Most attorneys who try to use AI for motion drafting do it wrong. They open a chat window, type "write a motion for summary judgment in my case," and then spend three hours correcting hallucinated citations, fabricated procedural rules, and a tone that reads like a first-year associate wrote it under sedation.
That is not this protocol.
This protocol treats Claude as a drafting tool, not a legal research tool. You supply the legal knowledge. Claude handles the prose production. The distinction matters for professional responsibility reasons and for quality reasons. What follows is a six-step workflow that works across civil litigation, appellate practice, administrative filings, and arbitration submissions.
Step 1: The Attorney-Authored Outline Comes First
Before Claude touches anything, you write a structured outline using IRAC for each argument: the Issue, the governing Rule, your Application of that rule to the facts, and the Conclusion. One IRAC block per argument. If your motion has three independent grounds, you have three blocks.
This outline is your work product. It is the distillation of your legal analysis. Claude's job is to draft prose that gives your outline sentences, transitions, and paragraph structure. Nothing in the output will be more analytically sound than what you put into the outline. If the outline is thin, the draft will be thin.
Attorneys who skip this step end up reviewing a document they did not actually plan, which means they are editing for substance rather than for style. That is slower and more error-prone than writing the draft themselves.
Step 2: Attorney-Supplied Authority Only
Before any drafting session opens, you prepare a research memo with every case, statute, regulation, and rule you intend to cite. Each citation is verified in Westlaw or Lexis. You include the holding, the relevant quoted language, and the jurisdiction.
Claude does not originate citations. This is not a suggestion. AI models generate plausible-sounding but fabricated case names at a rate that no production workflow can absorb. See our companion post on AI citation hallucinations in legal filings for the documented failure modes. The rule in this protocol is simple: if the attorney did not put the citation into the session, it does not appear in the draft. The same verification discipline applies when using Claude for negotiation preparation. See the Claude AI settlement negotiation protocol for how this works in the demand and negotiation phase.
Step 3: The Clean-Room Fact Record
Create a sanitized version of the relevant facts before the AI session begins. Replace client names with neutral identifiers: "Plaintiff," "Defendant," "the Employer," "the Contractor." Replace opposing party names the same way. Remove case numbers, court names, and any identifying information specific enough to reconstruct the matter.
You reconstruct the real names and case caption when you finalize the document outside the AI session, before filing. This is the same clean-room discipline covered in the demand letter protocol. One standard, applied consistently, reduces the surface area for confidentiality exposure across every workflow.
Step 4: Section-by-Section Drafting
Do not ask Claude to write a complete brief in a single session. Brief-length documents drafted in one pass drift in tone, lose thread coherence across sections, and produce argument sections that do not consistently track back to the facts you stated earlier.
Instead, run a separate session for each major section: caption and introduction, statement of facts, each argument section individually, and conclusion. The Leveraged Attorney course covers this section-by-section architecture in Module 5, including how to pass a context summary forward when moving between sessions so the later sections remain consistent with earlier ones.
Here are the prompt templates for the core sections:
PROMPT: Write the statement of facts section of a [motion type] motion based on this outline: [OUTLINE]. Use only the facts I have listed. Do not infer additional facts or fill gaps. Use neutral, precise language. No advocacy in the facts section. Output in paragraph form, approximately [X] words.
PROMPT: Write the argument section for [ISSUE] using only these authorities: [LIST FROM ATTORNEY RESEARCH MEMO]. Structure the argument using the following IRAC outline: [OUTLINE]. Each citation must appear exactly as I have written it. Do not add any cases, statutes, or rules that I have not listed.
Both prompts include explicit constraints on the scope of Claude's contribution. If Claude introduces a citation you did not supply, stop the session, discard the output, and rerun with a more explicit instruction at the top of the prompt.
Step 5: The Opposing Counsel Stress Test
Once a full draft exists, run this prompt before you read the draft for filing preparation:
PROMPT: Now argue the opposite position in this brief and identify the weakest points in the moving party's argument. Be specific about which assertions are unsupported, which facts could be characterized differently, and which legal standards leave room for a competing interpretation.
This prompt surfaces what opposing counsel will argue before you file. It does not require you to agree with any of the critiques. Some will be genuine structural weaknesses you should address. Others will be reachable counterarguments you can pre-empt in a reply brief. A few will be noise.
The value is in making that judgment call before opposing counsel does it in their response. The Opposing Counsel Simulator module in the Leveraged Attorney course covers how to run this technique across different motion types, including summary judgment, motions to dismiss, and preliminary injunction briefing, where the standards create different vulnerability profiles.
Step 6: Final Review Protocol
After drafting and the stress test, the attorney reads the full document. Read it aloud or use a text-to-speech tool to have it read back. Listening to a brief reveals tonal problems and sentence-length issues that silent reading misses. You are checking for three things: accuracy of every factual statement against your sanitized fact record, accuracy of every citation against your research memo, and a tone consistent with your filing posture.
The filed document contains no reference to AI involvement in the drafting process, nor should it. The work product is yours. You authored the outline, supplied all legal authority, conducted the review, and bear professional responsibility for the contents. AI was a drafting instrument, the same way dictation software or a template library is a drafting instrument.
What This Protocol Does Not Cover
This protocol does not address AI-assisted legal research. The research step, citation verification, and authority selection remain entirely attorney-driven. If you are relying on any AI tool to generate your initial list of cases or statutes, you are outside the boundaries of this workflow and operating under a different risk profile. The citation hallucination problem is documented, ongoing, and not specific to any single AI provider.
It also does not address emergency filings or situations where turnaround time compresses the review steps. This workflow requires time for the outline, time for each section, time for the stress test, and time for final review. If the filing deadline does not allow all six steps, the steps that get cut are the drafting sessions with Claude, not the research or review steps.
A Note on Jurisdiction-Specific Rules
Local rules on page limits, caption formats, certificate requirements, and electronic filing specifications are not covered by Claude's training data in a reliable way. Always verify local rules directly against the current court rules before finalizing any filing. The citation discipline in Step 2 applies to procedural rules as well: if you did not verify it and include it yourself, it does not go in the motion.
The protocol above works in federal court, state court, administrative tribunals, and arbitration because it is built on attorney judgment, not AI judgment. The practice area does not change the structure. The motion type does not change the structure. What changes is the research memo you bring into Step 2 and the outline you write in Step 1. Everything downstream of those two inputs is prose production, which is where Claude is genuinely useful.