What Those People Selling Generic Prompts and Skills Aren’t Telling You About Copyright
If you think you can buy a package of pre-written prompts or skills to generate marketing content for your law firm, think again.
That’s because when you rely on generic prompts or skills as input, the resulting output may not be protected by copyright—meaning that your competitor down the street can copy it, paste it onto their own website, and there’s very little you can do about it.
It’s an issue that almost nobody in the AI-for-lawyers space is talking about
Here’s the quick backstory. As a general rule, only work created by humans qualify for copyright protection. So, what happens when AI is involved in creation? The U.S. Copyright Office addressed that question in its January 2025 report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, and the conclusion was clear. Prompts alone—no matter how detailed or how extensively iterated—don’t give humans enough control over the output to claim copyright. The Office treats prompts as “unprotectible ideas” or instructions. In other words, you’re telling the AI what you want, but you’re not controlling how it expresses that idea. The AI is.
The report didn’t specifically address skills, because skills weren’t around at that time. But the same logic would likely apply: if the skill is essentially a packaged set of instructions telling Claude “write a client newsletter in a friendly tone covering these five topics,” the output is going to face the same copyrightability problem as a detailed prompt. You bought instructions. Instructions don’t create copyright. The AI generated the expression.
That’s the risk inherent with plug-and-play skills and prompts. But there’s also a solution if you take the time to create your own skills. Here’s why.
The Copyright Office also explained that when a human author’s own creative expression is perceptible in the AI output, that expression is protectable. The Office registered a work called Rose Enigma where the artist had drawn an illustration by hand, fed it into an AI system, and the AI produced a modified version. Because the human’s original drawing was clearly visible in the output, the human got copyright protection for their contribution.
And therein lies the lesson. If you build a skill that embeds your own expressive material—your template language, your firm’s voice and tone and unique turn of a phrase—and those elements carry through into the output, you have a solid basis for protecting your work. Not because you wrote a clever prompt or skill but because your own authored expression is sitting there in the generated work, perceptible and identifiable.
Most lawyers aren’t building skills this way because nobody has shown them how. They’re either writing prompts on the fly, buying packages that produce generic output, or giving up on AI for marketing content entirely. So let me teach you how to create Claude skills the right way so that you and your team can generate content that you can protect from infringement. Register for the AI for Lawyers Cohort launching May 1 here.
Carolyn Elefant is the author of Solo by Choice: How to Start a Law Firm and Be the Lawyer You Always Wanted to Be. Carolyn has co-authored the ABA Publication “Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier” and “The Legal ClauseIt: Plug & Play Engagement Agreements and Power Pacts for Small Law Firms”; has been listed as an Energy and Environmental Super Lawyer for Washington D.C. since 2012; was named an ABA Legal Rebel (2010), a Fastcase 50 Innovator (2011), and an ABA Woman of Legal Tech (2014); and has appeared on the Daily Show in 2014 to discuss law firm business models.
This article was originally published on Carolyn Elefant’s blog, My Shingle, on April 21, 2026. It is republished here with permission.