Prompt Pilotby Write.law
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Communicate

Draft a privilege one-pager for non-lawyers

Produces a one-page privilege primer people will actually read: the two-condition rule, the four habits that break it, and privileged-versus-broken email pairs drawn from your company's real situations.

About 10 minstarterIn-house

Your prompt4,612 characters

Still to fill in: Company context, Privilege regime, Who to ask

RoleYou are a general counsel who has watched capable business people destroy privilege by adding one name to a cc line. You teach in examples rather than doctrine, you cut any sentence a busy engineer would skim past, and you refuse to write a training document longer than the behavior it is trying to change.What I needDraft a one-page privilege primer for All employees at the company below, ending with a real contact: Who to ask.InputsAudience: All employees Company: Company context Where privilege questions come up: Where privilege questions actually come up Privilege regime: Privilege regime Who to ask: Who to askHow to work this1. State the rule in one sentence a non-lawyer could repeat from memory, then the two conditions: asked for legal advice, kept inside the group that needs it. 2. Name four habits as things people do, not principles: adding recipients, mixing a legal and a business question in one thread, forwarding, asking in an open channel. 3. Build four privileged-versus-broken pairs from Where privilege questions actually come up and Company context: same facts, two versions, the broken one a mistake All employees would plausibly make this week. Scenarios lifted from another industry are a failure. 4. Correct three misconceptions, including that a "Privileged" label rescues nothing and that copying a lawyer does not convert a business email into legal advice. Flag any limit under Privilege regime: business advice from in-house counsel, staff sitting where the in-house rule is weaker than they assume. Close with one decision rule and one contact: one name, one channel, one number.Close with these four sections, every time, without being askedAssumptions I made. What you assumed about how this audience communicates, whether legal here gives mostly legal advice, which situations actually arise, and what law governs under Privilege regime. Mark each [verify] or [safe]. Where this is weakest. The two or three lines this audience will misread: the example that does not match how they work, the rule that sounds like it makes any email protected, the paragraph they will skim. Quote the line. What only you can decide. The calls I left to you, as options with tradeoffs. Publish this as a standalone page people find when they need it (low friction, and nobody reads it until after the mistake) or make it the handout for a fifteen-minute session per team, which produces real retention at real calendar cost and invites questions you may not want asked in a group. And: build the pairs from real internal incidents (memorable, and people recognize themselves) or keep them synthetic (safer, weaker teaching). What would make this materially better. The input that would most improve the next pass: one redacted real privilege break from this company, confirmation of whether non-US staff are on the distribution, or the list of who emails legal most. Rank by impact.Output formatOne page titled "Talking to Legal: How to Keep It Privileged": the rule in one sentence; When it applies, with the two conditions and one example; Four habits that break it; Four pairs; Three things people get wrong; one decision rule; Ask: one name, one channel, one number.Never do this- If this page would fit any company in any industry, it is too generic. The examples must come from what these people actually do all day. - No hedging filler and no doctrine. Cut "arguably," "it should be noted," and "generally speaking." Do not tell the reader to consult an attorney. Teaching them when to is the point. - Every rule or case you reference must come from my inputs or carry [UNVERIFIED - confirm before circulating]. Never invent a holding or state a privilege rule for a jurisdiction you were not given. - Where the law is unsettled or varies (in-house counsel abroad, mixed advice, self-critical audits), say you do not know in one sentence rather than stating a clean rule you cannot support. - Do not pad. This is one page. If a section needs two lines, give it two; length is not value in a document people skim.Before you answer- Does "attorney-client privilege" appear more than once? Cut it back to one. - Is every example something this audience would plausibly do this week? - Does this actually fit on one page, and is there exactly one decision rule and one contact? - Is there any legal statement here I could not defend if a litigation partner read it?

Adds driver's-seat tunes: options instead of answers, questions before work, every citation flagged. Your values come with it.

2

Pressure-test it

Makes the AI switch hats and attack its own answer.

A senior backend engineer opens this between two meetings. He has never once thought about privilege and assumes it is another compliance email. Read it as the engineer and mark the exact line where you stop reading. Then cut a quarter of the document, rewrite the first three sentences so the engineer keeps going, and tell me which single example is the one they will actually remember on a Friday afternoon.
3

Go deeper

Pushes the work further once the basics are right.

One-pagers get read once and filed. Write three short Slack messages to post in the company channel over the following three weeks, each reinforcing one habit: do not add recipients, keep legal in its own thread, ask before you send. Under 60 words each, no legal vocabulary, and each anchored in a situation this audience recognizes.

Before you run it

What to gather first

  • Who the audience is and how they actually communicate: Slack, Teams, email, tickets
  • The three or four situations where this team most often needs legal
  • Any recent privilege break you can describe without naming names
  • Whether people outside the US are on the distribution list
  • Whether this is self-serve reading or the handout for a live session

Watch for

  • In-house communications are protected only where the predominant purpose is legal advice. Business advice from the legal team is not privileged, and this one-pager can make readers think otherwise if you are not careful with the examples.
  • Privilege for in-house counsel varies sharply outside the US. The EU gives communications with in-house lawyers materially less protection in competition matters. A US-drafted one-pager sent to non-US staff can teach the wrong rule.
  • Work-product protection is a separate doctrine with different scope and timing. If litigation is anticipated, do not let this document stand in for that conversation.
  • Audits, root-cause documents, and self-critical analyses need deliberate framing to be privileged. Say so before an engineering team writes a postmortem assuming it is protected.
  • The model will produce clean-sounding privilege rules it cannot support. Check every legal statement in the document before it goes to hundreds of employees who will treat it as authoritative.

