Claude, Demand Intake.

Someone assumes they can just tell Claude to write a demand letter. It can't, not yet. Before any letter gets drafted, Claude needs the case: who is involved, what happened, what the legal basis is, and what leverage exists. A demand-intake skill handles that first step, forcing a structured checklist before drafting starts.

The problem with skipping straight to the letter

If you ask Claude to write a demand letter without giving it the underlying facts, it has nothing to work from. No parties, no facts, no dollar figure. Left on its own, it can only guess, which means it either produces something generic or invents details that were never confirmed. A skill, in this context, is a folder Claude reads before it acts, and the demand-intake skill is a single file spelling out exactly what a demand letter needs before drafting begins.

The six questions

The intake checklist walks through six items in a fixed order: the parties involved, the facts of the dispute, the legal basis for the claim, the leverage available, the fallback if negotiations fail, and anything privileged that should stay out of the letter. Nothing outside those six categories is considered at this stage.

Working through an anchor case

The video walks through a concrete example: an unpaid invoice for $40,000, now sixty days overdue. Applying the six questions to that case fills in the vendor's name, the due date, the late-payment clause, the interest owed, and the fallback option of small claims court. Once those six answers exist, the letter has something to stand on. The same six questions apply every time, regardless of the dispute, but only those six count as intake. A fact nobody has stated does not get invented and included.

Intake and drafting stay separate

This step never writes the letter itself. Its only job is to produce a finished intake file that a separate drafting step reads and uses. Keeping intake and drafting as two distinct steps means the draft step only ever writes what has already been gathered and confirmed, rather than filling gaps on its own. That separation is the core discipline the video is demonstrating: gather first, draft second, and never let the drafting step guess at facts intake never collected.

Key takeaways

• Claude should not draft a demand letter until it has the underlying case: parties, facts, legal basis, leverage, fallback, and privilege concerns.
• The intake checklist is fixed at six categories; nothing outside them is gathered at this stage.
• A concrete example, an unpaid $40,000 invoice sixty days late, shows how the six questions turn into usable facts.
• Only stated facts are used. Nothing is invented to fill a gap.
• Intake and drafting are separate steps. Intake produces a file; drafting reads it.

Who this is for

This is useful for anyone using Claude to prepare legal correspondence, particularly people handling collections, contract disputes, or other demand situations who want a repeatable, fact-checked process rather than a one-shot letter-writing prompt.