foundry-legal

Automated technical assessment. Not legal advice.

A jurisdiction pack is a machine-readable checklist written by engineers. It is not a statement of law, it is not exhaustive, and it is not a substitute for a qualified lawyer or a data protection officer. Every pack in this repository ships with lastReviewed: null and an empty sources array, and the engine is required to surface that in every report.

foundry-legal separates data from reasoning. The controls live in JSON packs; the judgement lives in the agents. Adding a country means dropping one JSON file into packs/ — no agent, skill or code change.

Install

/plugin install foundry-legal@foundry

Requires foundry-core, which is installed automatically as a dependency.

When to install it

• The product processes personal data and nobody has traced where it enters, flows, is stored, replicated, logged and deleted.
• An AI feature is being shipped and the organisation’s role — provider, deployer, integrator — has never been classified.
• An accessibility conformance claim has to be made publicly and someone needs to decide what can honestly be claimed from the evidence available.
• Dependency licences have never been inventoried, or a copyleft term may have been triggered.
• You are building for the Italian or European public sector, where the obligations are explicit.

When not to use it

• Do not use it as a substitute for legal counsel. It produces evidence and gaps, not opinions of law.
• Do not use it to claim compliance. Packs only state what must be shown; no pack asserts that something is compliant.
• Technical accessibility testing and fixing belong to accessibility-engineer in foundry-dev. This plugin handles the conformance claim, its scope and its honesty.

Agents

Agent	What it does	Model	Effort
compliance-engine	Determines which packs apply from the project profile, evaluates each control’s appliesWhen predicate and emits one compliance-check.v1 per control.	opus	high
privacy-engineer	Data protection by design in the code: traces where personal data enters, flows, is stored, replicated, logged and deleted; maps each purpose to a lawful basis.	opus	high
ai-governance-analyst	Classifies the AI system and the organisation’s role (provider, deployer, integrator), determines transparency and disclosure duties, verifies human oversight.	opus	high
accessibility-compliance-analyst	The legal side of accessibility: the scope of a conformance claim, what may honestly be claimed from the available evidence, drafting the statement.	opus	high
licence-analyst	Open-source licence and IP hygiene: the dependency licence inventory, compatibility between permissive, weak copyleft, strong copyleft and network copyleft terms.	opus	high

Skills

Skill	When it fires
compliance-scan	Running a compliance assessment against pluggable jurisdiction packs. Determines which packs apply from the project profile — data processed, users, sector, deployment geography.
privacy-review	A code-level data protection review: where personal data enters, how it flows, where it is stored and replicated, where it is logged, and whether it is actually deleted. Runs through privacy-engineer.
licence-audit	Building the dependency licence inventory from the resolved transitive tree and the shipped artefact, and determining which obligations are actually triggered by how the software is conveyed. Runs through licence-analyst.
accessibility-statement	Producing a conformance claim and an accessibility statement from real audit evidence, refusing to claim more than the evidence supports. Runs through accessibility-compliance-analyst.

compliance-scan runs through the compliance-engine agent in a forked context (context: fork, agent: compliance-engine, model: opus, effort: high) and accepts:

/foundry-legal:compliance-scan [--packs eu,it,global-baseline] [--profile path]
                               [--theme privacy|ai|accessibility|licensing] [--dry-run]

--dry-run validates the packs themselves: controlId uniqueness, theme and severity enums, and any profile fact a pack references that is not in the published vocabulary.

The three themed skills all take a narrowing argument so a review has a bounded scope: privacy-review [--flow entry|storage|logs|deletion|rights|transfers], licence-audit [--conveyance saas|binary|container|onprem|library] [--fail-on copyleft|unknown], accessibility-statement [--instrument en301549|section508|wcag] [--scope <path-or-url-pattern>].

