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From legal-aid
Guides new legal-aid staff through office procedures, tools, and practice exercises using the managing attorney's uploaded manual. Run when onboarding paralegals, attorneys, intake specialists, or volunteers.
npx claudepluginhub lawdroidai/legal-aid-pluginHow this skill is triggered — by the user, by Claude, or both
Slash command
/legal-aid:onboard [role: paralegal|staff-attorney|intake|volunteer] [--card][role: paralegal|staff-attorney|intake|volunteer] [--card]The summary Claude sees in its skill listing — used to decide when to auto-load this skill
1. Check `~/.claude/plugins/config/claude-for-legal/legal-aid/CLAUDE.md` is set up. If placeholders: "Ask [managing attorney] to run `/legal-aid:cold-start-interview` first — every command depends on it."
One-time legal aid office setup: practice areas, funding, jurisdiction, supervision style, conflict checks, and seed documents. Writes CLAUDE.md for shared context. Use on fresh install or with --redo.
Helps a supervising attorney author a practice-area guide that configures student-facing skills — intake questions, pedagogy posture, review gates, cross-plugin checks, and local rules.
Interactive setup for employment-law jurisdiction mapping. Reads handbooks and termination memos, builds an escalation table, and configures CLAUDE.md. Use on fresh install or with --redo.
Share bugs, ideas, or general feedback.
~/.claude/plugins/config/claude-for-legal/legal-aid/CLAUDE.md is set up. If placeholders: "Ask [managing attorney] to run /legal-aid:cold-start-interview first — every command depends on it."--card: generate the one-page reference card./legal-aid:onboard
/legal-aid:onboard --card
Legal aid offices don't reset every semester, but staff transitions are constant — a paralegal leaves, a staff attorney joins, an intake specialist rotates from housing to family, a volunteer attorney comes in for a six-month rotation. Each transition is a malpractice exposure point until the new staffer knows the office: how this office runs intake, how it screens for eligibility, what its funders restrict, how the managing attorney reviews work, what the local courts expect.
This skill is the guided walkthrough. It reads what the managing attorney uploaded during /cold-start-interview — the procedures manual, filing guides, eligibility tables, intake forms, conflict-check SOP — and teaches it interactively, with practice exercises so the staffer tries the tools in a low-stakes setting before a real prospective client is on the line.
Audience: new staff — paralegals, staff attorneys, intake specialists, volunteer attorneys. Managing attorneys don't run this (they run /cold-start-interview).
~/.claude/plugins/config/claude-for-legal/legal-aid/CLAUDE.md → office profile, practice areas, jurisdiction, procedures manual path, supervision style, eligibility guidelines, funder restrictions, conflict-check process, practice-area templates.
If that file is missing or still contains placeholders: "The office hasn't been set up yet. Ask the managing attorney to run /cold-start-interview first — every other command in this plugin depends on it. You can come back here once setup is complete."
Before starting, ask:
What's your role here? (Paralegal / staff attorney / intake specialist / volunteer attorney / other.) The walkthrough adapts — intake specialists spend more time on eligibility screening and intake; staff attorneys spend more time on drafting and memos; paralegals usually do everything depending on the office.
Record the answer. The walkthrough emphasizes different commands and exercises based on role, but the verification habits and supervision model are the same for everyone.
Welcome to [office name]. I'm going to walk you through how this office works and how to use these tools — about twenty to twenty-five minutes, and you can pause anytime. By the end you'll have run a practice eligibility screen, a practice intake, drafted a practice document, and you'll know what the office expects before you touch a real prospective client.
One thing up front: everything I produce is a starting point, not final work. You and the managing attorney do the lawyering. I handle the formatting, the structured screening, the first draft, and the deadline tracking so your time goes to the matters and the analysis, not to writing "Dear Sir or Madam" for the twentieth time.
Read from ~/.claude/plugins/config/claude-for-legal/legal-aid/CLAUDE.md and the ingested procedures manual. Cover interactively:
Don't lecture — check understanding. Ask: "So if a caller comes in with an eviction and also mentions they're undocumented, what's the call here?" (Answer depends on the office — usually: screen both issues; LSC § 1626 status matters for the housing matter; non-LSC funds may serve the immigration question; both go to managing-attorney review if there's any uncertainty.)
Five-minute interactive segment specifically on supervision and prospective-client confidentiality:
Two things that bite legal aid offices that I want you to internalize before you do anything else:
One: every prospective client triggers Rule 1.18. When a caller starts telling you their situation — even before the office accepts the case, even if the office never accepts the case — duties of confidentiality and limited duties of loyalty attach. That means: information from a screening or intake is privileged-adjacent; you don't share it casually; conflicts with the prospective client matter even on declined matters. The eligibility-screening output marks this explicitly, but the habit needs to be yours, not the tool's.
