Ninety-five Ontario statutory checks run on your own computer and name the provision. AI is used only for what requires judgement.
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A deposit of $2,000 is provided for. A landlord may collect last month's rent and nothing further.
Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 — s.105A $75 monthly charge on late rent. Only the prescribed amount is recoverable.
Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 — s.134The tenant indemnifies the landlord with no reciprocity and no cap. Not prohibited, unusual, worth raising.
Model judgement — read before relying on itBoth are real output on real documents. Nothing here is illustrative.
The only permissible deposit is a rent deposit of up to one month's rent, applied to the last rental period. A security or damage deposit is void and must be returned.
Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 — s.105Section 134(1) prohibits any fee for late payment of rent. The clause is void, and charging it is an offence under s.234. The lawful remedy is an N4 notice.
Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 — ss.134(1), 234At least twenty-four hours' written notice is required, stating the reason and the time of entry, between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., except in an emergency.
Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 — ss.26–27Section 14 voids a lease provision prohibiting animals, subject to a valid condominium declaration. The landlord's remedy is for interference, not prohibition.
Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 — s.14Maintenance rests with the landlord under s.20, and s.33 limits tenant liability to ordinary cleanliness and wilful or negligent damage.
Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 — ss.20, 33Most tenancies entered since April 2018 must use the prescribed Standard Lease. A non-compliant agreement gives the tenant a right to demand it.
O. Reg 9/18The parcel is described as part of a road allowance. A conveyance contravening the subdivision control provisions does not create an interest in land. The standard clause on the form makes the agreement effective only if the seller complies — it obliges nobody to obtain the consent.
Planning Act — s.50It reads “the 27 day of …………, 20………”. The day is written and the month and year are blank. A date that cannot be calculated cannot be enforced, and any period measured from it is undefined.
Incomplete date field · requisitionThe trust wording is present but the line naming the holder is blank, so the obligation attaches to nobody. A reader scanning for “in trust” is reassured by wording that has no subject.
TRESA 2002 · O. Reg 536/23A deposit of $1.00 against a purchase price of $20,471.71. Lawful, and it leaves the seller with no practical security: a buyer with nothing at risk can walk away at no cost.
Deposit is 0.005% of the priceThe OREA form is a real executed agreement, scanned, with handwritten entries on printed lines. Both documents are fixtures in the test suite, so this output is reproduced on every build.
Section 105 permits a landlord to collect last month's rent and nothing else. A damage deposit is void — whatever the parties signed, however carefully the clause is drafted.
That is not a matter of judgement, and it should not rest on a language model's recollection of an Ontario statute. ContractShield checks it in code, names the section, and returns the same answer every time on the same text.
The model is then handed those findings as established facts it may not contradict, and asked only for what rules cannot judge: whether an indemnity is one-sided, whether a legal description will survive closing, whether a municipal seller shows authority on the face of the agreement.
Every finding is labelled with which of the two produced it. You always know what you can cite.
Not a replacement for reading the contract. A way of knowing what to look for while you do.
The time saved is not the reading. It is the looking up.
Review it where it already is.
Open the agreement and press Review contract on the Home tab. Findings appear beside the document. Select one and Word moves to the clause. Replacement language goes in as a genuine tracked change your client can accept or reject.
Right-click the file and choose Review with ContractShield. Scans included — read by OCR on your own machine. A Word add-in cannot open a PDF; this is the way round that.
Drag the document in. Full review, risk dashboard, matter history, and your firm's own positions on the clauses you negotiate most.
Provisions named so you can check them. You should.
s.105 deposits · s.134 late fees · ss.26–27 entry and notice · s.3 lease-break penalties · ss.44, 47–69 termination · s.14 pet clauses · ss.20, 33 repairs · s.108 post-dated cheques · O. Reg 9/18 Standard Lease
Deposit trust and delivery under TRESA and O. Reg 536/23 · deposit holder left unnamed · nominal deposits · requisition date falling on or after closing · requisition periods too short to use · conditions with no waiver mechanism · waiver notice with no delivery rule · Planning Act s.50 consent on a part-lot conveyance · HST addressed against the price · ITA s.116 residency · date fields left half-completed · schedules read against the body
Addendum missing or its precedence reversed · no Statement of Critical Dates · unilateral extension of closing · delayed closing compensation waived · deposit protection not stated · deposit released to the builder · Condominium Act s.73 ten-day rescission · disclosure statement · interim occupancy terms · HST new housing rebate assignment · uncapped levies · assignment terms · unilateral change of materials
ESA s.5 non-waivable minimums · Bill 27 non-compete ban with the executive carve-out · just cause below the Waksdale standard · ss.57–58 notice · ss.64–65 severance · s.61 benefits through notice · ss.33–35.2 vacation · s.22 overtime · s.22(2) hours averaging · Part XI.1 electronic monitoring · probation beyond the threshold · layoff with no contractual right
CPA s.43 cooling-off on a direct agreement · cancellation procedure · s.93 and O. Reg 17/05 prescribed content · s.42 price exceeding the estimate by more than ten per cent · s.7 non-waivable rights · ss.7(2), 8 arbitration and class action waivers
Criminal Code s.347 criminal interest rate, with effective-APR computation for compounded rates · Construction Act prompt payment and holdback
Every other contract type — software licensing, non-disclosure, shareholder, franchise, distribution and twenty more — receives a clause checklist and full analysis. What it does not receive is a statutory rule pack, and the review says so rather than leaving you to assume.
