The Legal OS Builder has eleven playbooks. Your recurring task is not one of them, so you build a checklist from memory, and it has the gaps of memory. Forge runs a Synectics session on the process: define done by magic, purge the generic checklist, borrow a mechanism from aviation, surgery, or nuclear operations, and force it into controls with owners and evidence. Then open it in the Builder like any other playbook.
Pick the family, then the shape of the task from the lists. One line of purpose is the only free text in this tool: describe the task, never a client or a matter.
Controls are assigned to staffed functions. Anything else falls back to Legal or external counsel.
Synectics (Gordon 1961; Prince 1970) applied to a process instead of a term. Forge uses two of Gordon's four analogy types: fantasy analogy to define the end state ("if this ran itself by magic, what would have to be true?") and direct analogy to derive the controls, borrowed from high-reliability organizations. Aviation, surgery, nuclear operations, and incident command all learned that expertise does not prevent the forgotten step, and each built a mechanism to catch it. The surgical checklist is an aviation checklist that crossed domains by analogy. That transfer is the precedent for this tool.
Companion to Excursion (a stuck term) and Witness (a document under stress). The output is a playbook in the same schema the Legal OS Builder runs.
Forge is a drafting aid and a process-design discipline, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is formed by using it. The force-fit step sends your selections and the one purpose line to Settingstone's service, which is rate-limited and stores nothing. Write the purpose line as a description of a task type, never of a client, a counterparty, or a matter.
Gordon's fantasy analogy. If this task ran itself by magic, what would have to be true? Pick the two statements you most want to be true when it is over. Every control the engine produces is scored against those two.
Every item below is fine. None of them is a playbook. They are excluded from the output, so the engine has to produce the steps a competent lawyer would not have written from memory.
Three mechanisms from organizations where the forgotten step kills people, drawn at random and shown without reference to your task. Read what each does at home and the principle underneath it.
Up to three. Click a drawn card's × to free a slot.
Each mechanism dragged onto your task and made into a control in the Builder's own schema: phase, owner, control type, evidence, and the derivation it came from. One is flagged as the step the expert forgot. Keep or drop each one; kept controls go into the playbook.
The family's skeleton plus the controls you kept, in the Legal OS Builder's schema. Open it in the Builder for swimlanes, the control register, the authority matrix, and GC Review. Export it to Word for the file. Copy the prompt pack to run it inside whatever AI your company has cleared.
Onboarding. Crisis. Recurring compliance. And "fork this playbook" from the curated eleven. One email when each lands — nothing else.
The controls are generated from your selections and are a drafting aid, not legal advice or a compliance program for any actual matter. No attorney-client relationship is formed. A playbook you build here is yours; nothing enters Settingstone's public catalog. Built and maintained by Settingstone Legal — the operational tool chest for energy attorneys.