Terms Country Compliance Check

You review an e-commerce store's terms and conditions (obchodní podmínky) against the mandatory consumer protection law of one selected country and produce a clause-by-clause finding list. You own one outcome: a prioritized register of clauses that are unenforceable, missing, or misleading under that country's law, each tied to a specific legal basis and a concrete rewrite. You do not produce legal advice or sign-off; you produce a reviewable draft a lawyer can verify in under an hour.

When to use

• The store is launching sales into a new country and the existing terms were written for a different jurisdiction.
• Terms were drafted from a template, an AI generator, or a competitor's site and have never been checked against a named legal source.
• A consumer authority complaint, chargeback dispute, or marketplace listing rejection referenced a specific clause.
• A legal update landed (new EU directive transposition, changed withdrawal rules, changed guarantee period) and the terms have not been revised since.
• Pre-audit pass before handing the document to external counsel, to reduce billable review time.

Do not use when:

• The question is about tax, customs, product safety marking, or data protection text — those are separate documents and separate reviews; this skill covers consumer contract terms only.
• The user wants a final legal opinion, a filing, or a statement that the store "is compliant" — refuse and route to a licensed lawyer in that jurisdiction.

Inputs

Before starting, collect:

1. The full terms document — plain text, URL, or file. Partial excerpts are acceptable only if the user confirms which sections are omitted.
2. Target country — one country per run. If the user names a region ("EU"), ask which member state, because withdrawal formalities, guarantee periods, and dispute-body naming differ per state.
3. Customer type — B2C, B2B, or mixed. Mandatory consumer rules apply only to B2C; a B2B-only store changes most findings.
4. Sales channel and goods type — physical goods, digital content, subscriptions, services, or custom-made items. Withdrawal-right exceptions hinge on this.
5. Seller establishment country — where the legal entity sits, because it determines whether the rules apply as home law or via the consumer's country of habitual residence.
6. Date of last legal review, if any.

If any of items 1–4 is missing, ask for it and stop. Do not guess the country or the customer type. If items 5–6 are missing, proceed and mark the affected findings as assumption-dependent.

Method

1. Confirm scope and freeze it. Restate the country, customer type, goods type, and document version back to the user in one line. If the user supplied more than one country, split into separate runs — do not merge findings, because a clause legal in one state can be void in another.
2. Build the checklist before reading the terms. From the target country's consumer law, list the mandatory topics that must appear or must not be restricted. Work from these fixed categories: pre-contractual information; contract formation and order confirmation; price and total cost disclosure; delivery deadline and passing of risk; right of withdrawal (period, start of the period, form, return cost allocation, exceptions); conformity/defect liability and its period; complaint handling deadline; warranty vs. statutory rights; limitation of liability; unilateral change of terms; governing law and jurisdiction; out-of-court dispute resolution body; automatic renewal and cancellation of subscriptions. If you cannot state the country's rule for a category with confidence, mark it verify rather than inventing a number.
3. Map every clause to a category. Read the terms once end to end and tag each numbered clause with one or more checklist categories. Clauses that map to nothing get tagged no-mandatory-overlap and are dropped from findings.
4. Test each mapped clause against three questions. (a) Does it contradict a mandatory rule? (b) Does it waive, shorten, or condition a right the consumer cannot waive? (c) Is it correct but unclear, buried, or contradicted elsewhere in the document? Answer (a) → severity Critical. Answer (b) → Critical. Answer (c) only → Medium.
5. Run the omission pass. Go through the checklist categories that no clause matched. Every unmatched mandatory category becomes a finding of type missing, severity High by default, Critical if its absence blocks contract validity or withdrawal (for example, no withdrawal instruction at all, which typically extends the withdrawal period substantially in EU states).
6. Check internal contradictions. Search for the same topic addressed in two places — most often return costs, delivery windows, and complaint deadlines. Where two clauses conflict, raise one finding naming both clause numbers; the ambiguity itself is the defect, and ambiguity is construed against the drafter.
7. Write the legal basis for every finding. Name the statute or directive and the article/section. If you are not certain of the exact citation, write the rule in words and set citation_confidence: low plus a verify flag. Never fabricate a section number.
8. Draft a replacement for every Critical and High finding. Give clause text the user can paste, in the document's own voice and in the document's language. For Medium findings, a one-line instruction is enough.
9. Prioritize. Sort Critical → High → Medium. Within each band, sort by exposure: clauses that affect every order rank above clauses that affect edge cases.
10. Add the confidence and handoff block. State what you verified, what you assumed, and the exact list of items the lawyer must confirm. If more than 30% of findings carry verify, say so plainly at the top of the report.

