legal-memo

Produces a predictive legal memorandum: an internal analysis that predicts how a question of law resolves on a given set of facts, and shows its reasoning issue by issue so a supervising attorney or decision-maker can scrutinize the chain from facts to rule to application before relying on it. Its center of gravity is IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion) applied once per discrete issue inside the Discussion — that ordered sub-structure is what makes this a legal memo and not a narrative brief.

This genre follows the standard U.S. law-practice predictive-memo convention, with Bluebook practitioner citation style for authority.

Scope caveat (carry, do not over-sell): this genre reproduces the structure and reasoning form of a predictive legal memorandum. It is not legal advice and asserts no legal sufficiency — the analysis is only as sound as the cited authority it points to.

Audience and altitude

A supervising attorney or internal decision-maker who must act on a prediction of how a legal question resolves. Altitude is predictive: state the most likely outcome and the confidence in it, then earn that prediction issue by issue. Surface adverse authority and counter-arguments honestly — an unaddressed weakness is a defect, not an omission.

Pattern (industry: predictive legal memorandum, IRAC + Bluebook)

1. Front matter — a standard memo heading (To / From / Date / Re).
2. Question Presented — the legal issue framed as a single yes/no question that joins the governing rule to the determinative facts, not an open-ended topic.
3. Brief Answer — the predicted conclusion in 2-3 sentences, with the core reason.
4. Statement of Facts — the material facts, stated neutrally; no argument here.
5. Discussion — the analytical core, in IRAC per issue: Issue -> Rule -> Application -> Conclusion. One IRAC cycle per discrete issue, each cycle citing its authority. Address counter-arguments within Application. This ordered sub-structure is the genre's distinguishing feature and the section that grounds the Conclusion.
6. Conclusion — overall disposition, the recommendation, and any open questions or next steps.
7. Back matter — the full table of authorities / reference list; an optional appendix for extended record or verification notes.

Add a figure only when authorities or factors are compared on shared attributes: render it as a Markdown table (or a fenced mermaid code block if it is a diagram, never ASCII art or an image), number and caption it, and reference it in the text. A required figure is never silently omitted — if the data cannot support one, say so in prose.

Citation style

Bluebook practitioner format — citations to authority as footnotes or inline cites, resolving to a table of authorities in the back matter. Every citation must resolve to a real, verifiable source; no uncited claims. Verify the current Bluebook edition live at authoring time and follow it — never bake an edition number into output as settled fact.

Rules that keep it a legal memo

• Every claim is traceable to cited authority; no orphan facts.
• The Discussion uses IRAC per issue, not a flat narrative — Issue, Rule, Application, and Conclusion must each be identifiable, in order, for every discrete issue.
• State adverse authority and limitations honestly; an undiscussed weakness is a defect, not an omission.
• Hedge uncertain predictions; present the range when authorities disagree, and mark a weakened or contested authority with an explicit qualifier rather than asserting it with the same confidence as settled authority.
• Exhaustive coverage: build the memo from the full set of supplied authority — every surviving source gets its own treatment, never condensed to a cherry-picked subset. A silently dropped source is a defect.
• Never cite a source you cannot verify is real; omit it or substitute a real, well-known authority rather than fabricate a citation.

Anti-triggers — do not use this genre for

• A single already-made technical decision with no predictive legal question — that is an adr (Structured MADR): immutable, driver-and-outcome, no IRAC and no legal authority to weigh.
• A finding against a regulatory standard rather than a prediction of how a legal question resolves — that is compliance-audit: a conformance checklist against a named regulation, not an issue-by-issue legal analysis.
• A settled record of what already happened — a legal memo predicts an outcome; it does not narrate history.

MIF frontmatter

type: semantic — a legal memorandum is declarative legal analysis and its rationale, not a time-bound event or a step sequence. Climb to L2 with namespace (legal-memo/<area>), modified, title, and tags when the drafting context supplies them. Gate every output with mif-validate at its target level; the floor is --level 1.

Why machine-readable — the point of MIF here

The same document still reads as a human legal memo and projects losslessly to JSON-LD and back — one artifact, two readers.

The L1 -> L3 climb (two exemplars)

• templates/good-l1.md — L1 floor: id, type, created + body. A complete, valid memo, but opaque to a machine consumer.
• templates/good.md — L3 (highest this genre supports): adds namespace, modified, temporal validity, W3C-PROV provenance, citations[] tied to the cited authority, and a typed relationships[] graph (e.g. relates-to a related engineering or compliance record). Validate with mif-validate --level 3.

Author at the highest level the drafting context supports (grade down rather than fabricate). templates/bad.md shows the antipattern: a memo whose Discussion has no IRAC sub-structure — the genre's single most load-bearing required element.