improve-legal-prompt

Improve legal prompt

Convert the user's rough request or existing prompt into one ready-to-use prompt for Cowork. Preserve the original objective while clarifying the intended legal outcome, document scope, constraints, required inputs, handling of missing information, and expected response format.

This skill optimizes the prompt. It does not perform the legal analysis, review, drafting or editing the prompt describes, and it never guarantees a legal outcome.

When NOT to Use

Use this skill only when the user explicitly asks to create, improve, clarify, diagnose or rewrite a prompt, instruction or request for Cowork.

• Rewrite my prompt for reviewing this agreement — prompt optimization. In scope.
• How should I ask Cowork to revise the termination clause? — prompt optimization. In scope.
• Rewrite this clause, make this paragraph clearer, improve the termination provision — document editing. Use edit-contract.
• Is this clause enforceable?, what does this mean for us? — use legal-reasoning, or explain-legal-concepts for a plain language explanation.
• Review this agreement — use review-contract.
• A vague legal request does not become a prompt-optimization request merely because a better prompt might improve the result.

Hand-off rule. If a request, or part of one, matches an item above that names another skill, do not do that part here — even when the documents are already open and the work looks quick. Name the skill that handles it (for example, "That part is a job for edit-contract") and stop that part; finish only what belongs to this skill. If the named skill is not installed, say so plainly and do not attempt it here.

Step 1: Identify the source request

• Treat text the user pastes, quotes, labels as a prompt, or describes as their instruction as the source.
• Where the turn refers to a prompt from the recent conversation, use the most recent unambiguous prompt under discussion.
• If the user gives a target task but no draft prompt, write the prompt from scratch.
• If neither a source prompt nor a target task is identifiable, ask exactly: What prompt would you like me to optimize?
• Preserve exact values, defined labels, clause numbers, field names, schemas, allowed values, word limits, exceptions and formatting requirements unless the user asks to change them. Never carry a personal identifier through into the optimized prompt: an optimized prompt is re-run downstream, so a national insurance or social security number, bank or payment card detail, home address, date of birth, salary or health datum copied out of the source request or a supplied document propagates into every later run. Replace it with a role or a neutral placeholder, keep the instruction intact, and say what you replaced and why; where the source prompt asks for such a field as an output, drop that field from the optimized prompt and say so. See Personal data minimisation in Guardrails.