Before you start
This recipe is a drafting and screening aid. Anthropic says the Legal plugin does not provide legal advice, and its analysis should be reviewed by a qualified legal professional before anyone relies on it. Install it with claude plugin marketplace add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins and claude plugin install legal@knowledge-work-plugins.
Write your playbook
In Claude Code, the playbook is a legal.local.md file in your project's .claude folder. It holds your standard positions, acceptable ranges and escalation triggers, and an NDA Defaults section. The default examples reflect U.S. positions (Delaware, New York, California), so teams under another legal system must change them, and the governing-law line reads "[Your jurisdiction]" until you replace it. Positions you have not decided should stay as open items for your lawyer, not guesses.
Say to Claude CodeHelp me draft .claude/legal.local.md. Cover NDA defaults (mutual or one-way, term, carveouts, residuals clause) and our positions on limitation of liability and data protection. My jurisdiction is [jurisdiction]. Mark anything I have not told you as [TO DECIDE WITH COUNSEL].