Sentinel Legal: Legal Intelligence Director

The contractor agreement arrived Tuesday for a project starting Monday. It is 14 pages, written in the standard "Party of the First Part" architecture, and contains a clause on page 9 that assigns all intellectual property created during the engagement to the client — including work created outside the scope of the contract, on personal time, using personal equipment. That clause is not unusual. It is in approximately 60% of standard contractor agreements. It also means that the side project being built on weekends could belong to this client if the project is in the same industry. Nobody flagged it. The agreement was signed. The lease renewal has an automatic renewal clause that rolled over to a two-year term because the 60-day written notice window closed while the renewal was being considered. The NDA from the last employer has a non-compete radius that covers three states and is sitting unsigned in a folder because it was never clear whether it was actually enforceable. Legal exposure is rarely dramatic — it is a clause that was never read, a deadline that wasn't tracked, a document that was signed without understanding what the underlined word "indemnify" actually commits to.

Sentinel Legal is a personal legal intelligence persona for individuals and small business owners who sign, receive, or negotiate legal documents regularly and need a first-pass analysis system before engaging (or deciding not to engage) an attorney. On day one, Sentinel reads LEGAL_LIBRARY.md, CONTRACTS.md, and DEADLINES.md to build a complete picture of existing legal exposure before reviewing anything new. The first output is a current legal risk summary: every active contract with its expiration date, any document containing clauses that warrant attorney review, and all tracked legal deadlines in the next 90 days.

What distinguishes Sentinel from a document template service or a legal FAQ site is that those tools give you general information about what a non-compete clause generally means. Sentinel reads the specific clause in front of you, identifies the specific language that creates risk, explains it in plain English, flags whether it deviates from the standard form for the document type, and gives you the three questions to ask an attorney if the clause warrants professional review. The output is always: here is what this says, here is what that means for you specifically, here is whether this is standard or unusual, and here is what to do next. Not a legal opinion. Legal intelligence.

What you get: SOUL.md — operating principles with 7 named anti-patterns (among them: never characterize legal outcome likelihood without citing jurisdiction-specific precedent, never let a signed contract go unlogged in CONTRACTS.md). IDENTITY.md — first-day protocol, voice standards, document review decision patterns. LISTING.md — this document. MANIFEST.json — product metadata. Memory files to populate: LEGAL_LIBRARY.md (standard reference clauses by document type), CONTRACTS.md (all active contracts with parties, dates, key terms, expiration), DEADLINES.md (legal deadlines with notice windows, response dates, filing dates). No external API keys required. Install time under 30 minutes in OpenClaw.

---

Pricing Rationale

A single hour of attorney time for a contract review runs $300–$500 at a mid-market firm. Sentinel does not replace that review for complex or high-stakes documents. Sentinel does provide the pre-review intelligence that determines whether attorney review is warranted, what questions to bring to that meeting, and which clauses need negotiation — reducing a billable review session from three hours to one. The first contract where Sentinel prevents a missed automatic renewal or flags an IP clause that would have assigned personal work to an employer pays for the product at a return of 3x to 10x on the $99 price.

Works Great With

• Aria Personal CFO — Financial and legal intelligence together; when Aria identifies a debt settle