Starting point
The company, around 350 employees across three sites, had grown through two acquisitions. Each firm brought its own employment contract, its own policies and its own idea of what belongs in a handbook. The HR team, four people, had never merged them, because there were never three free days in a row. The folder held three contract versions that differed on probation, overtime and notice periods, a handbook from 2021 that still described home office as an exception, and a travel expense policy citing a flat rate that no longer applied. Everyone knew it needed doing. Nobody had it on the desk.
The moment it tipped was a new employment contract. A manager from one of the acquired sites had built it from her old company template, HR had waved it through, and the works council chair read it during the consultation on the hire. He spotted two mandatory items under Section 2 Nachweisgesetz that appeared neither in the contract nor in an annex, among them the termination procedure with the deadline for filing an unfair dismissal claim. No drama, but a breach that can carry a fine, and proof that nobody in the company could say for sure which of the three versions was complete. The head of HR called me the same week.
At the first meeting the head of HR, the works council chair and the data protection officer sat at the table. The works council wanted two things: the same mandatory items at all three sites, and no contract with a name and salary in an AI tool without him knowing where it goes. The data protection officer had read Anthropic's documentation: on the commercial plans, inputs and outputs are not used for training by default, but processing runs on servers outside the EU. That fixed her two review points before a single routine was built. Working with Claude every day myself helped me understand her questions. It did not replace her review.
Approach
The first week belonged to the stopwatch. Each of the four people in the team noted for a week which document work came up, how long it took and whether it needed a decision or was just reading and comparing. In parallel I went through the folder: which contracts, handbooks and agreements exist, in which version, who checked them last. The list at the end was clear. Reading contracts against the law, holding the handbook against the current policies and turning the notes from four rounds of talks on mobile work into a draft: the three tasks with the biggest backlog, none of which needed a decision in the first step. Those became the three routines.
The works council was there from the first build session, as a co-author. We built the knowledge base first: a Claude project on the company's Team plan, holding the contract templates without names or salary data, the text of the Nachweisgesetz, the structure of the existing works agreements, the current policies and a project instruction on what results must look like: table, passage, status, no opinion. The works council signed off the list of documents allowed into the project itself and ruled that contracts with real personal data are never uploaded. Both are in the agreement verbatim today, because he phrased them.
The contract routine was the first to stand. HR uploads a contract template into a chat of the project, starts the company's comparison prompt and gets a table: mandatory item, passage with a verbatim quote, status present, incomplete or missing. Claude drafts no clause and assesses no validity; that is written into the prompt. The review step is non-negotiable: HR reads every passage against the contract, resolves the rows marked [check] and hands the gap list to the lawyer. He still reviews whether the contract holds. He just no longer gets the whole contract, only the places where it snags.
The skeleton of the prompt from the project. This is the frame of the comparison prompt the team has used for every contract since. It already works like this. What turned it into the company's own prompt during the project is listed below, and that is the part that keeps the annex mishap from week three from happening again.
The finished prompt, ready to copy
All six building blocks in one prompt. Replace the bracketed placeholders with your own details.
You work as an assistant to the Head of HR at [company]. The project knowledge holds our checklist under Section 2 of the German Nachweisgesetz and our customary annexes. Attached is an employment contract for [contract group, permanent or fixed-term, full-time or part-time] with its annexes. Compare contract and annexes together against the checklist: [the company's checklist under Section 2 NachwG] Annexes that belong to this contract group: [annexes] Produce a table with the columns: mandatory item, passage (contract or annex, clause, verbatim quote), status (present, incomplete, missing). Below it, a list of the incomplete and missing items with one sentence each on what is missing. Use only the attached documents. Do not draft clauses, do not propose changes and do not assess whether a clause is legally valid. If you are only guessing at a passage or can only partly recognise an item, mark the row with [check]. Limit: the result is a completeness check against our checklist, not legal advice. Whether the contract holds up legally is for our lawyer to review.
- The company's checklistthe mandatory items under Section 2 NachwG in the order and wording of the company's own contracts, with a note on which item customarily sits in which annex.
- The contract templates per groupwhich versions exist, which annexes belong to which, and how the team can tell that a set is complete.
- The rule for when the lawyer comes inwhich gaps HR closes itself and which row of the table always goes to him.
- The review stephow HR can tell in twenty minutes whether the table is right and the contract can go for signature.
The snag came in week three. On the first check of the second contract version, Claude reported three mandatory items as missing that were not missing at all. They sat in an annex on working hours and one on the occupational pension that had belonged to every contract at that site for years and that nobody had uploaded with it. Claude had correctly checked what it saw. We added the customary annexes per contract group to the project and rebuilt the prompt so it reads contract and annexes together and states where an item sits. The works council turned that into a rule: every contract group has a fixed annex list, and the routine runs only with the complete set.
In parallel ran the sessions on the wording of the works agreement, and that was the slowest track, deliberately. The works council meets every two weeks, the data protection officer wanted to read Anthropic's data processing addendum and the standard contractual clauses for the transfer to the US herself, and she wrote the data transfer into the agreement as a review point of its own with a follow-up date. The other two routines ran in test mode during that time: the handbook came back as a change list, section, what it says, what applies today, source. The notes on mobile work were arranged along the structure of the existing agreements, open points marked open, nothing added. At the end of month three the agreement was signed, and the team ran the three routines alone for a week while I stayed in the background.
Outcome
A new contract now runs like this: the manager names the contract group, HR takes the approved template with its annex set, runs the comparison, reads the passages against the documents and hands only the gap list to the lawyer. The three contract versions have been merged into one template per contract group, with an annex list the works council knows. The 2021 handbook has a new version date; only what the change list flagged with a source was changed. And the draft on mobile work is with the works council, open points marked open.
The works council signed the agreement on Claude, with the three use cases, the list of documents in the project, the ban on real personal data, the review step, the data transfer as a follow-up point and a review date after six months. The lawyer has received gaps instead of contracts ever since. The team has since built a fourth routine on its own, checking the travel expense policy against the current flat rates, and presented it to the works council at the review, as the agreement provides. It did not need me for that, and that was the point of the project.