Settlement agreements look longer than they are: strip the boilerplate and a consistent anatomy appears — mechanics, money, waiver, architecture — and once you can see the skeleton, you can see what’s missing, what’s swollen, and what’s been slipped in. This page is the skeleton; the Agreement Checker lets you walk your own document against it.
The Standard Anatomy
The recurring components: termination mechanics — the date and the mode of ending; notice — worked, paid in lieu, or garden leave, benefits addressed; the payments, itemised — notice monies, accrued holidays, statutory entitlements and the ex gratia layer each labelled for what it is, because the floor/layer separation is where packages get honestly valued; the waiver and its schedule — the engine, listing the claims settled; confidentiality with its scope actually defined; non-disparagement, ideally mutual; the reference — with agreed wording attached as a schedule, never a floating promise; announcements — internal and external lines in text; covenants restated or new; return of property, pension handling, the contribution clause recording the employer’s payment toward your advice, the advice warranty that completes the informed-consent architecture, and full and final language tying it together. Absence of any standard component is itself information — and usually the first, easiest ask in any negotiation.
The Under-Read Four — and the Carve-Outs
Four clauses designed to read as unremarkable, and regretted accordingly: new restrictive covenants — restraints on future earning appearing for the first time in the exit document, signed in the relief of getting the deal done: they are consideration to be paid for, narrowed, or struck — never wallpaper; overbroad confidentiality — drafting that would technically gag ordinary professional conversation or referencing your own career; clawbacks hiding in the payment mechanics; and the waiver schedule itself, skimmed as legalese when it is the entire price. Beside them, the carve-outs that mark careful drafting on both sides: accrued personal-injury claims commonly excluded — a back injury’s consequences shouldn’t be accidentally settled inside an employment exit; pension rights handled specifically; statutory floors that operate regardless of drafting; and future claims that generic language can’t reach anyway. The audit — what the waiver purports to reach, what it validly reaches, what’s being surrendered by ambiguity — is a fixed part of every 48-hour review here, because these are exactly the clauses the anxious eye slides past.
Walked Your Document Against the Skeleton?
The Checker flags the gaps; the review reads every clause and prices the trade. Send the agreement today - schedules included, because that's where the content lives.
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