Two: nothing goes to a client or a court without the supervision model running. In this office, that means [restate the supervision model from CLAUDE.md]. The plugin labels every output as a draft, but the gating is on the human side. If you're about to send something and you can't remember whether it cleared the model, stop and check.
Walk through each command the staffer will actually use. Emphasize different commands by role:
| Command | When you use it | What you get |
|---|---|---|
/eligibility-screening | First call from a prospective client | Funder-source matrix, conflict flags, priority classification, referral suggestion if ineligible |
/client-intake | After eligibility clears | Practice-area-specific case summary, cross-area issue spotting, urgency triage |
/draft [doc] | Need a first draft | Practice-area template filled from case notes — starting point, not final |
/memo | Internal case analysis | IRAC-format scaffold with research gaps flagged |
/research-start [issue] | Starting legal research | Roadmap: statutes, case law areas, agency guidance, search terms — leads, not authorities |
/status [audience] | Updating someone on a case | Summary tailored to client / internal / court / funder |
/client-letter [type] | Routine correspondence | Appointment confirm, doc request, status update, referral letter from templates |
/deadlines | Tracking case deadlines | Add, cross-case rollup with 14/7/3/1-day warnings, overdue flags |
/case-transfer | Moving a case to another staffer | Per-case handoff memo |
/client-comms-log | Logging a call/email | Append-only per-case communication record |
For each command: what it does, what it explicitly doesn't do, what you verify before relying on it.
If the office has the LawDroid LIA-MCP or VIA-MCP connectors enabled (check the integrations table in CLAUDE.md), mention:
If a caller spoke with LIA before this matter landed on your desk, or called the office's intake line and went through VIA, the eligibility-screening and intake skills can pull that conversation directly. You won't ask the person to repeat what they already told us — you'll start from where they left off and ask only the follow-ups needed to complete the screen.
Low-stakes. Fake prospective client. Real tools.
Exercise 1 — Practice eligibility screen:
Here's a fake caller scenario: [practice-area-appropriate hypothetical — e.g., for a housing-focused office, "Marisol, single mother of two, just received a 5-day notice to quit. Works part-time at $14/hour, takes home about $1,700/month. Lives in Greensboro. Her landlord is a regional management company — RealCo Properties. She mentions her cousin used to work for RealCo. She's a U-visa applicant."]
Run
/eligibility-screeningand screen me as if I'm Marisol. I'll answer as she would. At the end, look at the funder-source matrix — what does the screen recommend? Did it spot the U-visa § 1626 exception? Did it flag the conflict-check on RealCo? Where does it route?
Debrief: what the screen caught, what you should have probed deeper on, what the office's managing attorney will want to see before approving acceptance.
Exercise 2 — Practice intake:
Assuming the office accepts Marisol's case under [funding source], run
/client-intake. The screening output should propagate — you shouldn't be re-asking her income or about the U-visa.What did the intake spot beyond the housing issue? Did it flag the U-visa as a possible cross-area matter requiring referral or supplementation? Did it flag the funder restriction propagated from screening?
The point: intake builds on screening, doesn't restart it.
Exercise 3 — Practice draft:
Using Marisol's intake, run
/draft eviction-answer. You'll get a first draft.Read it. What's right? What's wrong? What would you change before showing it to [managing attorney]? Did it flag any [FUNDING RESTRICTION] concerns from the funder source she was accepted under? Did it use the local caption format the office uploaded, or default to state form?
The point: the draft is competent, not final. The staffer learns to read critically.
Exercise 4 — Research roadmap (staff attorney / paralegal only):
Run
/research-start "habitability defense to eviction in [state]". You'll get a roadmap — statutes, case law areas, agency guidance, search terms.None of those citations are verified. That's on purpose. Pick one statute and tell me how you'd verify it's current.
The habits that matter most in legal aid practice:
/research-start gives leads, not authorities. Use CourtListener or Descrybe before relying on a cite.[FUNDING RESTRICTION: ...] flag means stop and check — usually with the managing attorney, sometimes with the office's compliance lead. Don't strip flags to make things tidier.[UNCERTAIN: ...] or [VERIFY: ...] flag is a prompt to investigate or ask the managing attorney, not to delete the flag.That's it. You've run an eligibility screen, a structured intake, a first draft, and a research roadmap. Your first real prospective client will feel similar, except the person is real and the managing attorney is reviewing your work.
The one-page reference card:
/legal-aid:onboard --card. Print it, pin it. The first week or two, you'll glance at it more than you expect.
/legal-aid:onboard --cardGenerate a one-page reference card. Contents:
Printable. One page. Hand it out on day one.
/onboard does not write to CLAUDE.md. Only /cold-start-interview and /build-guide do./onboard --card again to get the updated reference card. The walkthrough itself can be re-run with no penalty.