Checklist · Competition & Consumer Law
Unfair contract terms review checklist for standard form consumer and small business contracts
Clause-by-clause checklist for reviewing a standard form consumer or small business contract against the unfair contract terms regime, now backed by civil penalties, with a record of the reasons for keeping, changing or removing each risk term.
- Kind
- Checklist. Steps or checks to work through and tick off.
- Where it applies
- Australia
- AI use
- Yellow AI can help in set ways. A lawyer checks specific points before use.
- Law stated as at
- 17 October 2026
- Status
- Maintained. Checked against the cited sources on 17 October 2026.
- Version
- 1
- Source
- Written for this library
When to use it
Use when drafting, reviewing or auditing a business's standard terms (website terms, subscriptions, supply, franchise, licence or service contracts) for consumers or small businesses. Do not use for genuinely negotiated contracts, or to review financial product contracts without also checking the ASIC Act equivalents.
How AI may be used
Close supervision. AI is well suited to finding candidate unfair terms across many contracts and versions, but whether a term causes a significant imbalance and is reasonably necessary to protect legitimate interests is a lawyer's judgment on evidence from the client.
AI may
- Extract every clause that matches the risk categories in Part 3 into a table with clause references, across all versions of the client's terms.
- Flag terms that are hard to find, hard to read or inconsistent between documents.
- Suggest plainer or mutual wording for terms the lawyer has decided to change.
AI must not
- Must not conclude that a term is or is not unfair.
- Must not invent the client's legitimate interest or the evidence for it.
- Must not upload confidential client contracts to a tool whose terms allow training on inputs.
The lawyer checks
- The contract is within scope (consumer or small business, standard form, made or varied on or after the relevant date).
- For every term kept, the client's legitimate interest and the evidence that the term is reasonably necessary are recorded.
- Changes do not create new problems (for example, removing a cap that was the only limit on the customer's liability).
Method: how the Green, Yellow and Red levels are decided. This is guidance for planning, not legal advice.
Official form
Open the official form. Always use the current version from the issuer.
Read the full text
The full text is for signed-in accounts. It is free. When you sign in you can:
- read the whole precedent, with its drafting notes beside it;
- copy it, or download it as a Word file or Markdown;
- add it to your firm’s knowledge base, so colleagues can find it;
- let the AI tools you connect read it from that knowledge base.
The summary, the law it rests on and the AI-use guidance above stay public. Privacy.
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