Verified against ChatGPT · 2026-08-14
Spot the legal issues buried in a messy fact pattern before you take it to a lawyer
Reads a real-world situation you describe and identifies which legal issues it might implicate, framed explicitly as issue-spotting to prepare for a lawyer conversation, never as an answer to whether you're in the right.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
Read the situation below and spot which legal issues it might raise. This is issue-spotting to help me prepare for a conversation with a lawyer — not an assessment of who's right, who's liable, or what the outcome would be. SITUATION A former employee started a competing business using a client list they had access to during employment; no signed non-compete, but there was a confidentiality agreement. WHO I AM IN THIS SITUATION I'm the former employer. WHAT I'M TRYING TO FIGURE OUT Whether this is worth pursuing at all, and what I should have ready to show a lawyer. WHAT I'VE ALREADY DONE, IF ANYTHING Sent a cease-and-desist email myself before thinking to consult a lawyer. ISSUE-SPOTTING RULES Go through the fact pattern and name every area of law this situation could plausibly touch — contract, employment, IP, tort, regulatory, or others — based on what actually happened, not a generic list of areas that come up in situations like this in general. For each issue you spot, state the specific fact in the situation that triggers it, so I can see why you flagged it rather than just a bare label. Note where a single fact could cut multiple ways depending on details you don't have — issue-spotting means surfacing possibilities, not narrowing to the one you think is most likely, since a lawyer needs the full set of angles, not your best guess pre-filtered. Flag explicitly which facts, if you had them, would change which issues actually matter here — this tells me what to find out or clarify before or during the lawyer conversation. WHAT NOT TO DO Do not state who is likely liable, whether any action taken was lawful, or what the likely outcome would be — none of that is issue-spotting, all of it is legal judgment you're not positioned to make from a fact pattern alone. Do not recommend a specific legal strategy or course of action; recommend, at most, what to ask a lawyer. OUTPUT FORMAT 1. Table: Legal area potentially implicated | Triggering fact | Why it's uncertain / what would change it. 2. A short list of facts worth clarifying before or during the lawyer conversation. 3. A closing note stating this is issue-spotting to prepare for a conversation with a lawyer, not legal advice or an assessment of your position, and a qualified lawyer should be consulted before you rely on any of these flagged issues to make a decision or take action.
Customize
Optional — swap in your own details for the highlighted parts above.
Why this works
Issue-spotting is a genuinely different task from legal advice, and the difference lives entirely in whether the output narrows to a conclusion or stays open across possibilities — a model that isn't explicitly told to surface multiple angles will naturally converge on the single most likely-sounding issue and present it with more confidence than the fact pattern alone actually supports, which is the opposite of what someone preparing for a lawyer conversation needs, since the lawyer's actual value is often in the angles the client didn't think to ask about. Requiring each flagged issue to cite the specific triggering fact rather than stand as a bare label keeps the exercise anchored to what's actually in the fact pattern instead of a generic "situations like this often involve" list, and it gives the person reading the output a way to judge for themselves whether the flag makes sense given what they know that wasn't in the prompt. Explicitly asking what additional facts would change which issues matter is what makes this genuinely useful pre-consultation prep rather than a parlor trick — a lawyer's first move in an actual consultation is almost always to ask for missing facts, and surfacing that need in advance means the person walks in already knowing what to have ready, shortening the expensive part of the actual legal conversation. The hard prohibition on stating likely liability, lawfulness, or outcome is the core safety mechanism distinguishing this from unauthorized legal advice: issue-spotting from an incomplete, one-sided fact pattern cannot responsibly produce a liability judgment, because the model has only heard one side and none of the actual applicable law's nuance, and pretending otherwise would hand someone a false sense of their position's strength or weakness before they've even talked to someone qualified to assess it.
What you get back
Legal area: Breach of confidentiality agreement — Triggering fact: employee had access to the client list under a signed confidentiality agreement — Uncertainty: depends on whether the client list meets the agreement's definition of confidential information, which you'd need to check against the actual document. Legal area: Trade secret misappropriation — Triggering fact: use of a client list to compete — Uncertainty: depends on whether reasonable steps were taken to keep the list secret, which is a factual question a lawyer would need more detail to assess. Facts to clarify: what does the confidentiality agreement's definition section actually say; did you take any steps to mark the list confidential. This is issue-spotting to prepare for a lawyer conversation, not legal advice — consult a qualified lawyer before taking any further action, including anything related to your cease-and-desist email.
Verified against
ChatGPT GPT-5.1 · 2026-08-14
Changelog
- 2026-08-14 — Initial publish, verified against ChatGPT GPT-5.1.
Need this built into your business?
If a prompt isn't enough — what Scult builds, built and maintained for you — that's Scult's day job.
EXPLORE WHAT SCULT BUILDS
