discovery-eyes

Discovery Eyes Skill

Every message your team writes is a potential exhibit with a highlighter across it, read aloud years later, stripped of tone and context. This skill performs that reading on sample messages — jokes that become admissions, speculation that becomes knowledge, "delete this after reading" that becomes the whole case — as prevention training. Its purpose is writing carefully and acting properly, never hiding, deleting, or evading: concealment is both the crime and the cover-up, and this skill refuses to help with either.

What This Skill Produces

• The exhibit reading — supplied sample messages, highlighted and characterized as a plaintiff's lawyer would
• The pattern list — the recurring habits that manufacture legal risk out of ordinary work
• The debrief — write-it-this-way rules that keep candor AND hygiene, plus when-to-pick-up-the-phone guidance

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• Sample messages/threads — real (sanitized) or representative of the team's style
• The context — industry and the risk surfaces that matter (employment, IP, competition, safety, securities)
• The audience — engineers, sales, execs — the patterns differ by tribe

Framework: How the Highlighter Reads

1. Tone strips off: sarcasm, hyperbole, and dark jokes read literally ("this feature will literally kill someone 😂" reads exactly as written, without the emoji's protection).
2. Speculation becomes knowledge: "I bet the numbers are inflated" reads as awareness-at-the-time. The hygiene rule: state facts and questions, not unverified conclusions.
3. The fatal phrases: "delete this," "keep this off email," "per our conversation" (after something sensitive), "I know we're not supposed to, but…" — each is a case-builder regardless of what follows.
4. Casual legal conclusions: non-lawyers writing "this is definitely infringement/discriminatory/illegal" create exhibits lawyers then own. Rule: describe behavior, route legal characterization to counsel.
5. The honest core: good hygiene is NOT saying less truth — it's precision (facts over vibes), routing (privileged questions to counsel properly), and escalation (real concerns raised through channels that fix them — a concern raised and addressed reads well in discovery; a concern joked about and dropped reads terribly).

Output Format

Exhibit Reading: [team/context]

> Prevention training — a plausible adversarial reading of sample messages. This skill does not assist with deleting, concealing, or evading preservation obligations; if litigation is reasonably anticipated, preservation duties apply — see counsel.

The Exhibits

> [message, quoted]

Highlighted as: [how it reads in a filing] · The pattern: [which habit produced it]

The Pattern List

[The 4–6 recurring habits in these samples, each with its risk mechanism]

Debrief — write it this way

| Instead of | Write | Why |

|---|---|---|

[Plus: the pick-up-the-phone list (what belongs in synchronous conversation — decisions still get documented properly afterward), and the escalate-properly note: raised-and-fixed is the best exhibit there is]

Quality Checks

• [ ] Every reading traces to a supplied message — no invented exhibits
• [ ] The prevention-not-concealment banner appears in the artifact
• [ ] Rewrites preserve the truth content — hygiene is precision, not omission
• [ ] Legal-conclusion language is routed to counsel, not softened into nothing
• [ ] The raised-and-fixed principle appears — the goal is better conduct, not quieter records

Anti-Patterns

• [ ] Do not advise deleting, auto-expiring, or moving topics off-channel to evade records — that request ends the exercise and goes to counsel
• [ ] Do not train people to stop reporting problems — suppressed concerns are worse in court AND in reality
• [ ] Do not sanitize into meaninglessness — a team afraid to write anything ships nothing
• [ ] Do not perform legal analysis — this is communication training; law belongs to lawyers
• [ ] Do not read real named individuals' messages punitively — samples train teams; this is not a surveillance tool