In the Kennedy-Mighell Report Episode 300, What’s Happening in LegalTech Other than AI? Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell had some good ideas in response to my recent question about where to find prompt libraries. It’s good to have starting points, but I strongly agree with Dennis that “roll your own” is the way to go.

Here is an edited transcript of that section of their podcast, with hypertext links to key resources mentioned:

Jerry Lawson: I was wondering if you had any suggestions for where I might find some prompt libraries. Thanks.

Tom Mighell: Well, first, I want to say thank you very much for your question, and thank you for breaking the long drought in time since we had a question. I think it’s a great question because I had to go and look at it too, because it’s something that I don’t have a lot of familiarity with, and I’m hoping that Dennis has better answers than I do. When I started to look for prompt libraries on the Internet, most of the libraries I found were about generating prompts for image AIs, like MidJourney, like Dall-E [ Ed: This link goes to the Dall-E developer group. Many other Dall-E prompt examples show up in response to a Google search), and they’re really cool, but I don’t think that, Jerry, is what you’re asking about.

Anthropic (developers of Claude) has a prompt library. They have one that you can look at, and it’s got some good tools. Google has a prompting essentials website where you can learn more about prompting, but it doesn’t really have a library in it.

I have found somewhat useful the Copilot prompt library. So if you have Microsoft Copilot, you can take advantage of that prompt library, which is nice to have, but I’m really interested, Dennis, to see what you have to say about this, because in my opinion, my advice would be, go out and take advantage of some of these prompt libraries to get an idea of what a prompt should look like, and then create your own, and then build what you have to use for yourself, but don’t necessarily rely on a library to have what you need. Use it as inspiration, and then find a way to build your own library.

Dennis, am I wrong about that?

Dennis Kennedy: No, I would say it a little bit differently. I used to look at prompt libraries, but I think what prompt libraries are really useful for is giving you ideas of what AI might be able to do for you that you hadn’t thought of yourself. So I’ve actually, coincidentally, have given this a lot of thought, because we discussed it in my AI and law class very specifically, because I had my students do two prompt creation projects.”

“And then my friend, our friend, Jerry Lawson, also said, back in the early days of blogging, people gave all kinds of content away. Why don’t people give away, like, all these great prompts in the same way? And I thought it was like a fair question from Jerry.

And so I thought about my own approach, and I’ll tell you what came up in the class as well. So I wrote a column on law department innovation for Legal Tech Hub, and for probably at least the last year and a half, I’ve ended every one of those columns with the suggested prompt that people can use. I’ve also written a paper that’s on SSRN that will tell you exactly how I structure prompts as of a year and a half ago.

And I’ve made other material available about prompting. But I think what’s more valuable is to teach people the framework and how to structure prompts rather than the prompts themselves. So the reason that I say that is when we discussed it in class, people were concerned about a couple of things.

“So if I give you a prompt and I don’t know what AI tool you’re going, I have no idea whether you’re going to get the same thing I got. And so there can be a lot of differences out there. Things can change.”

I would say, I’ve said this before, that in the last two months, the AI tools have changed more dramatically than any point I’ve seen. So some of the prompts I used to use don’t work as well anymore. So you have that.

And then in the class, we basically kind of relived the whole open-source discussion. And so I asked the students whether they would want to publish for free and make freely available the prompts they did in class. And none of them did.

And their concerns were, they were worried about not getting attribution. They didn’t want to be liable of something that went wrong. And they didn’t want to be like the helpdesk if people tried their prompts and didn’t get the same results, which basically recaptures all the discussions around open-source licensing.”

“So there are some things out there. So Tom, you mentioned a few things. Ethan Mollick has a website where he has some prompts.

Jennifer Wondracek, who is a law librarian, has some prompts for lawyers [Ms. Wondrachek shares at least some of her work at the AI Law Librarians group]. You could find some things out there. I just see them as starting points. contributions.

And as we might talk about later in the podcast, I may do some writing about, I sort of think we’re reaching the point where the AIs themselves can do a better job of prompting, actually creating the prompts and optimizing than we as humans can. So that’s where I’m at. So there are some things out there.

They’re going to be out of date. They might be helpful. You might get unexpected results.

I just use them, I would say, look around for them, and mainly to get ideas of the things you might try with AI that you had never thought of.”

From The Kennedy-Mighell Report Episode 300, May 2, 2025: What’s Happening in LegalTech Other than AI?