The packs exist where Ontario law is bright-line, which is where the volume is.
Nineteen checks on the agreement and sixteen on a builder deal — deposit trust, date coherence, Planning Act consent, HST against the price, s.116 residency — before the file reaches closing.
Run the lease against the Residential Tenancies Act before you read it manually. Nine checks, each cited to its section, in seconds and at no cost.
ESA minimums, the Bill 27 non-compete ban, just cause against the Waksdale standard, notice, severance, vacation and overtime — the provisions that void a termination clause entirely.
Consumer Protection Act cooling-off and prescribed content, Construction Act prompt payment and holdback, and the Criminal Code interest cap on any financing term.
A review that finds nothing reads as the contract is sound. It usually means no rules exist for this document type.
So every review states its own coverage, in the review itself, in these words:
Twelve rules written for this document type in Ontario, plus general Canadian checks. Four blanks or placeholders found. Rules cannot assess a term that has not been filled in, so an unfilled document can read as clean.
No statutory rules yet for this document type. Nothing was checked against legislation, so an empty statutory list here does not mean the contract is compliant.
No pretending the tool knows every statute for every contract. It goes deep where it has rules, and says so where it does not.
They are not the same, so they are not described as though they were.
Disconnect from the network and this still works.
A retainer disclosure clause generator is included.
Most mainstream AI contract tools are cloud-based throughout. Here the statutory half is not, which matters for a practice that cannot send client material anywhere. Detection of personal information is pattern based and is not a guarantee; every review reports what was removed and what was kept.
| ContractShield | Generic AI review | |
|---|---|---|
| Ontario statutory rules that cite the provision | 95 | Usually none — playbooks, not statutes |
| Statutory half runs without the document leaving the machine | Yes | Usually cloud-based |
| Scanned PDFs | Read locally by OCR | Varies; often .docx only |
| States what it did not check | On every review | Rare |
| Genuine Word tracked changes | Yes | Varies |
| Breadth of legal content | 25 contract types | Often thousands of issues, many jurisdictions |
| Benchmarking against a contract corpus | No — there is no corpus, and we will not pretend | Often yes |
| Subscription required | No — per contract | Usually |
If you review commercial agreements daily across many jurisdictions, a larger tool suits you better and we would say so. If you review Ontario agreements and want the statutory floor established before you begin reading, this was built for that.
Why pay ninety-nine to three hundred and fifty dollars every month for a seat, when some months you review three contracts?
All ninety-five statutory rules, the clause checklists, blank detection, the Word add-in and the right-click menu. It runs on your machine and costs us nothing to provide, so it is free without qualification.
Everything above, plus interpretive analysis, replacement clauses, negotiation positions and French output. Charged only when you use it.
One installer, and it brings its own Python — the machine needs nothing else. Or send the agreement and it comes back reviewed.
Installs the application, the Word add-in and the right-click menu. Windows will warn that the publisher is unknown because the installer is not code-signed — choose More info, then Run anyway. Nothing is wrong; Windows distrusts every unsigned installer.
Send the agreement and it comes back reviewed. Useful if you would rather see the output before installing anything.
WhatsApp · support@contractshield.ca
Answered personally while this is early.
No. It is software. It is not a lawyer, it does not practise law, and using it creates no solicitor-client relationship. A licensed lawyer must review any contract before it is signed or relied on. It is a first pass and a second opinion: it tells you what to ask about, not what to do.
That finding came from a deterministic rule rather than a language model, and it names the provision it relies on. You can check it against the statute, and you should. It returns the same answer every time on the same text. Findings marked “AI analysis” are model judgement and can be wrong — confidently wrong. Read them before relying on them.
That nothing was found by the rules that exist and the analysis that ran. It does not mean the contract is sound. Every review states its own coverage, including where no statutory pack exists for that document type.
The statutory rules are Ontario, together with federal rules that apply nationally — Criminal Code s.347 and Income Tax Act s.116. Agreements from other provinces receive the clause checklist and full analysis, and the product says plainly that no statutory pack applies rather than implying coverage it does not have. Other provinces are next. They are not here yet.
Not for the statutory review, which is entirely local including OCR on scanned documents. The AI review sends text to the provider you configure, under your own account, after removing personal information. Processing runs outside Canada; that is cross-border processing, the product discloses it before you use it, and a retainer disclosure clause generator is included.
Yes, on your machine. Right-click the PDF and choose Review with ContractShield. A Word add-in cannot open a PDF — a Microsoft limitation every add-in shares — so this is the way round it.
Six hundred and twenty automated tests, including fixtures built from real executed agreements — an OREA Form 100, a completed Ontario purchase agreement, a residential lease. Rules are added when a real document proves they are needed, not when they sound useful.
The statutory check is free, unlimited, and runs on your own machine.