legal-how-to

name	legal-how-to
description	A practical guide for UK lawyers and legal researchers using Claude with the UK Legal MCP server. Explains the five core research workflows — legislation lookup, case law drill-down, citation tracing, parliamentary intent, and HMRC guidance — with example prompts and real output. Use when a lawyer wants to understand what the tools can do or how to structure a legal research session.
license	Apache-2.0
compatibility	Requires the UK Legal MCP server (uk-legal-mcp). Connect via Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, or any MCP-compatible client.
metadata	{"author":"bouch","version":"1.0"}

UK Legal MCP — Lawyer's Guide

You have access to live UK legal data via real government APIs: legislation.gov.uk, the National Archives Find Case Law, Hansard, and HMRC. This is not a training-data summary — it is the actual text of Acts, SI provisions, and court judgments as they stand today.

This guide walks you through five workflows with example prompts. Use whichever fits your question.

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Workflow 1 — Find and read a statutory provision

Use when: You need the actual text of a section, not a summary.

Example prompts:

• "What does section 21 of the Housing Act 1988 say?"
• "Get me the table of contents for the Equality Act 2010."
• "What does section 172 Companies Act 2006 say, and is it in force?"

What happens: The tool searches legislation.gov.uk, reads the table of contents to locate the section, retrieves the live CLML text, and reports territorial extent (England/Wales/Scotland/NI) and in-force status.

Key details:

• Always checks extent — a provision may not apply in Scotland or Northern Ireland.
• Point-in-time research: add a date to get the law as it stood on a specific day (useful for historic transactions or disputes).
• Large statutes (Companies Act 2006, 1300+ sections) are paged — ask for a specific section rather than the whole Act.

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Workflow 2 — Find cases and read specific paragraphs

Use when: You need what the courts have said about a legal point.

Example prompts:

• "Find Supreme Court cases on indirect discrimination and proportionality."
• "Search for Court of Appeal decisions on section 21 notices and prescribed information."
• "What did the court say about the definition of 'woman' in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers?"

What happens:

1. case_law_search returns matching judgments with neutral citations, court, and dates.
2. Each result includes next_steps hints — no need to look up where to go next.
3. case_law_grep_judgment searches within a specific judgment for a keyword or phrase, returning matching paragraph eIds and snippets.
4. read_resource retrieves the verbatim paragraph text.

The drill-down pattern:

search → find the case → grep for your term → read the exact paragraph

This avoids pulling entire judgments into context. A Supreme Court judgment can be 50,000+ tokens. Grepping for "proportionate" and reading 3 paragraphs costs ~2,000.

Court codes for filtering: uksc · ukpc · ewca/civ · ewca/crim · ewhc/kb · ewhc/ch · ewhc/comm ewhc/admin · ewhc/fam · ukut/iac · ukftt/tc · eat · nica

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Workflow 3 — Trace a citation

Use when: You have a citation string and need to verify it, resolve it to a URL, or understand a judgment's citation network.

Example prompts:

• "Parse the citations from this paragraph: [paste text]"
• "Resolve [2017] UKSC 27 to a canonical URL."
• "What does Essop v Home Office cite, and what has cited it since?"

What happens:

• citations_parse extracts OSCOLA-format citations from free text.
• citations_resolve converts a neutral citation to the TNA URL.
• citations_network maps what a judgment cites and which subsequent cases cite it — useful for checking whether a case has been approved, distinguished, or overruled.

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Workflow 4 — Check parliamentary intent (Pepper v Hart)

Use when: A statutory provision is ambiguous and you need evidence of what Parliament intended when it passed the law.

Example prompts:

• "Search Hansard for debates on the Online Safety Bill, specifically on 'legal but harmful'."
• "What was the parliamentary reception of the Renters Reform Bill?"
• "Did any minister explain what 'woman' meant in the Equality Act debates?"

What happens:

• parliament_search_hansard searches the full record of Commons and Lords debates.
• parliament_vibe_check gives a quick read on how a piece of legislation or policy was received — useful for assessing political risk or finding dissenting voices.

Note: Hansard is admissible as an aid to statutory interpretation under Pepper v Hart [1993] AC 593 where the legislation is ambiguous and a minister made a clear statement on the precise point.

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Workflow 5 — Track live bills and HMRC guidance

Use when: You need to know the current status of pending legislation, or need HMRC's official position on a tax question.

Example prompts:

• "What stage is the Employment Rights Bill at?"
• "Search for bills relating to leasehold reform currently before Parliament."
• "What is HMRC's guidance on input tax recovery for mixed-use buildings?"
• "What is the current VAT rate for children's car seats?"

What happens:

• bills_search_bills and bills_get_bill return current parliamentary stage, sponsors, and text of bills before Parliament.
• hmrc_search_guidance searches published HMRC guidance on GOV.UK.
• hmrc_get_vat_rate returns the current VAT liability for a supply category.

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What this is not

• Not legal advice. Output is research material. Verify before advising a client.
• Not a case law database subscription. Coverage is the TNA Find Case Law corpus — strong for appellate courts from ~2001 onwards, partial for older cases and tribunals.
• Not EU law. Post-Brexit retained EU law must be checked separately.
• Not Westlaw or LexisNexis. No headnotes, no catchwords, no editorial treatment. You get the raw judgment and statute text and work with it directly.

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Tips

Be specific about the court. "Find cases on breach of confidence" returns hundreds. "Find Supreme Court cases on breach of confidence after 2015" returns a workable set.

Use grep before reading. Never ask for "the judgment on X" in full. Ask Claude to grep the judgment for your term, then read the paragraphs that match.

Check extent on every section you cite. The tools report it. Use it.

OSCOLA throughout. All citations are formatted to OSCOLA standard — ready to drop into a brief or advice note.

Point-in-time legislation. For historic disputes, add: "as it stood on [date]". The legislation resource accepts a ?date= parameter automatically.

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Quick References

• All tools with inputs/outputs
• OSCOLA citation format
• Copy-paste starter prompts