# Marcus Obi, Independent UX Consultant (Solo) — read of LexiRisk, June 17 2026

> 8 years doing UX at agencies, solo for 2 years now. I sign maybe 12-15 client contracts a year and I've never had a lawyer review one. My daughter is 6, I coach her soccer team Saturday mornings, and I'm usually reading stuff like this on my phone during her practice warmups.

## How I got here

A client I've been chasing for three months finally sent me their MSA last week. It was 22 pages, their in-house legal team's template, and one clause on page 14 had something about "work product" that made me genuinely nervous. I Googled "how to spot bad clauses in freelance contract" and LexiRisk showed up third. I clicked mostly because the other two results were law firm blog posts trying to sell me a retainer.

## What I clicked first

The subhead under the logo: "Founders and freelancers sign contracts without really understanding them. Lawyers charge $300+/hour." That's not a clever hook, it's just true. I've been embarrassed to admit I sign things I don't fully understand, so seeing it stated plainly felt less like marketing and more like someone who knows the situation. The "30 seconds" vs "3-7 days" comparison landed because I've actually waited three days for a lawyer friend to do me a favor read and the deal almost died.

## Where I paused

"flags buried terms that usually hide on page 12." That's specific enough to stop me. Not "finds hidden risks" but page 12 specifically. Either someone actually looked at a lot of contracts and noticed the pattern, or it's a weirdly precise claim that's made up. I genuinely don't know which. But it made me keep reading instead of bouncing, which is more than most of these pages do.

## What I distrusted

Two things.

First: "Our model is trained on 10,000+ legal contracts." I've seen this exact sentence, or a version of it, on six different AI legal products. 10K contracts sounds like a number someone chose because it's over four digits but under a million. What jurisdiction? What contract types? Enterprise NDAs or freelance SOWs? The number without any context doesn't reassure me.

Second: "Join 2,000+ founders and freelancers who've used LexiRisk." This is the loneliest social proof I've ever seen. No names. No company. No quote. No "Marcus from Denver saved $800 in legal fees on a licensing deal." Just a number that could be signups from a Product Hunt launch two years ago. I've worked in product long enough to know that "2,000+ users" often means 1,900 people who uploaded one contract and never came back.

The "Comes with all your notes" on the PDF report also confused me. What notes? I haven't added any notes anywhere in this flow.

## What would convince me

One real example. Not a testimonial. An actual contract snippet, redacted, with the clause that got flagged, the risk score it received, and the plain-English explanation next to it. Show me the output on a real NDA or SOW so I know what I'm getting before I upload my client's document. That would close me faster than any pricing table.

Also: what does a "94% accuracy" miss look like? If the 6% it misses is creative indemnification language from a large enterprise legal team, that's the exact category where I'm most exposed. Tell me that.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The 10,000 contracts your model was trained on: what's the breakdown by contract type? If it's mostly NDAs and I'm uploading a SaaS vendor agreement with custom IP clauses, how well does it actually hold up?

2. Can you show me one example output, even a fake one, so I know what I'm reading before I upload my client's contract? I'm not worried about privacy, I just want to know if the plain-English explanations are actually plain English or if they're legal-adjacent jargon with different words.

3. "We delete the raw file after 30 days" but you keep my reports forever. Who has access to those reports on your end? I'm not asking for a terms-of-service link, I'm asking what your actual data handling looks like.

## Verdict: curious-enough-to-reply

The $9 pay-per-scan is low enough that my skepticism almost doesn't matter. I've spent $9 on worse things this week. The page is more honest than most, the FAQ actually admits the model misses things, and the "first read, not substitute" positioning is exactly how I'd want to use it. I'd upload that 22-page MSA tonight if the signup flow doesn't ask me for a credit card first.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-17. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*