mblauberg Australian legal writing
General Australian legal style, document-shape and source-discipline layer. Stricter project and forum instructions override it. This is drafting assistance, not legal advice: verify current law, forms and procedure against official sources and retain qualified or human review for filing-facing work.
This skill is a specialization of the natural-writing hub. The hub owns the
Australian English default, the anti-AI taxonomy and the condense pass; this
skill owns jurisdiction, forum, instrument and filing-facing rules. The Legal
Function Test is this skill's own claim-classification scheme and does not map
to the hub's observed/inferred evidence schema.
Scope
Use this skill when the output is an Australian legal instrument, filing-facing text or legal correspondence: court and tribunal forms, affidavits, statutory declarations, witness statements, submissions and outlines, proposed orders, chronologies, annexure indexes, deeds and agreements, letters of demand and pre-action correspondence, registry and party correspondence, non-filing legal decision overviews, and AGLC4 citation.
Legal subject matter alone is not the trigger. An article, chapter, summary or
plain-language explanation about law goes to natural-writing; a spec, README,
runbook or other engineering artefact goes to engineering-writing. This skill
joins either as a companion where legal status, authority, forum wording or
source altitude must survive the rewrite.
Workflow
- Read project instructions, live matter state and source-boundary rules. Load the matching jurisdiction, forum and document skill where one exists.
- Choose
draft,rewrite,condense,diagnose,correspondence,decision-overvieworfinal-scrub. Load legal concision for all prose; the reference map in validation-checklists.md gives the remaining reference each mode, document type or content type needs. - Classify each sentence by legal function before polishing. Affidavits and witness statements give evidence; submissions argue; orders command; chronologies organise; internal notes analyse; correspondence communicates. Move wrong-home material first.
- Lock legal status, source anchors, exact quotations, authorities, labels, offer terms, non-admission/non-waiver wording, deadlines, attachments, redactions and user-authority conditions.
- Draft the minimum complete text in Australian English. Front-load the relief, request, answer or next step; use one proposition per paragraph, one home per point and exact pinpoints. Cut padding, duplicate history, intensifiers and internal agent language.
Every filing-facing fact needs a verified real source anchor. Never humanise by weakening a threshold, deleting an anchor, casualising court language or changing forum wording.
Never invent or silently alter an authority, instrument, finding, rule title, forum term or decision-maker label. Verify canonical sources, not indexes, summaries, OCR, renders or agent notes. Preserve contentions as contentions and hold the register the procedural stage requires. Protective-order, police-issued or other safety material remains a dated source with the legal effect its verified text supports, not a finding.
For substantial condensation or relocation, run the deterministic token set-diff and an independent qualitative pass. Stop before losing an anchor, qualification, disputed status, redaction, label, amount, date, forum wording or authority condition. Final scrub adds no new argument, fact, authority, history or courtesy closer.
python3 "$(provenant root)/skills/legal-writing/scripts/lint_legal_style.py" path/to/source
Lint is a guardrail; source checks, forum skills, render checks and user gates still apply. Changes to filing-facing, source-boundary or lint rules require the owning harness's independent review gate.