Claude legal skills give an agent a method for legal work: contract review, employment questions, data protection, patent drafting, bookkeeping rules for one country. We reviewed seven packs and gave every one a caveats verdict. The reasons are three facts about this field: the output is a draft, the rules depend on the jurisdiction, and several packs are very large.
Treat anything below as a starting draft for a lawyer. The packs we read say the same: Anthropic’s own legal suite describes every output as a draft for attorney review, and the patent plugin says it is not legal advice.
What to look for in Claude legal skills
Jurisdiction comes first. A skill for French accounting or German procedure is useless in the US, and a generic skill hides which law it assumes. Next, check how the content was checked. Large libraries differ in review: one tax library says most of its skills lack accountant review, and one German collection calls itself an experiment.
Look at size. Some packs hold hundreds or thousands of skills, and installing all of them crowds the agent’s skill list. Choose the practice area you need. Check connectors too. Some connectors in Anthropic’s suite depend on paid third party subscriptions for contract and document tools.
Last, check the license and security status. Of the seven, 4 are marked “review” and 3 have broad access. One pack uses a Commons Clause license that restricts commercial redistribution. See our security page for the labels. The official advice on third party skills applies doubly when the skill may see client documents: read the bundled files and check for connections to outside services.
Recommended legal skills
- Claude for Legal is Anthropic’s suite of 151 skills for in-house practice areas. Each one runs an interview and saves a practice profile under
~/.claude/plugins/config. It is Apache-2.0. Several connectors need paid subscriptions, and the setup is heavy for a quick clause check. - Awesome Legal Skills is a community library of about 280 skills in several languages, covering contracts, GDPR, litigation and the AI Act. Quality varies by author and so do licenses. We label it broad access because two skills pre-approve unrestricted Bash and one reads your Claude Code session logs to draft time entries.
- Paperasse is six French language skills for accounting, tax, notary, audit and co-ownership paperwork, with dozens of reference files and about 26 eval files. Its Qonto upload defaults to a dry run. Useful if you work under French rules, and only with a professional checking the result.
- Claude Patent Creator covers US and EPO patent work with a local MCP server. It is a beta with a heavy local setup, and we label it broad access. The server code was not in the files we could read.
- Claude für deutsches Recht is an openly licensed German law collection reporting about 19,000 skill files. The author calls it an experiment, and the skills are short and overlapping. Install individual skills, never the whole collection.
Closely related areas have their own pages: finance skills cover accounting and tax, and documents cover contract files. The category page lists all seven, and how we review explains the scoring.