Product Legal Cold-Start Interview

Product Legal Cold-Start Interview

Purpose

Conduct a structured, staged interview with a product-legal practice group — led by a supervising attorney or authorized designee — to gather the information required to populate practice-profiles/product-legal.md. The skill walks through all eight profile fields in sequence, records every answer, and assembles a filled draft of the profile for the practice group's review and approval. It produces draft legal work product for attorney review — not legal advice and not a final configuration.

Use When

• A team is adopting AgentCounsel and needs to configure practice-profiles/product-legal.md for the first time.
• A product-legal practice group is being onboarded to the library and no current profile exists.
• The library is being stood up for the first time and the product-legal area is included in scope.
• A practice group wishes to revisit or rebuild its profile from scratch rather than make incremental updates.

Required Inputs

• A knowledgeable person from the product-legal practice group — a supervising attorney or an authorized designee — who can answer questions about the group's jurisdiction, positions, escalation rules, and review requirements.
• Any existing playbooks, templates, source-of-truth documents, or standard-form documents the group already uses, so they can be referenced or cited in the profile.

Do Not Use When

• The group is actively working a live product-legal matter. This skill configures the library; it does not support an open matter.
• A practice-profiles/product-legal.md already exists and is current. In that case this is a refresh, not a cold start — though the skill may still be used to rebuild the profile deliberately.
• No authorized person is available to answer. Do not complete the interview with guessed or inferred answers; record all gaps as [CONFIRM: ...] placeholders.
• The purpose is to handle a specific product-legal matter (use the appropriate matter-level skill for that task).

Legal Safety Rules

• Produce draft legal work product for attorney review. This is not legal advice.
• Never guess or infer an answer to any interview question. If the interviewee cannot answer a question, record [CONFIRM: answer required from practice group] and move on.
• The filled profile is a draft. It must be reviewed and explicitly approved by the supervising attorney or practice group before it governs any AgentCounsel work product.
• Do not invent standard positions, clause preferences, escalation thresholds, or review rules. Record only what the interviewee provides.
• Do not include client-specific facts, client names, matter identifiers, or privileged details in the profile. The profile is a reusable group-level configuration, not a matter record.
• Do not state or imply that any threshold, position, or rule in the profile satisfies a legal requirement under any jurisdiction. Jurisdiction-specific legal obligations are for the attorney to verify.
• Flag every item the interviewee defers or leaves open with a visible [CONFIRM: ...] placeholder so the reviewer can see exactly what is unresolved.

Workflow

Stage 1 — Jurisdictions

Ask the interviewee:

• In which jurisdictions are the client's products available — US federal (FTC), US state (state AGs), EU, UK, Canada, others?
• Does the group regularly engage with sector-specific consumer-protection regimes (children's privacy / COPPA, health-related claims / FDA, financial / CFPB, age-restricted products)?
• Are there jurisdictions where the group's clients face heightened consumer-protection enforcement (e.g., California, NY, FTC priority areas)?
• Are there jurisdictions or product categories the group treats as out of scope, requiring specialist outside counsel?
• Does the group track foreign consumer-protection regimes (EU Digital Services Act, UK CMA, Australia ACL) that affect US clients?

Record answers. Mark any unanswered item [CONFIRM: jurisdiction not yet specified].

Stage 2 — Client and Team Context

Ask the interviewee:

• Who are the primary clients of the product-legal group — product teams, engineering, design, marketing, executives, external clients?
• What types of product-legal matters does the group handle most frequently — feature reviews, ToS / privacy-policy reviews, advertising-claim reviews, pricing-page reviews, subscription / cancellation flows, dark-pattern reviews?
• How is the team structured, and how does it coordinate with privacy counsel, IP counsel, and external regulatory counsel?
• Are there product categories (consumer financial products, health products, children's products, age-restricted products) that require special handling?
• How does the group engage with the client's product-launch process, design-review process, or marketing-review process?

Record answers. Mark any unanswered item [CONFIRM: client/team context not yet specified].

Stage 3 — Escalation Thresholds

Ask the interviewee:

• Which feature characteristics automatically require escalation — child-directed features, biometric features, financial features, health-related claims, dark-pattern indicators, UDAAP / FTC Act section 5 risk?
• Which advertising claims automatically require escalation — health, financial, environmental / green claims, sponsorship / influencer disclosures, comparative claims, free-trial-to-paid conversions?
• What pricing-page or subscription scenarios trigger escalation — auto-renewal without prominent disclosure, retention dark patterns, refund-policy disclosure, drip pricing?
• When does a UX flow (cancellation, account deletion, consent, opt-out) require immediate specialist review?
• Who is the designated escalation contact for product-legal matters, and what is the expected turnaround?

Record answers. Mark any unanswered item [CONFIRM: escalation threshold not yet specified].

