zgbrenner Attorney Review Gate
Purpose
Run the final pre-reliance quality gate for draft legal work product. The skill consolidates must-confirm facts, must-confirm law, must-confirm citations, client decision points, ethical/professional-responsibility flags, privilege/confidentiality flags, jurisdiction/deadline flags, and a status of "ready for attorney review" or "not ready for attorney review."
This gate does not approve, certify, or finalize legal work. It organizes the issues a qualified attorney must review before reliance.
Use When
- A high-risk legal output is about to be sent, filed, delivered, or relied upon.
- A draft demand letter, client memo, research summary, risk assessment, contract review, or filing-bound draft needs final attorney-review triage.
- Other quality checks have produced findings that need to be consolidated.
- The user asks whether a draft is ready for attorney review.
Required Inputs
- The complete final draft to gate.
- Source materials, citations, assumptions, and prior quality-check reports if available.
- Intended recipient, use, jurisdiction, governing law, posture, and any deadline context.
- Any client decisions, business positions, or attorney instructions already supplied.
If the draft is missing, stop and request it.
Do Not Use When
- The user wants the agent to approve, sign, send, file, or certify the draft.
- The draft has not been prepared yet.
- The user asks for legal advice or final legal judgment.
Legal Safety Rules
- Produce draft legal work product for attorney review. This is not legal advice.
- A "ready for attorney review" status means ready to be reviewed by an attorney, not ready for reliance or external use.
- Do not check boxes as if acting for the attorney. List items for attorney confirmation.
- Follow
core/source-and-citation-discipline.md; do not invent legal authority, citations, quotations, facts, or deadlines. - Do not resolve legal conclusions, citations, deadlines, or privilege questions by guessing.
- Preserve confidentiality and privilege.
Workflow
- Confirm gate scope. Identify draft type, recipient, intended use, jurisdiction, deadlines, and prior quality checks.
- Collect must-confirm facts. List material facts, source-dependent facts, and facts whose change would alter the output.
- Collect must-confirm law. List legal rules, standards, thresholds, elements, exceptions, and current-law questions.
- Collect must-confirm citations. List every authority, quotation, pin cite, and source that must be checked.
- Collect client decisions. List settlement authority, risk tolerance, business positions, tone choices, waiver decisions, and sign-off items.
- Identify ethics and professional-responsibility flags. Include legal-advice framing, unauthorized-practice risk, conflicts, candor, fairness, third-party disclosure, and competence/supervision issues.
- Identify privilege and confidentiality flags. Include sensitive facts, privileged communications, work-product labels, anonymization needs, and external-facing redactions.
- Identify jurisdiction and deadline flags. Include unknown jurisdiction, governing law, venue, agency, court, response dates, filing dates, notice periods, limitations periods, and effective dates.
- Assign status. Use:
- Ready for attorney review if the draft is complete enough for an attorney to review with listed confirmation items.
- Not ready for attorney review if missing inputs, unsupported authorities, unresolved assumptions, or confidentiality issues prevent meaningful review.
- State reasons. If not ready, explain exactly what must be provided or corrected.
Output Format
Deliver:
- Draft Label — "Draft legal work product for attorney review. Not legal advice."
- Gate Status — Ready for attorney review / Not ready for attorney review.
- Reasons for Status — Short bullet list.
- Must-Confirm Facts
- Must-Confirm Law
- Must-Confirm Citations and Sources
- Client Decision Points
- Ethics and Professional-Responsibility Flags
- Privilege and Confidentiality Flags
- Jurisdiction and Deadline Flags
- Attorney Review Checklist
Attorney Verification Checklist
- All must-confirm facts have been checked against the record or client instructions.
- All must-confirm law has been researched and confirmed by counsel.
- All citations, quotations, and pin cites have been independently verified.
- All client decision points have been resolved or escalated.
- All ethics and professional-responsibility flags have been reviewed.
- Privilege and confidentiality treatment is appropriate for the recipient.
- Jurisdiction, governing law, venue, posture, and deadlines are confirmed.
- The draft remains marked as draft legal work product for attorney review, not legal advice.