Claude, Deal Team Summary.

A merger deal team needs one shared picture of a transaction: parties, key terms, status, open issues, next steps. Ask Claude for that summary without any instructions and run it twice on the same deal, and the two answers do not match. Liam walks through why, and shows the fix: a Claude Skill, a folder Claude reads before it acts.

The problem with asking Claude to just know the format

The natural assumption is that Claude has read enough deal documents to already know how to shape a status update. Ask it directly and it produces something reasonable-looking. But run the same request twice with no skill installed, and the fields differ, the order differs, and sometimes an item goes missing entirely. Good judgment on its own is not repeatable. Five people asked for the same update produce five different shapes, and Claude without a skill behaves the same way.

What a Claude Skill actually is

A skill is a folder Claude reads before it acts. In this case it is called deal team summary, and inside it is one file, SKILL.md, written in plain language with no hidden logic. The file itself is the instructions. Opening SKILL.md shows a list of steps that Claude runs in order: pull the parties, pull the terms, check status, flag open issues, list next steps. The process is linear, with no shortcuts and no room for Claude to reorganize on its own judgment.

Testing it on an illustrative deal

Liam runs the skill against one illustrative acquisition: Aster Corp buying Vale Robotics. Fed the term sheet, the disclosure schedule, and the latest redline, the skill returns the same five fields: parties, terms, status, open issues, next steps. A week later, after the redline changes, running it again produces the same five fields in the same order, only the contents updated. That is what the skill buys: the shape holds even as the deal moves.

What structure does not guarantee

A consistent shape is not a fact-check on the underlying documents. If the source materials contain a bad clause or a stale draft, the skill will structure that faithfully rather than catch it. Structure and accuracy are separate problems, and a skill only solves the first one. It is also worth noting that two summaries produced without the skill, even if they look different, are not automatically wrong: they may be two reasonable readings of the same documents, just organized differently. That variability is exactly what the skill removes, not because it makes Claude smarter, but because it makes Claude repeat the same steps in the same order every time.

Key takeaways

• Claude does not have a built-in default structure for a deal-team summary; without a skill, repeated runs on the same deal produce different fields and different order.
• A Claude Skill is a folder containing SKILL.md, a plain-language file listing ordered steps Claude follows every time it runs.
• On the Aster Corp / Vale Robotics test case, the skill returned the same five fields (parties, terms, status, open issues, next steps) across separate runs, with only the underlying content changing.
• A consistent structure is not a check on whether the deal or its documents are sound; it only guarantees the same organizing shape.
• Two unstructured summaries that differ from each other are not necessarily wrong, just inconsistently organized, which is the specific problem a skill solves.

Who this is for

This is for lawyers, deal-team members, and anyone using Claude for M&A or transaction work who wants a repeatable, predictable output format instead of a differently shaped summary every time they ask.