Frequently Asked Questions

A typical 150+ page legal agreement may have 25–40% of its pages devoted solely to definitions and may contain 400+ defined terms. A defined term that is misused or unused, or use of terms that are undefined, creates ambiguities that attorneys are trained to avoid — not to mention an impression of sloppiness that detracts from a document's quality. Moreover, defined-terms-related errors have led to costly lawsuits.

First, the document must be in Microsoft Word format — DOC or DOCX (not WordPerfect, Google Docs, PDF or TXT). Second, the document needs defined terms within quotation marks, either single (') or double (") — smart/curly quotes work too. This is how DefCheck locates the defined terms. The free version handles up to 4 MB of Word files per check.

DefCheck highlights defined terms to assist the reviewing attorney. It finds terms defined in quotes and highlights every correct use in green (plural and singular forms included). A definition with no matching use is highlighted red. Capitalized terms that are never defined — and aren't generally known proper nouns — are highlighted pink. Optionally, lower-cased uses of defined terms are highlighted yellow, and cross-references (Section, Article, hereunder…) in blue.

When the check completes, you get the highlighted document as a PDF — so the page numbers in the report match exactly — together with a findings report in the Results panel. The report lists every potentially undefined term and unused definition with page numbers, surrounding context, occurrence counts, and — where one exists — the defined term you probably meant. Items are ordered by likely importance.

This is where most of our engineering effort has gone. Tables of contents, section headings, run-in headings ("Section 2.10. Optional Prepayments. The Borrower may..."), signature blocks and defined-term index tables are all detected and filtered automatically — even in documents converted from EDGAR HTML filings that carry no Word formatting cues. Terms quoted from external statutes ("as defined in the Code") are recognized as such rather than flagged. The remaining findings are ranked, with near-misses of your document's own defined terms at the top. On our benchmark of SEC-filed agreements hand-reviewed by a securities attorney, this filtering removes roughly three quarters of the raw flags while still surfacing over 98% of the issues the human review found. Like spell-check, some judgment calls remain — which is exactly what the findings report is designed to help you (or your AI assistant) resolve quickly.

We measure rather than guess. DefCheck's engine is continuously benchmarked against a corpus of real SEC-filed credit agreements, merger agreements and indentures that a practicing securities attorney reviewed by hand, finding several hundred genuine drafting errors. DefCheck surfaces over 98% of those expert-confirmed issues. Its "did you mean" suggestions are informed by a research dataset of more than 30,000 individually reviewed flags across 7,200 SEC-filed contracts — so common slips like "Issuing Bank" vs. "Issuing Lender" or "Hazardous Substances" vs. "Hazardous Materials" are recognized from thousands of prior human corrections, not just string similarity.

Yes — the findings report is designed for exactly that. It ends with review instructions, so you can paste the entire report into your AI assistant of choice and receive back a concise, reviewer-style memo ("pg. 63: 'Administration Questionnaire' is not defined; recommend using 'Administrative Questionnaire'"). In our blind tests, an AI assistant working from DefCheck's report reproduced roughly nine out of ten items on the expert attorney's final list for the same document — in about two minutes, including catches the human review missed. As always, the output assists your professional judgment; it does not replace it.

And note what you would be sharing: the findings report, not your document. The report contains only the flagged terms and a brief snippet of surrounding text for each — isolated fragments that do not reconstruct the agreement — so pasting it into an AI assistant is a far narrower disclosure than uploading the document itself. (Your document never leaves DefCheck's check process in the first place — see #10 below.) As with any tool, follow your organization's policies on the use of AI assistants.

Highlighting is consistent with how attorneys already perform the check manually, makes no substantive changes to the document, and is easy to reverse. A "spell check"-style interface forces users to decide on the spot — but there are multiple ways to resolve a defined-term error (lower-casing the term, creating a new defined term, or using an already defined one), and the best resolution is only clear after seeing the type, frequency and magnitude of all errors from start to finish. This design also permits features like the Paired Document Check (#9 below).

It depends on the length of the agreement and how many defined terms it contains. Documents under 50 pages take a few seconds; 200+ page documents with several hundred defined terms can take 2–3 minutes.

Use it when one document relies on defined terms contained in another — e.g., a collateral agreement providing that "Capitalized terms used in this Collateral Agreement and not otherwise defined herein shall have the respective meanings ascribed to them in the Loan Agreement." Other examples: a Fee Letter relying on the Commitment Letter, or a Supplemental Indenture relying on the Base Indenture. The Paired Document Check eliminates flipping back and forth: the Source file's defined terms (singular and plural) are highlighted green in the Target file and considered when making all other highlights.

Our app is designed by an experienced attorney who understands that documents come with both information and responsibility. Our service is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), whose data centers have received ISO 27001, PCI DSS, SOC 1 Type II and SOC 2 Type II certifications. We use industry-standard SSL/TLS encryption so communication between server and browser remains private. We immediately and permanently delete the uploaded document upon completion of the check — in fact, our serverless architecture processes your document in memory and never writes it to disk. And we never share customer information with third-party vendors for marketing purposes — we hate spam as much as you do.

Yes! We have moved DefCheck.com onto a serverless architecture that allows us to provide this service free of charge (up to 4 MB of Word files per check). We hope you find it useful in your daily practice.

If you have suggestions or need further assistance, contact us at legal@celant.com.