AI prompts for commercial solicitors
Business sales, shareholder agreements, commercial contracts — the corporate workload is full of structured, precedent-driven tasks where AI earns its place. Here's how to use it well.
- Corporate work is ideal for AI: precedent-driven drafting and position-driven review.
- Always work from your own precedent and the real instructions — never the model's generic template.
- Watch post-completion exposure: warranties, indemnities, tax covenants, deferred consideration.
- The verification duty applies to every assertion of "market standard" the model makes.
Commercial and corporate work suits AI better than almost any other practice area, because so much of it is structured: a precedent provides the skeleton, the instructions provide the flesh, and the review is a comparison against known positions. That's exactly the kind of task where a well-prompted model saves real time.
Drafting from a precedent
The pattern that works: give the model your firm's precedent as the template, the instructions transcript or scope document as the source, and have it populate the draft while flagging the source of each term — what came from the instructions, what came from the brief, and what it had to query because the instructions were silent. You get a first draft in your structure, with the gaps visibly marked rather than silently guessed.
Reviewing an SPA or shareholders' agreement
For review, the model compares the counterparty's draft against your preferred positions and produces the structured output that makes a review useful: an executive summary, a clause-by-clause risk table, and — crucially for corporate work — a post-completion exposure analysis covering warranties, indemnities, the tax covenant, deferred consideration and restrictive covenants. The provisions that create liability surviving completion are where your client's real risk sits. See AI contract review for the general method.
The Lawyer's Prompt — book + 15 Claude skills
Everything in this guide, built into tools you install once. Solicitor-trained skills that draft, review and verify to your house style, with the Ayinde discipline built in — and the book that explains the standard behind them.
See what's included — £99 →The corporate-specific trap
Models love to assert "market standard." In a negotiation, that phrase carries weight — and the model often cannot evidence it. Treat every such claim as a flag for your judgement, not a fact to relay to the client. This is the Ayinde discipline applied to commercial drafting: if it's asserted and unverifiable, it's checked, not used.
The skills for this work
The Lawyer's Prompt includes a Business Sale (SPA) assistant, a Contract Reviewer, a Commercial Contract Drafter and a Shareholder Agreement Reviewer — each built around your house positions and the verification standard. They turn the patterns above into tools you run on demand rather than prompts you rebuild each time.
Related practice guides: employment and property.