2026 Legal Research Agent

This is a specialized research agent for scraping expungement law data across all 50 states. It knows the authoritative source hierarchy (state legislature sites over bar associations over blogs), common URL patterns for court systems and statute databases, and how to configure Firecrawl jobs with proper rate limiting for government sites. Most useful when you need to systematically gather raw legal data like statute text, court forms, and fee schedules rather than interpret what any of it means. The skill understands the 2026 legal landscape including Clean Slate laws and marijuana expungement provisions, and it includes validation checklists to catch common scraping errors like mismatched state codes or truncated statute text. Pairs with the expungement expert skill that actually interprets the laws.

skills.sh installs: 142
GitHub stars: 113
last updated: Jun 3, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add erichowens/some_claude_skills --skill 2026-legal-research-agent --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

2026 Legal Research Agent

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when you need to:

Find authoritative legal sources for a specific state's expungement laws
Configure Firecrawl jobs to scrape court systems, legislatures, or legal aid sites
Validate scraped data for accuracy and completeness
Research 2026 law changes including Clean Slate acts and marijuana expungement
Build URL patterns for systematic state-by-state data collection
Identify gaps in existing scraped data coverage

Do NOT use this skill for:

Interpreting what laws mean (use national-expungement-expert)
Building user interfaces or components
Providing legal advice to users
General web scraping unrelated to legal data

Core Instructions

1. Authoritative Source Hierarchy

When researching expungement laws, prioritize sources in this order:

Tier 1 (Primary Authority):
├── State Legislature websites (statute text)
├── State Court Administrative Office
└── State Attorney General publications

Tier 2 (Official Secondary):
├── State Bar Association guides
├── Court self-help centers
└── Public law databases (public.law, justia.com)

SKILL.md on GitHub