Skill reference: legal-memo

Skill reference: legal-memo

The legal-memo skill authors one document genre: 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. This reference describes what that document type is, how the skill produces one, when it earns its place, and the provenance behind it.

Property	Value
Authors	A predictive legal memorandum
Purpose group	Regulated & compliance reports
MIF conceptType	semantic
Target MIF level	3
Primary source	Standard U.S. law-practice predictive-memo convention, with Bluebook practitioner citation style

What this document type is

A legal memo is a predictive internal analysis: given a set of facts and a governing body of law, it states the most likely outcome and then earns that prediction by working through the reasoning that produced it. Its defining trait is the IRAC sub-structure inside the Discussion — Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion, applied once per discrete issue — which is what makes the document a legal memo rather than a narrative brief or an advocacy piece. The memo also carries a standard front-matter heading (To/From/Date/Re), a Question Presented framed as a single yes/no question, a Brief Answer, a neutral Statement of Facts, an overall Conclusion, and a back-matter table of authorities citing every source in Bluebook practitioner style.

This is distinct from a single already-made, immutable technical decision (an adr), which has no predictive legal question and no authority to weigh, and from a conformance finding against a named regulatory standard rather than a prediction of how a legal question resolves.

How the skill produces one

legal-memo is a genre skill: it carries the predictive-memo pattern as durable instructions plus exemplars, and writes the artifact over a MIF floor so the result is at once a human-readable memo and a machine-conformant unit.

• Pattern, made operational. The skill encodes the seven-part shape — front matter, Question Presented, Brief Answer, Statement of Facts, Discussion (IRAC per issue), Conclusion, back matter — and treats IRAC as the genre’s single most load-bearing required element: a Discussion without identifiable Issue/Rule/Application/Conclusion per issue is not conformant. It requires exhaustive coverage of the supplied authority, honest acknowledgment of adverse authority, and hedged predictions where authorities disagree, and it forbids fabricated citations.
• Exemplars set the bar. Like every genre in the suite it ships good-l1.md (the MIF Level-1 floor), good.md (the Level-3 target), bad.md (a counter-example whose Discussion has no IRAC sub-structure), and evals/evals.json. The check-exemplars gate proves good-l1.md validates at L1 and good.md at Level 3.
• MIF projection. The document is authored with MIF frontmatter (via the shared mif-frontmatter substrate) and a conceptType of semantic, reflecting that the memo is declarative legal analysis and its rationale, not a time-bound event or a step sequence. mif-validate proves the Markdown ↔ JSON-LD round-trip is lossless before the document is considered done.

When it is beneficial

Reach for legal-memo when a supervising attorney or internal decision-maker must act on a prediction of how a legal question resolves on a concrete set of facts, and the reasoning chain from facts to rule to application needs to survive scrutiny before anyone relies on it. It is the right genre whenever the value is in showing the work issue by issue, with adverse authority surfaced rather than hidden.

Do not use it when the decision is already made and only needs recording immutably with its drivers — that is an adr: no predictive legal question, no IRAC, no legal authority to weigh. Do not use it for a conformance finding against a named regulatory standard rather than an issue-by-issue legal prediction — that calls for a compliance-focused audit genre instead. Do not use it to narrate a settled record of what already happened; a legal memo predicts an outcome, it does not recount history.

Example

A memo titled “Hendricks Non-Compete / Client-List Question” asks whether a former account manager who solicits clients using a list compiled solely from public trade directories breaches a non-solicitation covenant. The Brief Answer predicts likely no. The Discussion runs two IRAC cycles: Issue A asks whether the list is a protectable trade secret, citing the Uniform Trade Secrets Act and the Restatement (Third) of Unfair Competition to conclude it is not, because compilation effort alone does not establish secrecy; Issue B asks whether the covenant reaches solicitation built on non-confidential information, citing BDO Seidman v. Hirshberg to conclude the covenant is unlikely to be enforced absent a genuine protectable interest. The Conclusion recommends advising the client that an injunction carries a low probability of success, and the back matter lists all three authorities in a numbered table.

Provenance & citations

• Genre source — Bluebook practitioner citation style: the standard U.S. legal-citation authority, https://www.legalbluebook.com/; the skill instructs authors to verify the current edition live at authoring time rather than bake one in as settled fact.
• Skill provenance: authored by the legal-memo skill in the mif-docs plugin, https://github.com/modeled-information-format/mif-docs-plugin; the skill’s exemplars and evals/ define and verify the pattern.
• MIF conformance: the document projects to canonical JSON-LD under the MIF specification, https://mif-spec.dev, and is proven lossless by mif-validate.
• Index: this skill is one entry in the skills by purpose catalog; its closest sibling by contrast is adr, the immutable decision record this genre is not.