Stage 4 — Preferred Output Style

Ask the interviewee:

• Should product-legal work product default to feature-launch-checklist format, redline format, risk-matrix format, or memo format?
• What level of detail does the practice group expect — executive summary, full UX-element-by-element review, both layered?
• Are there house style rules for risk ratings, mitigation recommendations, or open-items lists in product-legal work product?
• Does the group produce go / no-go recommendations or mitigation lists in a standard format?
• Are there particular deliverable types — feature-launch checklists, ToS-update memos, advertising-claim memos — for which the group has mandatory format requirements?

Record answers. Mark any unanswered item [CONFIRM: output style preference not yet specified].

Stage 5 — Source-of-Truth Documents

Ask the interviewee:

• What is the group's authoritative feature-launch playbook, and where is it stored?
• Is there an advertising-substantiation requirements reference, and how is it kept current?
• What document governs the group's subscription / UDAAP standards reference?
• Are there dark-pattern criteria or design-review checklists the group treats as authoritative?
• Does the group maintain a current-FTC-priority reference and a state-AG enforcement-priority reference?

Record answers and document names. Mark any unanswered item [CONFIRM: source document not yet identified].

Stage 6 — Standard Positions and Playbooks

Ask the interviewee:

• What is the group's default dark-pattern posture — categories the group always flags, categories the group escalates?
• What is the group's default consent posture — opt-in, opt-out, layered, just-in-time?
• What is the group's default subscription / auto-renewal disclosure framework?
• What is the group's default UDAAP / FTC Act section 5 risk threshold?
• What is the group's default approach to advertising claims, substantiation, and disclosure?

Record answers. Mark any unanswered item [CONFIRM: standard position not yet specified].

Stage 7 — Attorney Review Requirements

Ask the interviewee:

• At what stage does attorney review of product-legal work product become mandatory — design-review stage, pre-launch stage, post-launch monitoring, incident response?
• Are there work-product types for which attorney review is always required regardless of stage — any feature launch above a complexity threshold, any ToS update, any advertising claim above a risk threshold, any pricing-page change?
• What is the designated reviewer's role — handling attorney, supervising attorney, product partner, general counsel?
• What is the expected turnaround for product-legal review, and how are urgent reviews (launch-day issues, FTC inquiries, viral product issues) handled?
• Is there a formal sign-off step before any feature launch, any ToS update, or any advertising-campaign launch?

Record answers. Mark any unanswered item [CONFIRM: review requirement not yet specified].

Stage 8 — Prohibited Assumptions

Ask the interviewee:

• Are there facts agents must never assume without explicit confirmation — that a claim is substantiated, that consent is informed, that a disclosure is sufficient, that a feature is FTC-compliant, that a dark pattern is acceptable?
• Are there product-legal risks — UDAAP, dark patterns, deceptive advertising, child-protection, fair lending — where an agent must stop and escalate rather than reason through independently?
• Are there matter types where agents must never proceed beyond intake without direct attorney involvement — FTC inquiries, state-AG inquiries, viral product incidents, child-protection matters?
• Are there prior incidents — adverse FTC enforcement, state-AG settlements, consumer-complaint pattern findings — that should be encoded as explicit prohibitions for agents working on product-legal matters?

Record answers. Mark any unanswered item [CONFIRM: prohibited assumption not yet specified].

Stage 9 — Assemble the Draft Profile

Compile all answers into a filled draft of practice-profiles/product-legal.md, populating each of the eight profile sections. For every item that was not answered, insert a visible [CONFIRM: ...] placeholder with enough context for the reviewer to understand what needs to be supplied. Append a list of all open placeholders so the reviewing attorney can see at a glance what remains unresolved.

Output Format

Deliver:

1. Filled draft of practice-profiles/product-legal.md — all eight sections populated with answers from the interview. Every unanswered item is a visible [CONFIRM: ...] placeholder.
2. Open-items list — an explicit enumeration of every placeholder inserted, with the stage and question it corresponds to, so the reviewing attorney can resolve them efficiently.

Label the entire output: Draft legal work product for attorney review. Not legal advice. This profile draft must be reviewed and approved by the supervising attorney or practice group before it is relied upon.

Attorney Verification Checklist

• All eight profile sections have been reviewed by a supervising attorney or authorized practice-group representative.
• Jurisdiction coverage — including FTC, state AGs, and foreign consumer-protection regimes — is accurately recorded [Verify current law].
• Dark-pattern criteria and UDAAP-risk threshold reflect current FTC and state-AG enforcement guidance.
• Subscription / auto-renewal disclosure framework reflects current state-by-state requirements [verify jurisdiction].
• Advertising substantiation requirements references are current.
• Feature-launch checklist references are current and tied to the client's product process.
• No client-specific facts, matter identifiers, or privileged details appear in the profile.
• All [CONFIRM: ...] placeholders have been resolved or explicitly accepted as pending.
• The approved profile has been saved to practice-profiles/product-legal.md and its effective date recorded.
• A process for periodic profile review and update has been identified.