I signed a contract I didn’t read: can I annul it?

Many people have signed a contract without reading it carefully, whether out of trust in the counterparty, haste, or even pressure, which may later lead them to be confronted with clauses they would not have agreed to had they been fully aware of what they were signing.
This raises the question of whether it is possible to annul a contract under such circumstances.

As a rule, the answer is negative. The law provides that contracts entered into must be performed by the Parties who execute them. By signing a contract, it is presumed that the signatory knows and agrees with its contents, even if they have not read it in full. For this reason, the subsequent annulment of the contract is, as a rule, difficult to obtain. Nevertheless, there are situations in which the law admits the annulment of a contract under these circumstances.

The most common cases in which a party signs a contract without knowing its content occur when there is a relationship of special trust between the Parties, which may lead the signatory to relax their duty of diligence because they are acting under mistake or deceit regarding the content of the clauses; or when a contract is entered into in an urgent situation, evidenced by the volume of business to be handled or the approach of a deadline; or if the signature occurred under coercion, that is, through threat or pressure by one of the parties or by a third party, which vitiated the will of the signatory; as well as in adhesion contracts, common in consumer contracts with banks, insurance companies, or telecommunications operators, in which the signatory is faced with clauses not individually negotiated, which are abusive or were not previously disclosed.

Thus, Portuguese law provides mechanisms that allow an individual who has not read the content of a contract to annul certain clauses, exclude them from the contract, or, in some cases, annul the contract in its entirety.

It should be emphasized, however, that these protective mechanisms only apply in the situations mentioned above, and the signatory always remains under the duty to act diligently and to read the content of the contract before becoming bound.

In contractual matters, trust does not replace reading, and attention to detail is often what separates an avoidable problem from an unavoidable dispute.