title: Contribute your legal experience
description: Help check whether a skill, workflow, or explanation actually supports the legal task it claims to — what to claim first, how the attestation works, and where review happens.
url: https://legalquants.github.io/lq-ai/contribute/lawyers/
checked-against: 671eab0d (2026-10-25)
status: draft
kind: how-to
sources: docs/contribute/lawyers.md, skills/CONTRIBUTING.md, docs/contribute/mini-prds/skill-acceptance-tests.md, .github/CODEOWNERS, CLAUDE.md, docs/adr/0024-jurisdiction-and-practice-area-expansion.md

Help check whether a skill, workflow or explanation supports the legal task it claims to support.

## Useful ways to help

Provide made-up examples, explain what a good result should contain and identify specific mistakes. Distinguish an unclear instruction from an incorrect AI answer or a missing app feature.

The single best first contribution is not drafting a new skill — it's **certifying an existing one**. Each of the ten skills the [acceptance-tests mini-PRD](https://github.com/LegalQuants/lq-ai/blob/671eab0d/docs/contribute/mini-prds/skill-acceptance-tests.md) tracks ships with a `test-plan.md` describing the scenarios it should handle; what none of them yet has is the acceptance pass — running the skill against real (anonymized) documents and recording whether the output meets the structural expectations the test plan describes. It's scoped at roughly half a day per skill, tracked as ten separate pull requests, and needs no coding. It's on [the contribution board](/lq-ai/contribute/board/).

## Prepare examples for sharing

Use material you are entitled to share. Remove identifying details and read through the whole example for information that could still reveal a client or matter.

## From proposal to review

The skill contribution process is claim, draft, attest, review and merge. Start with a task and jurisdiction you can assess, then provide example inputs and expected results.

Authoring a new skill is one path, and where it lands follows the community-skill routing guidance in [ADR 0024](https://github.com/LegalQuants/lq-ai/blob/671eab0d/docs/adr/0024-jurisdiction-and-practice-area-expansion.md): a community work-product skill goes to `legalquants/lq-skills`, while `lq-ai`'s own `skills/` directory holds the curated first-party set. A change to an existing first-party skill — a new regime for DPA Checklist Review, say — stays here; a new domain skill is a `lq-skills` contribution. [`skills/CONTRIBUTING.md`](/lq-ai/skills/attestation/) catalogs the candidates — new domain skills (settlement-agreement review, employment offer letter review, HIPAA BAA review), additional jurisdictions for the DPA Checklist Review skill, and structural patterns like a defined-terms consistency check. Read at least two existing starter skills in your practice area before drafting; the [skill-authoring on-ramp](/lq-ai/skills/author-your-first-skill/) walks through that in full.

If your practice diverges from a starter skill, forking is a supported outcome, not a failure — a fork can stay private to your deployment, come back as a named variant alongside the original (`msa-review-saas`, `msa-review-financial-services`), or come back as a PR against the original if it fixes a substantive issue.

Once you're ready to open a contribution: **Claim** on a tracking issue first, so two contributors don't duplicate the same skill. **Draft** the `SKILL.md`, any reference files, and at least one worked example. **Attest** in your pull request description — see [the attestation bar](/lq-ai/skills/attestation/#3-attest) for what that certification covers and how it decays. **Review** by a practicing attorney and an engineer, in parallel, before merge — legal-content review and engineering checks serve different purposes, and a contribution needs both.

Everything under this repository's `skills/` — the folder as a whole, not only individual skill folders, and holding the curated first-party set per ADR 0024 — is routed by [CODEOWNERS](https://github.com/LegalQuants/lq-ai/blob/671eab0d/.github/CODEOWNERS) to both the maintainer team and the project's practicing-attorney reviewers. A skill pull request is not mergeable on maintainer approval alone; it needs the attorney reviewer's sign-off on the substance and an engineer's sign-off on the operational shape — frontmatter completeness, whether the workflow runs cleanly, whether the worked examples are actually worked.

## Next

- [Find something to work on](/lq-ai/contribute/board/)
- [What counts as a reviewed skill?](/lq-ai/skills/attestation/)