Draft Review · an engagement
Catch it in the draft, not in the Appeals Court.
A bill, amendment or home rule petition, read cold, the way a judge will read it. Every ambiguity is put to you as a decision — fix it, define it, or keep it on purpose — and every decision is written down.
Send me a draft. You get back the text with every problem either fixed or knowingly kept, a one-page briefing a legislator will actually read, and a comparison that shows exactly what changed and why.
Most drafting trouble is not exotic. A vote handed to a body the statute gives no role. A thirty-day clock that starts when something is "made public," with no one saying by whom. "A majority" that never says of whom. Each reads fine to the person who wrote it, because the writer knows what was meant. A court only has the words.
Not every ambiguity is a mistake. Sometimes a word is left open because that is what it took to pass the bill, or because the agency should fill it in. The review does not take that choice away. It makes sure the choice is made on purpose, by the sponsor, with the likely readings in view — and that the record says so.
What you receive
One page on top. Everything else underneath.
The sponsor reads page one. Counsel and staff who want to check the work read the rest.
The revised text
Clean, and checked word for word against what you sent. Where a change could go either way, you decide it; nothing is rewritten on the quiet.
The briefing
One page. What the bill does in two or three sentences, its working parts in plain English, what changed from the earlier draft, and the drafting notes a legislator should know before standing up for it — including anything deliberately left as is.
The comparison
First, each change in a single row: the old words, the new words, and why. Then the two drafts side by side, split by what each part of the text does — who decides, the vote, the hearing, the notice — so a reader compares a line with a line, not a paragraph with a paragraph. Changed phrases are highlighted in both columns. Nothing is struck through, because in a bill a strike means something.
The analysis record
For counsel. Every issue found, the decision taken on it, and the language adopted. An issue kept on purpose stays visible with its reason; an issue dismissed carries the reason it did not apply. Nothing drops out silently.
How it is done
A sequence of checks, each with a job.
Each check is written down as a Claude skill and runs the same way every time. The cheap mechanical checks run first, so they do not muddy the harder judgments that follow. Claude runs them. I run Claude, and I read everything before it leaves.
The phrase check
A mechanical pass for the phrases courts struggle to bound — "related to," "initially," "notwithstanding any other provision of law." The same check is open to anyone on this site.
The ambiguity scan
Application 1 checks every substantive term against roughly 15,800 definitions in the General Laws and the regulations: terms defined differently in different chapters, regulations that narrow or widen a statute, and terms the bill uses without defining. Then the chapter being amended is read against the draft, for the problems no database can see — a body named in the bill that the statute gives no role, a scope that quietly leaves something out.
Your decisions
Each issue comes to you with the options: add a definition, point to an existing one, keep the ambiguity on purpose, or set the issue aside with a reason. An ambiguity serious enough to change outcomes cannot simply be waved through; keeping it takes a written answer to the strongest case against it.
New definitions, scored
Any definition added is scored for what it covers, what it wrongly sweeps in, how clearly it reads, and whether it collides with a definition already on the books — and revised until it scores as strong.
The editor's checklist
Citations and cross-references checked against the current General Laws, numbers and style against the Legislative Research and Drafting Manual. Points left as drafted are listed in the briefing, not buried.
My read
I read the briefing and the comparison as the client will, and read the revised text against the original one more time. This is the step that cannot be delegated.
What it is not
A second reader, not the decision-maker.
The policy is the sponsor's. The review tells you what the words will be taken to mean and where they could be read another way; it does not tell you what the bill should do. Every choice in the record is yours, and the record says whose it was.
Drafts you send stay confidential. Nothing from a review is published or used as an example without your permission.
Request a review
Send the text.
Tell me the bill or draft, the stage it is at, whether there is an earlier version to compare against, what it is meant to do, and who will read the result.
Correspondence does not create an attorney-client relationship. Nothing on this page is legal advice.