Legal Research
Quick precedent search against CourtListener — 1-page brief with citations, saved to the matter.
The problem
WestLaw and Lexis are slow and expensive. For a quick precedent check ('what have appellate courts said about X in the last 5 years?'), spending 20 minutes on premium tools is overkill. But ad-hoc Google searches give you noise instead of citable authority.
The outcome
Ask in plain English. Claude searches CourtListener's free public case-law database, reads the most-cited recent opinions, writes a 1-page brief with citations, and saves it to your matter as a research note.
Connectors you'll need
The prompt
Paste this into Claude (with Cohesive360 installed in your Claude → Settings → Connectors). Replace bracketed placeholders with your specifics.
Find recent [JURISDICTION] [COURT LEVEL] decisions on [LEGAL ISSUE] from the last [N] years. Read the top 5 opinions by citation count and write me a 1-page brief covering:
1. The current state of the law.
2. Any splits among courts.
3. Citations to the leading 3 cases.
Save the brief to case [CASE NUMBER] as a research note.What Claude does
Step-by-step rundown of the work. Every write is drafted, not posted — you approve before anything lands in your systems.
- 1
Search CourtListener
Searches the opinions corpus with the user's terms + jurisdiction + date range. ~10M opinions, refreshed daily.
legal_courtlistener_search_opinions - 2
Read the top opinions
Per result, pulls the opinion text. Ranks by citation count so leading authorities surface.
legal_courtlistener_get_opinion - 3
Synthesize into a brief
Structure: Issue, Current State of the Law, Notable Splits, Leading Cases (with parallel citations in your jurisdiction's format).
- 4
Save to matter (optional)
If you named a case, the brief saves as a research note attached to that matter — searchable by the next person who picks up the file.
Run this workflow in Claude
Two ways: copy the prompt and paste into Claude for a one-off run, or install as a permanent Claude Skill that activates automatically. Step-by-step instructions →
Skill downloads are gated to active subscribers. Already have an account? Sign in — or request access and we'll have you running this in under 1 business day.