Inside Lawve Skills

Supply follows regulation. Demand follows reasoning.

Compliance is the largest shelf on Lawve: 48 skills, or 18% of the catalog. Add data protection, technology law and financial regulation and a third of everything published is about following rules. The EUR-Lex · EU AI Act (opens in a new tab), EUR-Lex · GDPR (opens in a new tab), NIS2 and DORA turn legal work into obligations, which are easy to write down as checklists.

The laws inside the skills tell the same story. We searched every file for references to major legal instruments. The GDPR appears in 82 skills, almost a third of the catalog, and 63 of those aren't data-protection skills at all. They're contract reviewers, research assistants and AI-governance tools that treat the GDPR as background knowledge. Six of the ten most-referenced instruments are EU law.

Usage pulls the other way. Legal research is 9.6% of the catalog but 22% of downloads since March. That's 2.3 times its share. Legal drafting is close behind at twice its share. Compliance, legal operations and rights-focused skills all get fewer downloads than their catalog share would suggest.

We read this as a signal about demand. The skills people take help with the hardest, least routine part of the job: finding the right authority, testing an argument, drafting under pressure. Compliance skills are often highly specific (one regulation, one article), so each one serves a smaller audience. The next great compliance skill should probably be broader.

Supply also follows geography. 59% of skills come from authors based in Europe and 30% from the United States. The EU is the most-targeted jurisdiction, ahead of the US and the UK. 86% of skills are written in English and 10% in French. A third of skills name no jurisdiction at all. Those tend to be methods (how to review, how to verify, how to write) rather than statements of the law.

A legal skill reads like a memo

We sorted all 3,094 files by what they do. The typical Lawve skill is a SKILL.md of about 2,100 words, roughly eight double-spaced pages of instructions, plus a binder: statutes, checklists, precedents, glossaries and house style. Only 16% of skills contain any executable code.

The binder is where most of the knowledge sits. Across the catalog there are about five words of reference material for every word of instructions (3.6 million against 0.7 million). The biggest skills are legal translation lexicons of nearly half a million words each: whole bilingual dictionaries of legal terms, packaged so an assistant can look terms up rather than guess.

The best skills are organized like a good memo with an appendix. 59% of skills point from their SKILL.md to specific reference files, so the assistant opens the appendix only when a question calls for it. The other 41% carry no reference material at all and put everything in one document. That's fine for a method, but risky for anything that states the law.

Written like contracts, tested like drafts

Lawyers write skills the way they write agreements. In English skills, must and do not each appear about 1.7 times per thousand words. That's more often than may or should. Taken together, obligations and prohibitions outnumber permissive and advisory verbs by more than two to one.

Most of those prohibitions guard against invention. 92% of English skills talk about sources, citations or verification. One in six spells out a rule against making things up. The things they forbid inventing most are citations and authorities, then facts and evidence, then numbers, dates and deadlines, then URLs.

But a rule in the text proves nothing on its own. When we compare the safeguards skills ask for with the ones they ship, the gap is wide. Nearly every skill tells the model to check its sources. One in ten includes an evaluation that checks the skill itself.

The dating gap matters as much as the testing gap. Law has a shelf life. A skill that summarizes the AI Act's timeline or a French code article is right on a given date and wrong later. Only 34% of skills say anywhere when their content was last checked, and just 22 keep a changelog. A human lawyer would never hand over a memo without a date on it.

What this means if you build legal skills

1. Ship an evaluation

   Only 28 of 271 skills include evals or tests. Twenty prompts with known correct answers (the right article, the right deadline, the case that doesn't exist) would do more for trust than any "never hallucinate" line.

2. Date your law

   Put a "verified as of" line in the SKILL.md and keep a changelog. When the law moves, users will know which version of your skill still matches it.

3. Write the memo, file the binder

   Keep the SKILL.md focused on method and judgment. Move statutes, thresholds and checklists into reference files the skill points to by name, so the assistant loads the law only when it needs it and you can update the law without rewriting the method.

4. Build methods

   Compliance is well stocked. Research, reasoning and drafting methods are scarce compared with demand. The most-used skills teach an assistant how to think through a problem.

5. Fill the empty shelves

   Employment law has 4 skills, corporate law 4, IP 2, immigration 2 and criminal law 1. Outside English and French, there are only nine skills in any other language. These are wide-open areas for the next author.

If you have a method that works in your practice, publish it on Lawve.