Role, Legal

Claude for
legal work

Contract review, clause summaries, policy consistency checks, and the careful habits that keep LLMs useful without causing problems.

Legal is the role where the word "careful" has to appear most often. Claude is not a lawyer, cannot give legal advice, and should never be the last set of eyes on anything that goes out the door. But it is very good at reading large volumes of text and structuring them, which is a real share of what legal work is. Used within its lane, it saves meaningful time. Used outside its lane, it creates risk. This page is the version that stays in its lane.

Three places to start

Three workflows where Claude speeds up the reading-and-structuring work without touching the judgement calls.

1. First-pass contract review against a playbook

Paste the contract, paste your playbook (acceptable positions, fallbacks, red lines), and ask Claude to mark each clause that matters against the playbook. For each, it should quote the exact language and tell you whether it's within acceptable, at the fallback, or over the red line. It's not a substitute for a real review. It's a way to focus your real review on the clauses that actually need it.

First-pass review prompt, annotated

The shape of a prompt that filters a contract without pretending to replace a lawyer.

YouHere is a master services agreement from a prospective vendor, pasted below. 1 Here is our negotiation playbook, pasted below. It lists acceptable positions, fallbacks, and red lines for each of the clauses we care about: liability cap, indemnity, termination for convenience, IP ownership, data residency, auto-renewal. 2 Do a first-pass review. For each clause on the playbook, quote the exact language from the contract and tell me: within acceptable, at the fallback, or over the red line. Do not comment on style or drafting, only on substance. 3 If a clause is missing from the contract entirely, flag that explicitly rather than treating silence as acceptable. If you are uncertain about interpretation, say so rather than committing to a classification. 4
1
Context. The contract type and the source. Grounds every classification.
2
Example. The playbook itself, with specific clauses named. No guessing at what "acceptable" means.
3
The ask. Quote + classify. "Do not comment on style" is the line that stops the review being 40 items long.
4
Escape hatch. Missing clauses get flagged as missing. Uncertainty gets flagged as uncertainty. No silent acceptance.

Where this falls over

Claude will occasionally miss a subtle clause issue because the language is unfamiliar to it. The first-pass review is a filter, not a substitute. You still read everything it flagged as acceptable, just faster.

2. Plain-English clause summaries for non-lawyers

Sales wants to know what a clause actually means. Finance wants to know if it affects the quarter-end. Leadership wants to know the one scenario where it bites. Claude will produce an under-80-word plain English summary plus three bullets: obligations on us, what it allows the other party to do, and the one scenario where the clause would cost us money. The last bullet is the one that matters.

Where this falls over

Claude's default is to soften risk language to make it sound less scary. Tell it explicitly: do not soften the language to make it sound less scary than it is.

3. Policy consistency checks across documents

The handbook, the employee policies, the partner agreement, and the terms of service sometimes contradict each other. Humans rarely spot this because nobody reads all of them on the same day. Claude reads all of them at once and surfaces the contradictions with exact quotes. The output isn't a merged policy, it's a list of problems. You decide how to resolve them.

Running a policy check, as a conversation

Notice Claude pushing back on the instruction to suggest fixes.

YouHere are four documents: the employee handbook, our internal data policy, our partner agreement, and our public terms of service. Find contradictions between them on anything related to data access, retention, or sharing. Suggest a merged version for each contradiction.
ClaudeI can find the contradictions, but I want to push back on "suggest a merged version". A merged version hides which document was wrong and loses the reasoning for why each one said what it said. If you want to resolve them properly, the first output should be the problems with exact quotes, not a smoothed answer. Can I do the problems first and we decide on merges afterwards?
YouFair point. Problems only.
ClaudeFound four. Each one has the exact quote from both documents, the specific contradiction in one line, and my honest read on which document is more likely to be the one out of date. I have deliberately not recommended which one should win, because in three out of four cases that is a policy decision, not a drafting decision. Here they are.

Where this falls over

Claude will sometimes suggest a merged version if you don't ask it not to. The merged version hides the disagreement, which is the thing you most need to see. Always ask for the problems first.

Worked examples

Before and after, on tasks from legal work.

Prompts to steal

Copy any of these, fill in the square brackets, run.

Try this week

Pick one. All of these are under an hour.

The line for legal is simple: Claude is a research assistant and a first-pass drafter. It is not a lawyer and cannot give legal advice. Everything above that line is on the table. Everything below it is not.

If you want to go broader, the Beginner guide covers the habits that apply everywhere. The prompt library has the full set of role-tagged prompts in one place.