Terms of Business land in the inbox, someone skims the fee structure, checks the payment terms aren't completely outrageous, and hits sign. Maybe the rebate clause gets a second glance. Maybe. The rest? Liability caps, IR35 indemnities, restrictive covenants, termination provisions – they sit there, buried in legalese, quietly ticking away until the day they blow up.
That's the reality for most recruitment agencies in the UK. Not because people are careless, but because the maths doesn't work. You can't send every set of Terms of Business to a solicitor at £350+ a pop. You definitely can't do it for contractor agreements when you're placing 200 temps a month. So you don't. You sign and hope for the best.
We built Vern to fix that.
What Is Vern?
Vern stands for Verify Every Risk Now. It's an AI-powered contract risk triage tool built specifically for UK recruitment agencies.
Upload a PDF or DOCX – or just forward it to your dedicated Vern email address – and Vern analyses every clause against your agency's own risk playbook. Not a generic checklist. Not some American contract template that doesn't understand UK employment law. Your positions, your thresholds, your rules.
Average triage time? About three minutes.
Traffic Light Risk Ratings on Every Clause
Simple. Fast. No ambiguity.
Aligns with your risk position. Crack on.
Deviates from your standard. Needs a conversation.
Material risk. Escalate it. Don't sign as-is.
Try it free
No credit card. No commitment. No sales call. Run your first contract through Vern and see what it flags.
Why Recruitment Agencies Need This
The recruitment sector operates on contracts. That's not a revelation. But the sheer volume creates a problem that most agencies just accept as normal.
The compliance landscape is getting harder, not easier. New umbrella company regulations are shifting responsibility onto agencies and end clients. The Employment Rights Bill is introducing over 200 amendments to worker protections. IR35 enforcement continues to tighten, with HMRC investing in automated compliance checks and thousands of new compliance staff.
Agencies that treat contract review as an afterthought are carrying risk they can't even quantify. Inaccurate IR35 status determinations alone can result in back-tax liabilities, National Insurance contributions and penalties that run into hundreds of thousands of pounds.
And it's not just the big scary compliance stuff. How many agencies have signed Terms of Business with 60-day payment terms when their standard is 30? How many have missed an uncapped liability clause buried on page seven? How many have agreed to rebate periods that quietly erode placement margins?
These aren't hypothetical examples. We've seen all of them. In the first week of testing.
How Vern Works
We deliberately kept this simple because recruitment consultants don't have time for complex software.
Set your risk playbook
Define the positions that matter to your agency – acceptable payment terms, liability caps, rebate periods, IR35 provisions, the lot. Don't know where to start? Use our recruitment-specific template and customise from there. Or book an expert playbook setup consultation and we'll build it with you.
Upload or email in
Drag and drop a document into Vern, or forward it to your dedicated email address. Either way, it's in the system in seconds.
AI triages every clause
Every single clause gets checked against your playbook. Traffic light ratings, issues flagged, suggested alternative wording provided. All in roughly three minutes, with full process time shown transparently.
Review and decide
You get an executive summary, a clause-by-clause breakdown and prioritised flags. Share it with your team, send it to the client, or pass it to your solicitor for the red-flagged items. You're making decisions from a position of knowledge, not guesswork.
What Makes Vern Different from Generic AI Contract Tools
There's no shortage of AI contract review tools on the market. So why did we build another one?
Because none of them understand recruitment.
Most AI contract tools are built for law firms reviewing commercial agreements, or for enterprise legal teams processing vendor contracts. They check against generic standards and generic risk positions. That's fine if you're reviewing a SaaS agreement. It's useless when you need to know whether a client's Terms of Business contain an IR35 indemnity that transfers liability to your agency.
Triages against YOUR playbook
Every agency has different risk appetites, different standard positions, different deal-breakers. Vern checks against yours, not generic standards.
Understands recruitment contract types
Terms of Business, contractor agreements, IR35 compliance documents, NDAs, candidate contracts – these are the documents Vern was built to process.
Tuned to UK contract norms
Built in the UK, for UK agencies, with analysis that understands the regulatory framework you actually operate in.
Scales without bottlenecking
Whether you process 10 contracts a month or 1,000, every single one gets the same thorough clause-by-clause analysis. No queue. No waiting list.
Transparent about what it is
Vern is a risk triage tool, not a solicitor. It flags risks so you can make informed decisions. We'll never pretend it replaces legal advice – that honesty is the whole point.
The Real Cost of Not Knowing
Let's talk about what contract risk actually costs recruitment agencies.
Risk you can't quantify is risk you can't manage
An uncapped liability clause in a set of Terms of Business doesn't cost you anything – until it does. Then it can cost you everything.
Extended payment terms don't just mean waiting longer for your money. They strain cash flow, make lenders more cautious and can become a barrier to growth. Forward-thinking agencies are already re-evaluating how they manage this risk.
An IR35 indemnity buried in clause 14 of a client's Terms of Business can transfer tax liability to your agency for every contractor on that account. One HMRC investigation, one determination that status was wrong, and you're looking at back-tax, NI and penalties per contractor.
None of this is scare-mongering. These are the documented, real-world consequences that UK recruitment agencies face every year. The difference between the agencies that survive them and the ones that don't? Usually, it comes down to whether someone actually read the contract properly before signing.
Vern makes sure someone does. Every time.
Free to start. Seriously.
Sign up for the free tier. No credit card. No commitment. No sales call. We're confident enough in the product that we don't need to lock you into anything.
What's Coming Next
Vern launched with AI-only triage, and that handles the vast majority of day-to-day contract risk analysis. But we're already building the next tiers.
AI Only
Instant clause-by-clause triage against your playbook. Traffic light ratings in ~3 minutes.
AI + Expert Review
AI triage enhanced by a specialist reviewer. Best of both worlds for your most important contracts.
Expert Only
Full specialist oversight for enterprise-level or high-risk contracts. Start-to-finish assessment.
Register your interest at assurepath.co.uk/vern to get notified when these tiers launch.
Built by AssurePath
Vern is built by the team at AssurePath – an engineer-led managed IT services provider that specialises in the recruitment sector alongside legal, accountancy and healthcare.
We built Vern because we kept seeing the same problem across our recruitment clients: smart, capable people signing contracts they hadn't properly reviewed, carrying risk they didn't know about, and finding out the hard way.
If something's broken, we fix it. This was broken. So we built Vern.
Questions? Get in touch at hello@assurepath.co.uk or call 0333 050 0729.
Ready to stop signing blind?
Run your first contract through Vern and see what you've been missing. Free to start, no strings attached.