Research Plan

Research Plan is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from zgbrenner/agentcounsel. It costs 58 tokens per session (2,311 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A roadmap for researching a legal question before collecting authorities. It identifies possible statutes, regulations, case-law topics, search terms, source types, and areas that are outside the planned research.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps plan research for legal memos, briefs, or other matters where jurisdiction, topics, and research boundaries need to be agreed first.
Why use it?
It turns a broad or unclear request into a scope that an attorney can approve before time is spent gathering sources. It also keeps early planning separate from citations and legal conclusions.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit It helps plan research for legal memos, briefs, or other matters where jurisdiction, topics, and research boundaries need to be agreed first.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/zgbrenner/agentcounsel/research-plan
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add zgbrenner/agentcounsel --skill research-plan
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/zgbrenner/agentcounsel

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for Research Plan

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zgbrenner/agentcounsel/research-plan/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/zgbrenner/agentcounsel/research-plan)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zgbrenner/agentcounsel/research-plan"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zgbrenner/agentcounsel/research-plan/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for Research Plan

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zgbrenner/agentcounsel/research-plan"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zgbrenner/agentcounsel/research-plan.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 58 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,311 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00058 $0.02311
Opus 5 $0.00029 $0.01156
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00462
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00231

Measured 9d ago against content hash 0d2322c39781, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Research Plan scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/legal-research/research-plan/SKILL.md · 134 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 134 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research Plan

Purpose

Produce a structured research roadmap that converts a vague legal question into a scoped, attorney-approvable plan — before any authority is gathered. The roadmap names the statute leads, regulatory leads, case-law areas, search terms, source-hierarchy targets, and out-of-scope items the research will pursue. It produces draft legal work product for attorney review; it is not legal advice, and it does not begin the research itself.

The most important discipline this skill enforces: the roadmap contains no citations. No case names, statute numbers, regulation sections, or quotations appear in the output — only leads, expressed as topics, doctrines, and search terms. The point of the plan is to surface scope and let the attorney approve or redirect it; producing citations at this stage front-runs research with the very fabrication risk the planning step exists to contain.

Use When

  • A user asks to "research X" without a specific Question Presented, and the scope needs to be settled before research begins.
  • A research task is broad or open-ended, and the attorney needs a written plan to approve scope, budget, or jurisdiction coverage.
  • The matter involves multiple jurisdictions, overlapping doctrines, or a long time horizon, and the research strategy must be visible before resources are spent.
  • A new research engagement begins and the supervising attorney wants to see leads, search terms, and source-hierarchy targets before the work starts.
  • A research task has been started and produced too much off-scope material; restart with an attorney-approved plan.

Required Inputs

  • The legal question(s) or research task — as stated by the user; will be refined into discrete sub-questions in the plan.
  • Jurisdiction and governing law — the applicable jurisdiction(s) and the body of law (federal, state, contractual, regulatory). If unknown, flag as [CONFIRM: jurisdiction] and produce the plan with jurisdiction-conditional branches rather than guessing.
  • Known facts — the facts framing the research need. Do not invent or reconstruct facts; use only what the user has provided.
  • Procedural posture or transactional posture — if applicable.
  • Scope and time constraints — turnaround, budget, page limits, or other constraints that should shape research depth.
  • Optional: authority already in hand — any cases, statutes, or sources the user has identified. These become "starting authorities," noted by topic, not as citations to verify here.

Read the full file on GitHub · 134 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 134 lines · 58 tokens per session scan A 0d2322c39781

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Research Plan is a skill published in the GitHub repository zgbrenner/agentcounsel (19 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 58 tokens to every session and 2,311 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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