Industry use case - legal

Project: Draft a limitation-of-liability clause

You are a legal assistant at a SaaS company. The company is revising its standard customer agreement and needs a limitation-of-liability clause that caps damages at the annual subscription value. The CEO wants to be able to read it. The company's attorney will review it before it goes into production.

What this project tests

This project tests whether you can write a prompt that produces a specific legal artifact — not a general explanation of what the clause should say, but the actual clause text — with the right structure, the right carve-outs, and the right level of language for a non-lawyer executive to read.

The gap between "explain what a limitation-of-liability clause is" and "draft one for this specific context" is exactly the gap between a general prompt and a production prompt.

Building the prompt

Start with the task in one sentence: "Draft a limitation-of-liability clause for a SaaS customer agreement."

Then add the specifics:

• Damages cap: the annual subscription fee paid by the customer
• Carve-outs: gross negligence, willful misconduct, indemnification obligations, and intellectual property infringement
• Jurisdiction: Delaware
• Language register: readable by a non-lawyer CEO, but legally valid
• Length: no more than two paragraphs

Add a role: "You are a corporate attorney with experience drafting SaaS customer agreements."

Add a format constraint: "Produce the clause text only. No explanation of the clause. No preamble."

Iteration

Run your first draft. Then run a second pass with this prompt: "You are a skeptical corporate attorney reviewing this clause for ambiguity and loopholes. List every problem you see."

Use the critique to revise the clause. Run it again. Repeat until the skeptical attorney finds no problems or only minor ones.

The self-check

Read the clause out loud. If any sentence takes more than one reading to understand, it is too complex. Ask Claude to simplify that sentence without changing its legal meaning.

If you get stuck

If the clause is too generic (does not reference the subscription fee specifically), add the specific language: "The cap should be expressed as 'the total fees paid by Customer to Company in the twelve months preceding the claim.'"

If the carve-outs are missing or incomplete, list them explicitly in the prompt. Do not assume Claude knows which carve-outs are standard for SaaS agreements.

Deliverable

A two-paragraph limitation-of-liability clause, plus a one-sentence plain-English summary of what each paragraph does. The clause should pass the skeptical attorney review prompt with no major issues identified.