As many of the commenters pointed out the summary becomes a part of the agreement. I think it would even trump the legalese if there is some inconsistency betwe

As many of the commenters pointed out the summary becomes a part of the agreement. I think it would even trump the legalese if there is some inconsistency between them. What people fail to understand is that the contract/agreement itself is not the written text. Rather it is a legally binding relationship between 2 or more parties. The better each party understands the terms and duties the less likely disputes are going to happen. Legalese is a kind of legal FUD, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Unfortunately most people are still scared of changing it. All those legalese clauses you see in most agreements can be trumped by plain English or actually even common sense. The common law contract system allows judges to invalidate extremely unfair terms based on common sense and common practice as it requires both parties to perform some sort of equal exchange for a contract to be valid. I believe that a well written plain language contract is a lot less likely to have disputes. I also believe that judges like the rest of us are perfectly able to read English as well, so I can only conclude that legalese is FUD. See these two posts to learn more about how contracts work: http://stakeventures.com/articles/2006/08/17/pragmatic-contract-law-for-entrepreneurs http://stakeventures.com/articles/2006/08/17/pragmatic-contr... http://blog.extraeagle.com/2007/10/09/contracts-are-relationships-with-strings-attached/ http://blog.extraeagle.com/2007/10/09/contracts-are-relation... If you are interested in the history of legalese I warmly recommend the book http://www.partyofthefirstpart.com/ http://www.partyofthefirstpart.com/ which is probably the funniest legal book I have ever read. I'm on a bit of a crusade against legalese myself and at http://agree2.com http://agree2.com we've tried to write our user agreement in plain english. We had it for public review last year (http://blog.extraeagle.com/2008/05/20/public-review-of-agree2-user-agreement/ http://blog.extraeagle.com/2008/05/20/public-review-of-agree...) during a major rewrite and even allow you to propose changes to it during your signup.