Quick reference · AI & risk
What AI Is Actually Good At — and What It Isn’t
Cut through the pitch. Where AI is genuinely strong, where it is dangerous, a strong-fit vs. high-risk table, and the questions to ask any vendor.
The library
Every tool here exists because the same situations keep repeating across legal departments. Each one is short, printable, and written to be used — on the day the problem shows up, not after a research project. Take what helps; share it freely.
Nothing matches that search.
AI & emerging risk
Adopting AI creates new legal exposure — in hiring, contracts, governance, and the courtroom. These tools separate what AI is genuinely good at from what you’re being sold, and help you put the guardrails in before something goes wrong, not after.
Framework · AI & risk
AI in Hiring: An Employment-Law Risk Review
Deploying AI in recruiting and hiring without inheriting a discrimination charge: adverse-impact testing under privilege, the ADA accommodation path, vendor diligence, and the audit and notice rules emerging across jurisdictions.
Checklist · AI & risk
Employee Monitoring and AI Surveillance
AI-driven monitoring — productivity scoring, communications and sentiment analysis, video and badge analytics, flight-risk scoring — without buying notice, biometric, NLRA, ADA, and discrimination exposure. The risk is rarely the watching; it’s the missing notice and the score treated as proof.
Checklist · AI & risk
A Workplace Generative-AI Use Policy: A Build Checklist
What an employee generative-AI acceptable-use policy actually needs to be usable, not just restrictive: approved tools, the one bright-line data rule, IP, verification, prohibited uses, disclosure, privilege, security, and enforcement.
Framework · AI & risk
AI Governance: Inventory, Risk-Tiering, and Oversight
Stand up proportionate AI governance a lean team can run: inventory shadow and embedded AI, risk-tier each use, gate new tools, scale controls, monitor, and track the law.
Checklist · AI & risk
Buying an AI Tool: A Vendor Contract Risk Checklist
The AI-specific contract terms a standard SaaS template misses — training on your data, output ownership, IP-infringement indemnity, accuracy reps, model-change notice, auditability, and exit.
Checklist · AI & risk
AI in Litigation: A Hallucination and Verification Protocol
A verification protocol for AI-assisted litigation work — for teams using AI themselves and supervising outside counsel who do. Every citation, quotation, and fact checked against the primary source before anything is filed.
Labor & employment defense
For the moments HR escalates: a charge, a complaint, a leave request that has outgrown the policy, a termination that doesn’t feel routine, a workforce reduction on a deadline.
Checklist · Employment
Responding to an EEOC Charge: The First 72 Hours
Deadlines, the litigation hold, carrier notice, decision-maker identification, and the retaliation briefing — sequenced for the first three days.
Framework · Employment
Termination Risk Review: Nine Questions Before You Decide
The pre-termination review many in-house teams run from memory, written down: the reason, the file, consistency, timing, and the mechanics that create claims on their own.
Decision tree · Employment
The FMLA–ADA Interplay: A Decision Tree
Where leave law actually gets dangerous: what happens when FMLA runs out, when it never applied, and why automatic termination at week twelve buys ADA claims.
Framework · Employment
Running the Interactive Process: An ADA Accommodation Playbook
A six-step framework for running the disability-accommodation interactive process under the ADA — from recognizing a request to monitoring the accommodation — with a Michigan PWDCRA overlay covering broader coverage, the statutory cost-cap tiers, and the 182-day written-notice defense.
Quick reference · Employment
Workplace Investigations: A Quick Reference
Intake to closing memo: choosing the investigator (and what that does to privilege), interim measures, interview order, credibility factors, and the file you should end with.
Checklist · Employment
Reduction in Force: A Compliance Checklist
Selection criteria, adverse-impact review under privilege, WARN math, OWBPA release requirements, and the communications plan — in the order they need to happen.
Decision tree · Employment
Is This Role Really Exempt? An FLSA Classification Audit
A four-gate decision tree and self-audit for testing whether a role is truly exempt from FLSA overtime — salary basis, salary level, and the duties test — plus the classic misclassifications and where state law is stricter.
Framework · Employment
Employee or Independent Contractor? A Classification Framework
Worker classification tested against the several legal standards that apply at once — IRS, FLSA, state ABC tests, and more — with a red-flags checklist to run against your current roster.
Framework · Employment
Will This Non-Compete Hold? A Restrictive Covenant Review
Assess whether a non-compete, non-solicit, or confidentiality covenant is likely enforceable — the four factors courts weigh, the state-law variables that now decide the question, and the narrower tools that travel better.
