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msa-snapshot

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Use when the user wants to compare the substantive commercial terms across N master services agreements side-by-side — term and renewal, payment terms, limitation of liability, and indemnification posture across each agreement. Returns a row-per-document × column-per-question grid with citations per cell. MSA-tuned reference skill for the M3-C `output_format - table` mode; intended as a fork-and-tune starting point for operators reviewing MSA portfolios.

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How to use this skill

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Source SKILL.md: https://github.com/LegalQuants/lq-ai/blob/HEAD/skills/msa-snapshot/SKILL.md

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MSA Snapshot

A reference skill for the M3-C output_format: table mode, tuned for master services agreement portfolios. Produces a side-by-side grid of MSA-specific commercial terms across N agreements — the in-house lawyer's "compare these vendor MSAs" or "diligence these target MSAs" workflow. Each cell carries a citation back to the source document; failed extractions render as not found rather than confidently-wrong text.

When this skill applies

Apply when the user has a portfolio of MSAs and wants to see how key commercial terms compare across them. Examples:

  • "Pull liability caps, indemnification, and payment terms across these 8 vendor MSAs before our renewal cycle."
  • "For this acquisition diligence, show me the renewal trigger and termination posture across the target's top 15 MSAs."
  • "Compare the liability carveouts across our SaaS MSAs vs. our commercial-purchase MSAs."

Do not apply this skill to:

  • Single-MSA review — use msa-review-saas or msa-review-commercial-purchase for one document at a time.
  • General contract comparison across mixed types — use contract-snapshot for the general Term/Survival/Carveouts/Governing-Law grid.
  • NDA portfolios — use nda-snapshot for NDA-specific columns (Confidential Information definition, permitted recipients, etc.).

Pairing with the synthetic corpus

This skill ships paired with the synthetic MSA corpus in docs/quickstart/sample-msas/ (5 MSAs with varying commercial terms). Operators trying LQ.AI for the first time can attach those 5 PDFs to a Knowledge Base and run this skill to see the tabular workflow end-to-end without committing real documents to the system.

Fork-and-tune notes

The four columns here cover the highest-frequency MSA comparison questions for in-house counsel doing portfolio review or diligence. They do not overlap with the general contract-snapshot columns (Term, Survival, Carveouts, Governing Law) — operators wanting both can run the two skills in sequence.

When forking for your own MSA template / counterparty patterns, common modifications include:

  • Adding a Termination for Convenience column if your business cares about exit flexibility (notice period + fee structure).
  • Adding a SLA / Service Levels column for SaaS-heavy MSA portfolios (credit structure + measurement period).
  • Adding a Data Processing column if you need to compare DPA references and data-residency commitments across vendors.
  • Replacing the Indemnification column with a narrower IP Indemnification column if that is the only indemnification scope you care about.
  • Bumping minimum_inference_tier to 3 on all columns for high-stakes diligence work.

The Limitation of Liability and Indemnification columns default to minimum_inference_tier: 3 because these clauses are dense, fragmented across the document, and most prone to silent extraction errors. The carveouts in particular are the most-negotiated piece of an MSA — surfacing them inaccurately is worse than surfacing them not-at-all.

Output expectations

For each document × column cell:

  • A quoted phrase or short paragraph from the source document, anchored by character offsets to enable the citation modal.
  • A brief plain-language summary when the operative clause spans multiple paragraphs.
  • An explicit "one-way (vendor-favorable)" / "one-way (customer-favorable)" / "mutual" tag where the column asks about directionality (e.g., Indemnification).
  • not found when the requested term is genuinely absent from the document (not when extraction failed — those surface as a parse error in the cell footer).