What comes back

A single page titled "Talking to Legal: How to Keep It Privileged": the rule in one sentence; when it applies, with the two conditions and one short example; four habits that break privilege, numbered; four privileged-versus-broken pairs built from the company's real situations; three things people get wrong; one decision rule for borderline cases; and one contact: name, channel, number. Then assumptions, the lines most likely to be misread, the calls left to counsel, and what would improve the next pass.

See an example of what you’ll get
Talking to Legal: How to Keep It Privileged The rule, in one sentence. When you go to legal for legal advice and keep the conversation to the people who need it, that conversation is generally protected from being used against Fanstop later. When it applies. Two things have to be true at the same time: (1) you are asking legal a legal question, not moving a project along, and (2) the conversation stays inside the group that needs it to get the answer. Lose either one and the protection goes. *Example.* You DM J. Lin: "Before we ship the new attribution join, can you confirm our consent posture covers it for EU users?" That is a legal question, kept tight, and it is protected. Add four people from the platform channel because "they should see the answer" and you have put the whole thread at risk. Four habits that break it. 1. Adding recipients. Every extra name is a risk. If someone does not need the answer to get you the answer, leave them off. 2. Mixing legal and business in one thread. "J, is this consent gap a problem? Also team, can we move the release to Thursday?" That email is now half a project update. Split the threads. 3. Forwarding. A protected email forwarded outside the group is a break in real time. Summarize instead: "Legal has looked at this; we are good to ship." 4. Asking in an open channel. A question to legal in #platform-eng is not a private conversation. DM or email. Four pairs: same situation, two outcomes. *Shipping a data-scope change* - Protected: DM to J. Lin: "The new join sends purchase category to the retailer's ad partner. Does that fit our consent language?" - Broken: Same question in #platform-eng, with the PM and two partner engineers tagged so they "stay in the loop." *A retailer threatens to terminate after an incident* - Protected: Email to J. Lin: "Northgate is threatening termination over the April incident. Can we walk through the contract?" - Broken: Same email, cc'ing the CS leadership list, subject line "Can they sue us?" *Writing a postmortem* - Protected: "J. Lin asked us to write up the root cause for her legal assessment", with legal actually directing the write-up, and the doc kept in the restricted folder. - Broken: Posting the same postmortem in the public engineering wiki with a "Privileged" header on top. *The FTC inquiry* - Protected: "J, the FTC document request seems to cover the 2023 pipeline diagrams. Which version should I be looking at?" - Broken: Forwarding J. Lin's answer to your counterpart at the retailer as a courtesy. You have just handed a protected email to a third party. Three things people get wrong. - A "Privileged" label is not a force field. It helps at the margin. It does not rescue an email you sent to twelve people who did not need it. - Copying a lawyer does not make an email privileged. If you would have sent the same email without J. Lin on it, it is not legal advice. - Drafts count. A doc with legal's tracked changes in it is still a document. Do not park privileged drafts in shared folders. If in doubt, ask before you send. It takes two minutes and it is never the wrong call. Ask: J. Lin, General Counsel, Slack DM @jlin, legal@fanstop.com, +1-555-0142. --- *(For counsel, not for the distribution.)* Assumptions I made. That legal here gives predominantly legal rather than business advice on these topics. If the team treats J. Lin as a product decision-maker, several of these examples are weaker than they read [verify]. That US privilege law governs the examples [safe for US staff]. That the postmortem example reflects how your engineering org actually documents incidents [verify]. Where this is weakest. The postmortem pair. It teaches that counsel-directed write-ups are protected, which is true only if legal genuinely directs the work and the document is handled accordingly. An engineer will read it as "add J. Lin's name and we are covered." Second: nothing here addresses your Irish and German staff, for whom the in-house rule is materially different. As written, this page teaches them something that is not true where they sit. What only you can decide. Publish this as a standalone page people find when they need it (low friction, and nobody reads it until after the mistake) or make it the handout for a fifteen-minute live session per team, which produces real retention at real calendar cost and invites questions you may not want asked in a group. Separately: build the pairs from real internal incidents, which is far more memorable and will have people recognizing themselves, or keep them synthetic, which is safer internally and teaches less. What would make this materially better. (1) One redacted real privilege break from your own company: it is worth more than all four synthetic pairs. (2) Confirmation of whether non-US staff are on the distribution, which decides whether this page needs a second version. (3) The list of who emails legal most, so the examples target the people actually generating the risk.
Why this prompt is built the way it is
## Framework 1. **One page, plain English.** Rule, four habits, four pairs, three corrections, one decision rule. Nothing else. Use "attorney-client privilege" once; everywhere else, say what it means: keep it between you and the lawyer. 2. **Two conditions, both required.** The communication is for legal advice, and it stays inside the group that needs it to get that advice. Lose either and protection goes. 3. **The four habits that break it.** Extra recipients, mixing legal and business in one thread, forwarding, and asking in an open channel. 4. **Pairs beat principles, and labels are not magic.** Same situation, privileged version and broken version, drawn from what this audience actually does. A "Privileged" header helps at the margin; copying a lawyer on a business email protects nothing. Close with "if in doubt, ask legal before you send" and a single name, channel, and number.