Claude for Legal

Claude for Legal

Use this skill when the user asks for legal workflow help: contract review, legal triage, policy/regulatory analysis, legal research planning, compliance checklists, litigation support, legal ops trackers, law-student practice, or clinic-style intake/drafting.

Source basis: Anthropic claude-for-legal at anthropics/claude-for-legal commit 9cecd91b0f26f732d18315afc3c9bb5ff99e0fbb, Apache-2.0. This OMK skill is a compact adaptation, not a vendored copy of upstream prompts.

Non-negotiables

• Treat outputs as AI-assisted drafts for qualified attorney review, not legal advice or legal conclusions.
• Do not file, send, sign, threaten, accept, reject, waive rights, or communicate externally without an explicit user gate and attorney-review note.
• Identify jurisdiction, governing law, audience, role of the user, deadline, and source set. If unknown and material, ask; if proceeding, state assumptions.
• For current law, citations, statutes, regulations, court rules, agency guidance, or case law, verify with authoritative/current sources before relying. If not verified, label citations and conclusions as needing verification.
• Never invent citations, docket facts, quotes, party facts, deadlines, or regulatory text.
• Preserve privilege/confidentiality boundaries; avoid putting sensitive facts into external tools unless user has configured and approved them.
• If user is not a lawyer, structure output as an attorney-facing brief with plain-English risk explanations and clear questions for counsel.

Core workflow

1. Classify lane: choose practice area and workflow. Load references/workflow-catalog.md when mapping is not obvious.
2. Intake: collect only missing material facts: role, jurisdiction, document/source corpus, transaction/matter context, risk appetite, deadline, intended audience, and requested output.
3. Source preflight: record what sources were actually checked. Prefer official/primary sources; use legal research connectors/MCPs only if configured. Otherwise browse authoritative sources or mark [verify].
4. Analyze conservatively: separate facts, assumptions, legal issues, risk level, source-backed points, open questions, and attorney decisions.
5. Gate consequential action: give draft language/checklist/memo, then list what must be reviewed before use.

Default output skeleton

# AI-assisted legal workflow draft — attorney review required

- Role/audience:
- Jurisdiction/governing law:
- Scope:
- Sources checked:
- Verification gaps:
- Assumptions:

## Executive summary
## Key issues / risk flags
## Analysis
## Draft / checklist / table
## Open questions for counsel
## Pre-use review gate

Risk language

Use cautious labels: Blocking, High, Medium, Low, Information needed. Explain each label in business/plain-English terms. Avoid saying a position is “legal,” “compliant,” “privileged,” or “safe” unless verified and still framed for attorney judgment.

Citation rules

• Attach source/provenance to every legal authority or factual extraction from documents.
• Distinguish primary authority, secondary source, model reasoning, and user-provided facts.
• If a citation comes from model knowledge or an unverified web result, tag it [verify] and place it in verification gaps.
• Quote only short excerpts needed for analysis; prefer paraphrase and pinpoint citations.

Practice profile pattern

When a matter will continue across turns, create or update a concise practice/matter profile in the working docs, not in global memory unless explicitly asked. Include: client/company context, role, jurisdiction footprint, escalation contacts, risk posture, house style, source locations, and current open questions. Do not store secrets.