Drafting is a discipline, not typing.

Anyone can put a policy into sentences. The harder question is what those sentences will be held to mean in five years, read by a judge who was not in the room. Most bills that fail, fail there.

I spent over twenty-five years drafting for the House of Representatives in the Massachusetts General Court. An outside lawyer usually sees a bill once. In House Counsel you see it drafted, amended on the floor, engrossed, enacted — and then, years later, construed by a court working only from the text. That is where you learn which choices hold and which quietly do not.

The tools on this site came out of that. A detector for the words and phrases that cause trouble later. The Supreme Judicial Court Style Manual made answerable. The path through chapter 62 that the statute itself never draws. You do not build these unless those problems have cost you.

Why Claude

I built the system on Claude because the work is reading, and reading closely is what the model is good at when it is told exactly what to look for. Each skill is a set of instructions a senior drafter would give a junior one: which chapters define this term, which canons the court reaches for first, what a paste-up must align down to the subclause. Written down that way, the instructions run the same on the fourteen-hundredth amendment as on the first. The judgment about what to do with the result stays with a lawyer. That is the division of labor, and I have found no reason to move the line.

The name

In the General Court a bill is examined before engrossment to ensure that it is correctly drawn. It is the standard I worked under, and it is the standard I hold a client's draft to.