---
name: discovery-eyes
description: "Read your team's messages the way opposing counsel would in litigation discovery — prevention training that makes communication hygiene visceral. Use when asked how would our Slack look in discovery, train my team on communication hygiene, review this thread like a plaintiff's lawyer, or what shouldn't we put in writing. Produces the highlighted-exhibit reading of sample messages, the patterns that create legal risk, and a debrief with the write-it-this-way rules — strictly for prevention, never for concealment."
---

# 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