Most bills that fail, fail on their language.
I spent over twenty-five years drafting legislation for the House of Representatives in the Massachusetts General Court. The defects I look for are the ones that survive a vote: the definition doing two jobs, the effective date that never reached the engrossed print, the “including” a court will read as exhaustive where the drafter meant it to illustrate.
Correctly drawn is not a slogan. It is the standard a bill must meet before it can pass to engrossment in the General Court — examined and certified as correctly drawn. For most of my career that certification was the job. This site is what came of it.
Services
Three things I do.
Each begins the same way: with the text, read cold, the way a judge will read it.
Drafting and review
Bills, amendments, home rule petitions. Before filing, or before a floor vote when the language has changed and nobody has read it cold.
Statutory analysis
What the text will be held to mean, and where it is ambiguous enough that either reading could win. With the canons named and the cases behind them.
Corpus work
Comparison sets for questions that span dozens of acts, so the drafting starts from what the General Court has already done rather than from a blank page.
Bias Spectrum Audit
Bias you can see is bias you can fix. Where a statute or bill sits between the worst version that would still look fair on paper and the most protective one — decision by decision, with the language that closes the gap. A commissioned engagement. Five published audits.
Casebook
What a missing sentence costs.
Real statutes, real litigation, and the language that would have prevented it. Public text throughout; nothing privileged.
The statute said nothing about waiver. Litigation said the rest.
One sentence in the mechanic's lien statute forbids waiver. The public-works bond statute copied from it never got that sentence. The Supreme Judicial Court had to supply it forty years later.
Silence on a question the parallel statute answered expressly — an omission a court had to fill from purpose and policy because the text gave it nothing.
Read the exampleThe method
Ambiguity is a condition to understand, not always a defect to fix.
Some ambiguity is deliberate; it is how bills pass. The job is to make sure the sponsor knows what the ambiguity creates, who bears the cost of it, and what a court will do with it. I built a system to do that work at scale, as a set of Claude skills that run in sequence: a lint for the phrases that generate litigation, a detector for the ambiguities themselves, an adversarial simulator for how each would be argued and resolved, and a scorer for the definitions that fix them.
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Step one
Lint
The cheapest check first. Relational phrases, bare time references, unclear cross-statutory references.
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Step two
Detect
Definitional conflicts across chapters, regulatory overlays, undefined terms. Every alert dispositioned with a reason.
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Step three
Simulate
The competing readings, the canons behind each, the predicted resolution — calibrated against what the SJC has actually done.
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Step four
Score
A proposed definition rated for coverage, precision, clarity and conflict against 1,800 existing ones.
Tools
Six tools, built to catch what I kept catching by hand.
One is open. The rest are free to anyone who asks; I add each member myself, because I would rather know who is using them.
Ambiguity Detector
Paste in a bill or a section of the General Laws. It flags the words and phrases that cause trouble later.
DetailsPolice Continuation Acts open
Twenty-five special acts, 2020–2025, full text, side by side, with a plain-language query tool. No login.
Open the toolTax Statutes Navigator
Chapter 62 drawn as a single path from federal gross income to net tax.
DetailsSJC Style Manual Assistant
The 2025–2026 Style Manual, made answerable.
DetailsCanons of Construction in Massachusetts
The canons an SJC or Appeals Court panel actually reaches for, in the order they are reached for: what triggers each one, what defeats it, which ones the General Court has codified in G.L. c. 4, and where the pairs that point in opposite directions get resolved. With the drafting corollary for each — the language that invites the canon in the first place.
ReadDrafting Effective Dates in Massachusetts
When a bill or a section takes effect, and who decides when the drafter does not. The three default rules, the five referendum-exempt categories, what an emergency preamble costs and what it does not do, the Sutton rule for outside sections, retroactivity after Landgraf, and how Massachusetts counts days.
ReadLegislative Research and Drafting Manual, Fifth Edition
The General Court's own manual, published jointly by Counsel to the Senate and Counsel to the House of Representatives: bill structure, formatting requirements, statutory references, and the conventions the General Court expects. The text behind the Ask the Drafting Manual tool.
Open the PDFContact
Send me the language.
A bill, a section, an amendment, a petition — as filed or as it stands. I will tell you what a court would do with it, and what I would change. Email is the best way to reach me.