Jurisdiction packs

Pack id	Name	Controls
global-baseline	Global baseline (standards and frameworks, not law)	40
eu	European Union	39
it	Italy (national layer over eu.json)	16
north-america	United States and Canada	26
uk-apac-latam	United Kingdom, Asia-Pacific and Latin America	26

The Italian pack is a national layer on top of the EU pack, covering instruments such as the Codice Privacy (D.Lgs. 196/2003), Garante measures, Legge 4/2004 (Stanca) and the AgID accessibility guidelines, the Codice dell’Amministrazione Digitale (D.Lgs. 82/2005), the Codice dei contratti pubblici (D.Lgs. 36/2023) and the Italian NIS2 transposition supervised by ACN.

Pack format

packs/PACK-FORMAT.md is the normative description of pack.v1. In summary:

Header field	Rule
id	lowercase kebab, equal to the filename without .json; becomes compliance-check.v1.jurisdiction
name	human label
scope	who it applies to and what it deliberately excludes
lastReviewed	null in this repository; a fork that verifies against official texts sets the date and fills sources
sources	empty until someone verifies; entries are { instrument, url, consultedOn }
verificationRequired	mandatory warning sentence, present in every pack

Control field	Required	Notes
controlId	yes	<packId>-<instrument-slug>-<short-name>, unique across all packs
theme	yes	one of governance privacy security ai accessibility licensing records resilience consumer
instrument	yes	copied verbatim into compliance-check.v1.instrument
requirement	yes	the obligation in general terms, one or two sentences, no invented thresholds
appliesWhen	yes	predicate: always, allOf, anyOf, noneOf
evidenceHints	yes	at least two, each prefixed code: doc: cmd: config: ask:
severity	yes	critical | high | medium | low — exposure if unaddressed, not effort
unverifiedCitation	no	true when the citation has not been confirmed against the official text

How unknowns are handled

The appliesWhen predicate is evaluated over a project profile of dot-namespaced booleans (data.personal, markets.eu, product.genai-feature, org.controller, and so on) with three possible values: true, false and "unknown". Anything absent from the profile is "unknown".

1. If a referenced fact is "unknown" and the predicate cannot already be decided from the known facts, the control is emitted with status: "undetermined" and a rationale naming the missing profile fact. It is never silently dropped.
2. If the predicate is decidably false, the control is emitted as not-applicable with the deciding fact.
3. Otherwise it is assessed against evidence.

“Unknown” is never collapsed into “false”. That collapse is the single most common way an automated compliance tool produces a confident wrong answer.

Output contracts

Agent	Input	Output
compliance-engine	handoff.v1 and requirement.v1	compliance-check.v1, one artifact per control, written as an array
privacy-engineer	compliance-check.v1	compliance-check.v1 per privacy control, plus finding.v1 for code-level defects
ai-governance-analyst	compliance-check.v1	compliance-check.v1 per AI control
accessibility-compliance-analyst	compliance-check.v1	compliance-check.v1 per accessibility control
licence-analyst	compliance-check.v1	compliance-check.v1 per licensing control

compliance-check.v1 requires a disclaimer field whose only permitted value is the constant "Automated technical assessment. Not legal advice.". The schema makes the disclaimer unremovable: an artifact without it does not validate.

It also requires status from compliant, partial, non-compliant, not-applicable, undetermined — and a rationale for whichever was chosen.

Adding a jurisdiction

1. Copy an existing pack, keep the header shape, set lastReviewed: null and sources: [].
2. Write controls using the published profile vocabulary; do not add facts unless genuinely needed.
3. Run /foundry-legal:compliance-scan --packs <new-id> --dry-run.
4. Open a PR stating, per control, whether the citation was confirmed against an official text. Anything unconfirmed keeps unverifiedCitation: true.

Never invent an article number, a deadline, a monetary threshold or a penalty amount. If you are not certain, name the instrument only and set unverifiedCitation: true.

Limits

• Every pack shipped here is unverified: lastReviewed is null and sources is empty. Citations may be wrong or out of date, and the engine says so in every report.
• Coverage is uneven by design. The EU and global baseline packs are the deepest; APAC and LATAM are grouped into a single pack of 26 controls and are not comprehensive.
• The engine assesses evidence in the repository. Obligations discharged outside the codebase — a signed DPA, a completed DPIA, a register maintained in a separate system — appear as undetermined unless you point the profile at them.