Checklist · Employment
The Departing Employee: Protecting the Business on the Way Out
A phased checklist for when a high-access employee resigns — especially toward a competitor or customer. Covers covenant review, forensic imaging before any device is touched, access investigation, and relationship security.
Checklist · Employment
Hiring From a Competitor: Onboarding Without Inheriting a Lawsuit
How to onboard a hire leaving a competitor without importing a trade-secret or breach-of-covenant suit: diligence on their covenants, a written no-documents rule before day one, and a clean, documented start.
Checklist · Employment
Severance and Releases: What a Defensible Agreement Needs
What a separation agreement and release must contain to actually hold up — consideration, scope, OWBPA formalities for employees 40+, the NLRB limits on confidentiality and non-disparagement, and the practical terms.
Commercial litigation
For disputes between businesses: the demand letter, the contract everyone suddenly reads closely, and the decision — made deliberately or by drift — about whether to fight.
Framework · Commercial
Demand Letter Triage: The First Week
An eight-step sequence for any serious demand: deadlines, preservation, insurance notice, the contract itself, and choosing a response posture on purpose.
Framework · Commercial
Early Case Assessment: Twelve Questions Before You Litigate
The questions that decide whether a case is worth bringing or worth settling — exposure, documents, witnesses, forum, fees, counterclaims, and the exit ramps.
Checklist · Commercial
Contract Disputes: The Pre-Suit Checklist
Conditions precedent hiding in the contract — notice and cure, ADR escalators, forum clauses, shortened limitations — plus the performance question: keep going or stop?
Quick reference · Commercial
Contract Risk Review: The Key Terms, Triaged
A fast triage of an inbound commercial contract: the clauses that move the most risk, in the order to hit them, with what to check and a typical fallback ask for each, anchored by a clause-by-clause reference table.
Decision tree · Commercial
NDA Triage: Green, Yellow, Red
A green/yellow/red system for inbound NDAs: which ones a trained business owner can sign under delegation, which need a quick counsel look, and which two terms turn a routine NDA red on sight.
Quick reference · Commercial
Indemnification and Limitation of Liability: Reading the Risk-Shifting Clauses
A guide to indemnification and limitation of liability — scope, defense control, the cap and damages exclusions, and the carve-outs that should stay uncapped. With a reference table and negotiation fallbacks.
Framework · Commercial
Insurance Tender: Getting Your Carrier to Defend
A seven-step framework for getting your insurer to defend a claim or lawsuit: inventory every responsive policy, tender promptly, check additional-insured status under others’ policies, and handle reservation-of-rights letters.
Either way, both ways
The tools that apply the moment any dispute becomes foreseeable, employment or commercial.
Checklist · Cross-practice
Litigation Hold: Trigger to Release
When the duty to preserve attaches, what a defensible hold covers, the sources teams forget — texts, Slack, CCTV loops, departing employees — and how holds end.
Checklist · Cross-practice
Served With a Subpoena You’re Not a Party To
Your company isn’t a party, but a subpoena just landed. A nine-step sequence for non-parties: calendar the real deadline, preserve, object in time, assert privilege, shift costs, and clear third-party notice obligations before producing.
Quick reference · Cross-practice
Privilege That Holds Up In-House
How to keep attorney-client privilege intact when in-house counsel wears both legal and business hats: the primary-purpose test, Upjohn warnings, work product, the waiver traps, and why over-designation backfires.
Framework · Cross-practice
The 30(b)(6) Deposition: Preparing the Company Witness
A step-by-step framework for preparing a Rule 30(b)(6) corporate representative: scrutinizing the notice, designating by knowledge, meeting the duty to prepare, and keeping the company from binding itself by accident.
Framework · Cross-practice
Records Retention: A Schedule That Survives Litigation
A framework for building or auditing a records-retention schedule that holds up in litigation: inventory systems, map legal requirements, dispose consistently and on the record, and yield the moment a litigation hold attaches.
Checklist · Cross-practice
Data Incident: The First 48 Hours
What to do in the first two days after a suspected data-security incident: activate the team, contain without destroying forensic evidence, engage counsel and the cyber insurer, preserve logs, and scope before you speak.
How to use these
Use them in your own work freely — print them, drop them into your playbooks, adapt them to your policies. If you republish or redistribute them, the license (CC BY-SA 4.0) asks only that you keep the credit and share under the same terms. They describe patterns, not your facts: state law varies more than most teams expect, and several of these areas (non-competes, leave laws, final-pay rules) are moving targets. When a real matter is on the table, run the specifics past your counsel.