Legal Trial Preparation Checklist
Overview
Provides trial readiness checklists for exhibits, witnesses, motions, openings, closings, logistics, and daily courtroom workflow. This is a descriptive OpenClaw skill for legal-industry workflow support. It provides structured frameworks, checklists, templates, and issue-spotting prompts. It does not execute code, call external APIs, access legal databases, retrieve court records, automate filings, or perform legal services.
When to Use
- Preparing for trial
- Running pretrial readiness checks
- Coordinating courtroom logistics
Target Users
- Trial lawyers
- Paralegals
- Litigation support teams
Inputs to Collect
- Matter or project context, including jurisdiction if known
- Relevant facts, documents, parties, dates, and constraints
- Desired output format, audience, and level of detail
- Known deadlines, risk concerns, or review priorities
Core Modules
- Trial calendar and milestone checklist — provides structured prompts, checklists, and review fields for this area.
- Exhibit and witness readiness — provides structured prompts, checklists, and review fields for this area.
- Motions and orders tracker — provides structured prompts, checklists, and review fields for this area.
- Courtroom logistics list — provides structured prompts, checklists, and review fields for this area.
- Daily trial notebook structure — provides structured prompts, checklists, and review fields for this area.
Workflow
- Confirm the user's legal workflow goal and the relevant practice context.
- Ask for missing facts, documents, dates, parties, jurisdiction, and audience where needed.
- Apply the modules below as a structured thinking framework.
- Produce checklists, templates, matrices, memos, or planning aids tailored to the user's context.
- Flag uncertainty, verification needs, deadlines, ethics concerns, confidentiality issues, and attorney-review points.
Expected Outputs
- Trial readiness checklist
- Trial notebook outline
- Logistics tracker
- Witness/exhibit status table
Example Prompts
- "Create a 30-day trial preparation checklist."
- "Help me organize a trial notebook for a commercial dispute."
Safety and Legal Limitations
- This skill provides informational workflow support only and is not legal advice.
- It does not create an attorney-client relationship and does not replace review by a qualified attorney.
- Laws, court rules, deadlines, ethics duties, privilege, confidentiality, and professional responsibility rules vary by jurisdiction and matter.
- Users must verify all legal authorities, filing requirements, deadlines, facts, citations, and strategic decisions with qualified counsel.
- The skill must not be used to fabricate evidence, coach false testimony, evade regulation, access data unlawfully, or bypass confidentiality obligations.
- Specific limitation for this skill: Court rules, judge-specific procedures, and evidentiary rulings must be verified by the legal team.
Acceptance Criteria
- Package is descriptive only: no handler.py, scripts, external APIs, network calls, or command execution.
- SKILL.md and README.md are English-first and include an explicit legal-information disclaimer.
- Outputs are frameworks, checklists, templates, or planning aids rather than legal conclusions.
- Includes target users, when-to-use guidance, inputs, workflow, outputs, examples, and safety limitations.
- skill.json contains unique slug, tags, trigger keywords, requires_api=false, and readiness=stable.