| name | legal-memo |
| description | Write a predictive legal memorandum — Question Presented, Brief Answer, Statement of Facts, an IRAC Discussion (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion per issue), and a Conclusion, with Bluebook practitioner citations. Use when the deliverable is an internal legal analysis predicting how a question of law resolves on the facts. Anti-trigger; for a single immutable engineering/technical decision use adr, for a regulated-industry compliance finding rather than a predictive legal question use compliance-audit. |
| argument-hint | <the legal question to analyze> |
legal-memo
Produces a predictive legal memorandum: an internal analysis that predicts
how a question of law resolves on a given set of facts, and shows its reasoning
issue by issue so a supervising attorney or decision-maker can scrutinize the
chain from facts to rule to application before relying on it. Its center of
gravity is IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion) applied once per
discrete issue inside the Discussion — that ordered sub-structure is what makes
this a legal memo and not a narrative brief.
This genre follows the standard U.S. law-practice predictive-memo convention,
with Bluebook practitioner citation style for authority.
Scope caveat (carry, do not over-sell): this genre reproduces the
structure and reasoning form of a predictive legal memorandum. It is not
legal advice and asserts no legal sufficiency — the analysis is only as sound
as the cited authority it points to.
Audience and altitude
A supervising attorney or internal decision-maker who must act on a prediction
of how a legal question resolves. Altitude is predictive: state the most
likely outcome and the confidence in it, then earn that prediction issue by
issue. Surface adverse authority and counter-arguments honestly — an
unaddressed weakness is a defect, not an omission.
Pattern (industry: predictive legal memorandum, IRAC + Bluebook)
- Front matter — a standard memo heading (To / From / Date / Re).
- Question Presented — the legal issue framed as a single yes/no question
that joins the governing rule to the determinative facts, not an open-ended
topic.
- Brief Answer — the predicted conclusion in 2-3 sentences, with the core
reason.
- Statement of Facts — the material facts, stated neutrally; no argument
here.
- Discussion — the analytical core, in IRAC per issue: Issue ->
Rule -> Application -> Conclusion. One IRAC cycle per discrete
issue, each cycle citing its authority. Address counter-arguments within
Application. This ordered sub-structure is the genre's distinguishing
feature and the section that grounds the Conclusion.
- Conclusion — overall disposition, the recommendation, and any open
questions or next steps.
- Back matter — the full table of authorities / reference list; an
optional appendix for extended record or verification notes.
Add a figure only when authorities or factors are compared on shared
attributes: render it as a Markdown table (or a fenced mermaid code block if
it is a diagram, never ASCII art or an image), number and caption it, and
reference it in the text. A required figure is never silently omitted — if the
data cannot support one, say so in prose.
Citation style
Bluebook practitioner format — citations to authority as footnotes or inline
cites, resolving to a table of authorities in the back matter. Every citation
must resolve to a real, verifiable source; no uncited claims. Verify the
current Bluebook edition live at authoring time and follow it — never bake an
edition number into output as settled fact.
Rules that keep it a legal memo
- Every claim is traceable to cited authority; no orphan facts.
- The Discussion uses IRAC per issue, not a flat narrative — Issue, Rule,
Application, and Conclusion must each be identifiable, in order, for every
discrete issue.
- State adverse authority and limitations honestly; an undiscussed weakness is
a defect, not an omission.
- Hedge uncertain predictions; present the range when authorities disagree, and
mark a weakened or contested authority with an explicit qualifier rather than
asserting it with the same confidence as settled authority.
- Exhaustive coverage: build the memo from the full set of supplied
authority — every surviving source gets its own treatment, never condensed to
a cherry-picked subset. A silently dropped source is a defect.
- Never cite a source you cannot verify is real; omit it or substitute a real,
well-known authority rather than fabricate a citation.
Anti-triggers — do not use this genre for
- A single already-made technical decision with no predictive legal
question — that is an
adr (Structured MADR): immutable, driver-and-outcome,
no IRAC and no legal authority to weigh.
- A finding against a regulatory standard rather than a prediction of how a
legal question resolves — that is
compliance-audit: a conformance
checklist against a named regulation, not an issue-by-issue legal analysis.
- A settled record of what already happened — a legal memo predicts an
outcome; it does not narrate history.
MIF frontmatter
type: semantic — a legal memorandum is declarative legal analysis and its
rationale, not a time-bound event or a step sequence. Climb to L2 with
namespace (legal-memo/<area>), modified, title, and tags when the
drafting context supplies them. Gate every output with mif-validate at its
target level; the floor is --level 1.
Why machine-readable — the point of MIF here
| Question an agent asks | Answered by (frontmatter) |
|---|
| Is this prediction still current, or has the law moved? | temporal.validFrom / ttl |
| Where did the authority come from; can I trust it? | provenance (W3C-PROV) + citations[] |
| What does this memo relate to or get formalized by? | typed relationships[] (relates-to, realized-by) |
| Which claims are cited authority vs. asserted analysis? | citations[] tied to each IRAC cycle's Rule |
The same document still reads as a human legal memo and projects losslessly to
JSON-LD and back — one artifact, two readers.
The L1 -> L3 climb (two exemplars)
templates/good-l1.md — L1 floor: id, type, created + body. A
complete, valid memo, but opaque to a machine consumer.templates/good.md — L3 (highest this genre supports): adds namespace,
modified, temporal validity, W3C-PROV provenance, citations[] tied to
the cited authority, and a typed relationships[] graph (e.g. relates-to a
related engineering or compliance record). Validate with
mif-validate --level 3.
Author at the highest level the drafting context supports (grade down
rather than fabricate). templates/bad.md shows the antipattern: a memo whose
Discussion has no IRAC sub-structure — the genre's single most load-bearing
required element.