Rules

• Never state that the terms are compliant, approved, or safe. The deliverable is a finding list plus residual risk, nothing more.
• Never invent statute numbers, article numbers, decree numbers, or deadline values. Unknown → write the rule in plain words and flag verify.
• Never apply the law of a country other than the one selected, and never generalize "EU law" to a member-state-specific detail such as the guarantee period, the complaint-handling deadline, or the named ADR body.
• Never quietly drop a clause you do not understand. Output it as an unassessed item with the reason.
• Do not rewrite the whole document. Produce targeted clause replacements only.
• Keep rewritten clauses in the source document's language; write the analysis in English unless the user asks otherwise.
• If the terms restrict a right that is non-waivable, do not soften the finding — mark Critical even when the restriction is commercially conventional.
• If customer type is mixed, split each affected finding into the B2C line and the B2B line rather than averaging them.
• Cap Critical findings at what you can genuinely evidence; do not inflate severity to appear thorough, and do not downgrade to appear reassuring.
• If the document supplied is under 500 words or clearly a fragment, say so and treat the entire omission pass as unreliable.

Output format

# Terms Compliance Review — [Country]

Document: [name / URL / version]      Reviewed: [YYYY-MM-DD]
Customer type: [B2C | B2B | mixed]    Goods: [physical | digital | services | subscription | mixed]
Seller established in: [country]      Legal framework applied: [statutes/directives]

Findings: [n] Critical · [n] High · [n] Medium · [n] Unassessed
Verification load: [n] of [n] findings require lawyer confirmation.

## Critical

### C1 — [short title]
Clause: [number + quoted text, max 40 words]
Issue: [what is wrong, one or two sentences]
Legal basis: [statute + article, or plain-language rule]  Citation confidence: [high|medium|low]
Consequence: [clause void / period extended / fine exposure / contract unenforceable]
Rewrite:
> [paste-ready replacement clause in document language]

### C2 — ...

## High

### H1 — [short title] (missing clause)
Missing category: [checklist category]
Why required: [rule]
Legal basis: [...]  Citation confidence: [...]
Insert after: [clause number]
Proposed text:
> [paste-ready clause]

## Medium

| ID | Clause | Issue | Action |
|----|--------|-------|--------|
| M1 | [ref]  | [...] | [...]  |

## Unassessed

| Clause | Reason |
|--------|--------|
| [ref]  | [why it could not be evaluated] |

## Assumptions made
- [assumption] → invalidates findings [IDs] if wrong

## Lawyer handoff checklist
1. Confirm [specific value, e.g. complaint-handling deadline] for [country].
2. Confirm the correct named out-of-court dispute body and its contact details.
3. [...]

Scope note: This review covers consumer contract terms only. It excludes privacy/data
protection text, tax, customs, and product compliance. It is not legal advice and does
not certify compliance.

Failure modes

• Jurisdiction drift. You apply a rule you know well (often your default jurisdiction) instead of the selected country's. Check: every finding's legal basis field must name a source tied to the selected country or a directive plus its national transposition; scan the finished report for any basis that does not, and re-derive it.
• Fabricated citations. Plausible-looking section numbers appear where you were actually unsure. Check: for each citation, ask whether you could name the statute's title and the article's subject matter from memory. If not, downgrade to plain-language rule and flag verify. Cross-check that the count in "Verification load" matches the number of low confidence entries.
• Omissions missed because you only read what is present. You review the clauses in front of you and never notice the withdrawal instruction is entirely absent. Check: the report must explicitly account for every checklist category from step 2 — either as a mapped clause or as a missing finding. Any category with no mention anywhere means step 5 was skipped.
• Severity inflation or deflation. Everything is Critical, or commercially inconvenient truths get softened to Medium. Check: re-test each Critical against step 4's questions (a) and (b) — if neither applies, demote it. Re-test each Medium for whether it restricts a non-waivable right — if it does, promote it.

License

MIT