Extract Contract Dates

Extract contract dates

PREREQUISITE: Use the propper skill for authentication and tool routing only when reading documents already stored in Propper. Reading files from disk needs no account.

Most missed contract deadlines are not missed because nobody read the contract. They are missed because the deadline was never written down as a date — it existed only as "sixty days prior to the end of the then-current term".

The job is to turn durations into dates.

Steps

1. Read the documents

From disk, or from Propper with locker_list_documents and locker_get_document when the user's contracts live there. For ask_doc_question, supply agreementId or the intended documentIds and verify its sources before quoting a deadline; never widen a failed agreement lookup to the whole library. locker_extract_risks and locker_list_risks surface what Propper has already extracted, including renewal and termination terms.

2. Find the anchor dates

Every derived deadline hangs off one of these:

• the effective date — often not the signature date, and often defined in the preamble
• the signature dates, and whether the contract runs from "the date last signed"
• delivery, acceptance or go-live dates, where the term starts on an event

If the anchor is blank, unsigned or undetermined, the whole schedule is undetermined. Say that first, list the durations you found, and do not present a computed date built on a guessed anchor.

3. Find the durations and what each attaches to

4. Compute the derived deadlines, and show the arithmetic

This is the part that has value. For each duration, give the resulting date and how it was reached:

Auto-renewal date        2027-03-01   Effective 2026-03-01 + 12-month initial term
Non-renewal notice due   2026-12-31   2027-03-01 minus 60 days' notice (§ 9.2)

Showing the derivation lets the user check the reading. A bare date cannot be verified.

Be precise about the things that move a deadline:

• Calendar days versus business days. Thirty business days is roughly six weeks.
• Months versus days. "Three months" and "90 days" land on different dates.
• Inclusive or exclusive. "Within 30 days after" versus "30 days from" can differ by a day, and a one-day miss on a notice window is a full renewal term.
• Whose time zone, when a contract specifies one.

When the wording is genuinely ambiguous, give both readings and both dates. Do not pick one silently.

5. Report as a dated list

Sort by date ascending, soonest first. For each row: the date, what happens on it, the clause it comes from, and the derivation. Mark every date that is already in the past.

Close with what you could not determine and why — a missing effective date, an undated signature, a duration with no anchor.

The auto-renewal trap

The date that matters is not the renewal date. It is the notice deadline before it, which typically falls 30, 60 or 90 days earlier. A contract that renews on 1 March with a 90-day notice window is effectively decided on 1 December.

Put the notice deadline in the list as its own row, ahead of the renewal. If it has already passed, say so plainly with both dates, and state what the contract says happens next — not what the user should do about it.

Across many contracts

Reading a folder or a Locker library, produce one combined list sorted by date, with the source document named on every row. Then note the documents you could not read — a scanned PDF with no text layer, an encrypted file — rather than letting them vanish from a list that looks complete.

Never present a date that is not in a document you actually read.

Boundary

The arithmetic is factual. What to do about it is not.

Report the dates, the clauses and the derivations. Do not advise whether to renew, terminate, renegotiate or let something lapse, do not characterize a notice window as unreasonable or aggressive, and do not tell a user they have missed their chance — give them the dates and let them, or their counsel, draw that conclusion.