How To Use Citations Prompting With Claude For Legal Analysis

What How To Use Citations Prompting With Claude For Legal Analysis actually solves

Apply the citations prompt pattern with Claude on legal analysis — with the exact system prompt, tool list, and eval rubric.

If you've tried to duct-tape this before, you already know the pain: fragile scripts, secrets in three places, and no audit trail when something misbehaves. The approach below fixes those three problems in one shot.

Before you start

You'll need an Anthropic API key, the CLI installed locally, and permission to create a scoped token on the provider side. If you're deploying to production, add a secrets manager — never bake tokens into your repo.

Everything below assumes Node 20+ and a Unix shell. Windows works via WSL.

Wire the core loop

Set up the smallest possible loop that proves the idea end-to-end. Resist the urge to generalize before the happy path works — the temptation to abstract is the number one reason these projects stall.

import Anthropic from "@anthropic-ai/sdk";

const client = new Anthropic();

const res = await client.messages.create({
  model: "claude-opus-4-5",
  max_tokens: 1024,
  system: "You are an assistant for Claude citations legal-analysis.",
  messages: [{ role: "user", content: "Kick off the task." }],
});
console.log(res.content);

Register it with Claude and verify

Run one real task end-to-end, then look at the trace. Traces beat prints. If you can't see every tool call, every input, and every output, you can't operate this in production.

Guardrails you actually want in production

Hard-cap tokens, tool calls and wall-clock per session. Redact PII on the way out. Log every tool invocation to an append-only store — future-you will need it during an incident.

For anything that mutates data, add a dry-run mode and require an explicit confirmation flag on the tool call. This one control catches most of the accidents.

Common failure modes and fixes

The three we see most often: (1) token scoped too broadly, so the blast radius of a prompt injection is huge; (2) no timeout on the tool call, so a hung provider stalls the whole agent; (3) no eval, so nobody notices when a prompt tweak regresses Claude citations legal-analysis by 20%.

Fix all three before you promote to production. They're cheap now and expensive later.

Deploy it in one line

The recipe below wraps everything above into a single deploy. Secrets resolve from your locker; tools register automatically; the audit log is on by default.