The Restatement

Rules, not vigilance.

Black-letter rules for the practice of law with artificial intelligence — stated, explained, and shown working.
The form

Artificial intelligence in legal practice has produced an enormous amount of advice and almost no rules. The advice is mostly vigilance — check your cites, don’t trust it, be careful — which is not a skill. It is a mood, and it fails on the day you are tired, which is the day it matters.

A Restatement is the answer to that problem, and the form is nearly a century old. It states a rule in black letter, explains it in comment, and shows it working in illustration — because a rule without its reasoning cannot be applied to a case nobody anticipated, and a rule without an example cannot be taught.

Black letter
The rule itself. Short enough to remember at 6 p.m. on a filing day.
Comment
Why the rule exists, what it prevents, and how to tell when you have broken it.
Illustration
The rule working — or, where I have one, my own error that produced it.
Contents

The spine.

Five chapters, in the order the work actually happens: you ask, you check, you declare, you keep. The list is short on purpose — a rule I do not follow myself does not go in it. It will grow when practice earns it, and not before.

Ch. I

Research Prompting

How a question is asked, and how many of them you are allowed to ask at once. No juggling. One agent, or scouts. The batch cap. Versioning, to control for model recall.
Published§§ 1–4  ·  with comments and illustrationsRead →
Ch. II

Verification

How you know that what came back is real. The rule that the model is never asked whether a case exists, what serves as ground truth instead, and the order the checks run in — existence, then quotation, then characterisation.
Next
Ch. III

The Ethics of AI-Assisted Research

Which uses are permissible, which are restricted, and which are prohibited outright — and the disclosure that follows from each. Built on Young & Young’s 2025 editorial standard, which arrived at the provenance thesis independently and from outside law, and adapted here to legal work.
In preparation
Ch. IV

Provenance

What a document declares about its own making. Authorship stated by the maker rather than detected by the reader — and the limit of any such declaration, which is that a model cannot certify the work you did after you closed it.
In preparation
Ch. V

Continuity

What carries between sessions, and what does not. Context stored on your own disk rather than in a conversation, what a model must be handed before it is useful, and why a summary of your work is not your work.
In preparation
A note on the name

It is called a Restatement because the form is right, not because the institution is mine. Cite it as Lee’s Restatement of Research Prompting § 1 (2026), and blame me rather than anybody else for what it says.

Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced under the auspices of The American Law Institute.

Chapter Two

Verification is next.

New chapters go to the list first. No schedule promised, because a rule that is not ready is worse than a rule that is late.

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