Writing effective prompts for legal AI can feel overwhelming, especially when you're not sure where to start or how to get the results you need. Many legal professionals struggle with knowing how much context to provide, what tone to use, or how to structure their requests to get meaningful outputs. The good news? With a few simple strategies, you can transform your AI interactions from frustrating to incredibly productive.

In our recent webinar on mastering your AI workflows, our guest speaker and client Talya Faigenbaum, principal lawyer at Nest Legal, shared her tips on how to write a strong prompt for legal AI. Talya and the team at Nest Legal are always looking for ways to improve how they do things. They are champions of legal tech and one of the first adopter’s of Smokeball’s Archie AI. Like all new users, they had to navigate learning a new tool and how to phrase a prompt to get the best results.

Read on to see Talya’s top tips for prompt writing for legal AI.

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How to write a strong prompt for your legal AI tool

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Know when AI can and can’t help

“Before jumping into prompt writing, ask yourself: is this a task about explanation, communication, or summarisation? You don’t really want to be using Gen AI for anything that requires human discretion, strategy or negotiation.”

Things to keep in mind before you decide to use AI:

• Only use AI for legal reasoning, explanation, summarising, or communication.
• Avoid using it for giving legal advice or anything that requires human discretion, strategy, or negotiation.
• Examples of when legal AI can help:
  • Generating first drafts of things such as files notes and memos
  • Converting detailed legal advice into client-friendly summaries
  • Generating backgrounds and chronologies
  • Turning information into follow-up emails for clients

“AI’s real flex is for things like generating first drafts of file notes, memos, and turning those into follow-up emails to clients, and converting detailed legal advice into client-friendly summaries.”

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Be specific about the context of your prompt

“It’s all about the context. Good prompts will give you great results. The more details you give tools like Archie, the better your outputs will be.”

When writing your prompt, remember:

• Include relevant context about the situation in your prompt e.g., “Summarise this advice for a client who has a limited understanding of parenting arrangements and is concerned about interstate relocation”.
• Because AI is limited by the context you provide, avoid short, generic prompts like “Summarise this family law advice”.
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Follow the four core parameters of a good prompt

“Think about your RATT. Your role, audience, tone, and task. Consider these to be the holy playlist of prompt writing.”

• Role: What is the purpose of the task you are asking the AI to complete?
• Audience: Who is the output of the information going to be for?
• Tone: How would you like the information to be presented?
• Task: What are you asking the AI to do?

Here is an example of a prompt with a strong RATT:

“You achieve the best outputs if you address each of these parameters and identify them clearly.”

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Iteration is your superpower, use it!

“Think of Archie as your junior lawyer. Give it a prompt and then read the output critically in the same way you would a letter of advice that a junior has prepared for you.”

When working with legal AI, ensure you:

1. Read through the prompt before you send it.
2. Read the returned output critically.
3. Refine or ask for changes as necessary, e.g. “make this clearer and more professional” or “further summarise this into bullet points”.

“Keep in mind, you’re building a relationship with your AI. The more time you invest in writing and refining your prompts, the more that Archie will learn and the better it gets.”

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If you get stuck, just ask AI

“Other Gen AI tools can really help you to achieve great prompts.”

Whilst you should avoid using open source AIs like ChatGPT for doing legal work (especially to keep client information confidential), you can use them to help you master your AI workflows. Here is an example of how you could ask AI to write a better prompt for you:

“I want to create a prompt that I can use to review letters prepared by my junior legal staff. What should be included in this prompt - can you draft the prompt for me?”

Talya tried this and here was the output:

“Don’t stop there, remember your trusty RATT and keep tweaking until the output actually sounds like something that you can use.”

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Use Archie’s built-in prompt library to save your best prompts

The Archie Prompt Library is available to all Archie AI users and allows you to:

1. Easily save prompts for re-use
2. Share your prompts with others in your firm
3. Use a number of pre-configured prompts already added by the Smokeball team
4. Create advanced, multi-step prompts for a more comprehensive output

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To learn more about Smokeball AI and the Archie Prompt Library, click here.