, only where written notice was given. Summaries lose qualifiers, because qualifiers are the least prominent part of a sentence and the first thing compression drops.

3. The claim is true and incomplete

There are four payment terms and it found three. The answer is accurate about the three. Nothing signals the fourth. This is the omission problem, and it has its own lesson later in this module.

4. It answered about the wrong document

If you pasted several (old policy and new, quote A and quote B, two versions of a draft) an answer can silently blend them or address the wrong one. This is why the labelling lesson exists, and why the answer should name which block each claim came from.

The prompt that makes all four checkable

For each finding: quote the exact sentence, give its section or
clause number, and name which document it came from.
Where a sentence contains a condition or exception (unless, except,
provided that, only where), quote the whole sentence including the
qualifier, and state the condition separately in plain words.
If you cannot quote a sentence, do not make the claim.

That is four lines and it addresses the first, second and fourth failures directly. The third needs a different move, which is asking for an enumeration before an analysis.

The check, in order of speed

1. Search a middle fragment of each quote. Ten seconds. Catches invention.
2. Read the whole sentence around the quote, not the quoted part. Catches truncation that removes a qualifier.
3. Read the sentence before and after. Catches scope errors: the sentence that says “the following applies only to renewals”.
4. Count. If the answer lists three of something, ask whether there are exactly three.

Steps one and two take under a minute for a five-finding answer and catch the great majority of what goes wrong.

Where this matters most

Contracts, policies, regulations, medical letters, tender documents, insurance terms, tenancy agreements. Anything where a condition or an exception carries the meaning, and where the summary sounds authoritative because it is fluent and confident about a document you have not read carefully yourself.

That last clause is the real risk. The reason people accept an incorrect summary is not that it was persuasive. It is that they were using it precisely because they had not read the document.

A worked example

A clause reads: ”The Licensor shall not unreasonably withhold consent to assignment, save where the proposed assignee is a competitor of the Licensor or where any sum remains outstanding.”

A summary said: consent to assignment cannot be unreasonably withheld.

Every word of that is in the clause. It is also, for a company with an unpaid invoice, exactly wrong: the second exception applies and consent can be withheld outright. The quote checked out, the section number was right, and the answer was still useless in the only situation the reader was in.

This is why “quote the whole sentence including the qualifier” is in the prompt above, and why reading the original sentence beats reading the summary of it.