Stop prompting like you're Googling

I’ve watched a lot of smart attorneys open an AI chat, paste in a three-hundred-page deposition, and type “summarize this.” Then they read the confident, citation-free mush that comes back and conclude AI isn’t ready for legal work.

The AI was ready. The prompt was a search query.

a good prompt is an assignment memo

Here’s the thing lawyers already know how to do better than almost anyone: brief an associate. Who you are, what the matter is, exactly what you need, what format you need it in, and what standards the work product has to meet. Nobody hands an associate a banker’s box and says “thoughts?”

CasePrompts is that skill, pointed at an AI. It’s a free library of copy-ready prompts for litigation work — pick the task, pick the document type, fill in the blanks — all built on one structure I’m calling the CITE method:

• C — Context. Who you are, the matter, the document, the case posture.
• I — Instructions. The precise task with explicit scope.
• T — Template. The exact output format the AI must fill.
• E — Evidence. Citation requirements — page:line, timestamp, Bates — plus the anti-hallucination directive.

That last one is the whole ballgame:

If it’s not in the record, say “not found in the record” — never infer.

An AI that’s allowed to say “not found” stops inventing things to fill the silence. Every prompt in the library carries that rule, because a summary you can’t cite-check isn’t a summary, it’s a liability.

what’s in the library

The tasks litigation actually runs on: extract key testimony, build a chronology, find contradictions, summarize the record, draft from the record, interrogate the file. The templates get specific — a page:line deposition summary done right, a prior-statement cross-examination builder with dual cites, a treatment chronology that flags gaps and pre-existing references, an expert report vs. deposition audit that’s basically exclusion-motion fuel.

why free, why no signup

Same answer as DepoAudio: I work at a court reporting firm — we produce the record. Tools that help people use the record carefully make the whole system better, and a paywall in front of citation discipline would be a strange thing to build.

CasePrompts is in preview and I’m building it in public — the library is growing, and there’s developer-facing work coming for people building legal software on top of the same discipline. Kick the tires, and if a prompt lets the AI get away with something, I want to hear about it.

— Andrew