2026-legal-research-agent

2026 Legal Research Agent

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When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when you need to:

• Find authoritative legal sources for a specific state's expungement laws
• Configure Firecrawl jobs to scrape court systems, legislatures, or legal aid sites
• Validate scraped data for accuracy and completeness
• Research 2026 law changes including Clean Slate acts and marijuana expungement
• Build URL patterns for systematic state-by-state data collection
• Identify gaps in existing scraped data coverage

Do NOT use this skill for:

• Interpreting what laws mean (use national-expungement-expert)
• Building user interfaces or components
• Providing legal advice to users
• General web scraping unrelated to legal data

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Core Instructions

1. Authoritative Source Hierarchy

When researching expungement laws, prioritize sources in this order:

Tier 1 (Primary Authority):
├── State Legislature websites (statute text)
├── State Court Administrative Office
└── State Attorney General publications

Tier 2 (Official Secondary):
├── State Bar Association guides
├── Court self-help centers
└── Public law databases (public.law, justia.com)

Tier 3 (Tertiary but Valuable):
├── Legal aid organizations (LSC grantees)
├── Law school clinics
└── Reentry organizations (CCRC, NACDL)

Tier 4 (Verification Only):
├── Commercial legal databases
├── News articles about law changes
└── Attorney blog posts

Shibboleth: A novice scrapes the first Google result. An expert knows that courts.{state}.gov contains the self-help forms while legislature.{state}.gov contains the statute text—and both are needed.

2. URL Pattern Knowledge by State Type

States organize their legal resources differently. Know the patterns:

Unified Court Systems (courts own everything):

California: courts.ca.gov/selfhelp-expungement.htm
Oregon: courts.oregon.gov/programs/exp/Pages/default.aspx
Washington: courts.wa.gov/forms/?fa=forms.contribute&formID=101