Bring on your first teammate

Help a small company move from “we need another pair of hands” to populated editable documents that its decision-maker can review, accompanied by a short list of unresolved decisions and relevant sources.

This workflow helps the company prepare its process; it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Before asking the proposed teammate for sensitive personal information, explain that you are helping the company and are not acting as the teammate’s lawyer. Avoid collecting personal identifiers or completed government forms in chat.

Boundaries

• Identify facts that affect the relationship; do not make a final employee, contractor, tax, benefits, or payroll classification.
• Do not assume a cofounder is already an employee merely because they work for the company or own stock.
• Do not send an offer, sign or file a document, start payroll, grant or issue equity, or invite anyone to a company system without explicit authorization.
• Keep company records wherever the user chooses. Do not require a hosted account or copy private matter state into the skill.
• Distinguish sourced facts, user statements, open questions, and your own inferences in every review package.

Workflow

1. Establish the operational need, intended work, expected start date, work location, manager, and who can approve the engagement.
2. Establish each capacity separately. Ask whether the person is already a founder, director, officer, stockholder, optionholder, contractor, or service provider; then ask what new relationship the company proposes.
3. If the relationship is uncertain, collect the facts needed for counsel or a qualified payroll/tax adviser. Label the result “classification review required”; do not choose the more convenient form.
4. Identify the governing jurisdiction before recommending state-sensitive wage, invention-assignment, or restrictive-covenant material.
5. Inventory existing documents and approvals. Do not replace an existing founder stock, IP, board, contractor, or employment instrument without first identifying it.
6. Read the bundled Legal Explainer content listed in references/resources.md. These are source-linked exports, not a complete onboarding manual. Verify current law and applicable state guidance before using them for a recommendation. Select only the resources that fit the known facts; the same index links to canonical pages and downstream documents.
7. Prepare the selected canonical forms using their current declared fields and the facts already supplied. Ask one compact batch of material questions that remain unanswered; do not ask the user to repeat facts in their records. Separate missing facts that prevent selecting a form (such as work state) from unanswered fields that can remain visibly open (such as reporting manager). Continue with supported drafts while identifying blocked documents.
8. Return the editable drafts and short handoff described in references/review-package.md.
9. Stop for approval before any external action.

Drafting from canonical forms

Retrieve and read the actual form, including its fields, defaults, conditional provisions and drafting notes. A catalog listing or link alone is not the form. Read the canonical template page for its version, attribution and license, and https://openagreements.org/templates/<slug>/template.json for current field metadata; the annotated Markdown alone may not contain either. If a signal is unavailable, state that rather than inventing it. Use the current schema rather than inventing field names. Populate consistent party names, compensation, dates and work location across the documents. Preserve applicable notices and supply attribution/license information with the delivered drafts, not only in retrieval logs. Remove fill instructions and optional-module annotation banners from the populated document. Fill business terms with the terms themselves; put drafting comments, approval limits and decisions in the handoff, outside operative text.

Conditional provisions

Read each form’s annotated Markdown at https://openagreements.org/templates/<slug>/template-annotated.md and its current schema. The annotated form lists conditional sections and their triggers. Make each applicable choice explicit; do not rely on a declared default or assume an unset trigger omits a section. Check the tool’s behavior against the source.

For the current offer and CIIAA forms, non-empty text or true keeps the corresponding section; an empty string or false omits it. Set each offer bonus_terms or equity_terms to an empty string unless that award is proposed; record its absence in the handoff, not as “No bonus proposed” in a trigger field. Set CIIAA personnel_nonsolicit_included and future_employer_notice_included false when no optional post-employment restraints are requested. If the choice is unresolved, prepare a provisional draft omitting them and identify the choice for review. Preserve confidentiality, IP and statutory protections independently. For the generic offer, set california_specific_terms explicitly according to the confirmed work state; do not include California terms for a non-California employee merely because the trigger was left unset.

Inspect every selected section in the output. Unknown trigger warnings or a section retained against the stated choice make that output unusable regardless of the tool’s exit code. If the filler cannot honor the choice, return populated editable Markdown from the canonical annotated form, removing the omitted section and its related cover terms, and state that Word output was unavailable. If the source or condition cannot be resolved, identify that document as blocked.

Use explicit placeholders for unanswered material terms. An invention disclosure of “None” is an affirmative answer, not a substitute for an absent disclosure. Distinguish an intended effective date from an executed agreement and a proposed equity term from an approved grant. Verify current jurisdiction-specific rules when making legal recommendations; filling user-supplied terms does not establish their compliance.

Return editable Word files when available through the user’s tools. Editable Markdown containing the actual populated document is also useful; state when Word rendering is unavailable. Fill-data files may accompany drafts but do not replace them. If a canonical form cannot be retrieved, identify the unavailable document and produce the other supported drafts. Do not recreate its substance from memory or substitute another jurisdiction without explanation. Inspect the returned documents: accepting fill values does not prove a tool replaced visible field tokens or omitted the selected conditional provisions. Unresolved placeholders should correspond only to facts still unanswered.

Relationship routes

• First employee: ordinarily evaluate an offer letter, confidentiality and invention assignment, wage-and-hour rules, required notices, payroll setup, and any proposed restrictive covenant.
• Working cofounder: first inventory the person’s existing founder, governance, equity, and IP documents. Treat employment, compensation, and payroll as additional questions, not consequences of founder status.
• Contractor: fact-spot classification risk and use contractor documents only after the proposed relationship remains supportable. Do not disguise an employee relationship with a contractor agreement.
• Transition to payroll: inventory prior services, compensation, IP, equity, and approvals; identify what changes prospectively and what historical questions require professional review.
• Uncertain relationship: produce a short fact matrix and escalation list rather than a document recommendation.

Completion

For a worked intake with deliberately missing facts, see examples/first-employee.md. For a specified synthetic NY hire and expected populated terms, see examples/new-york-employee.md. For a founder transition, see examples/founder-transition.md.

For a drafting request, completion means returning the actual editable drafts supported by the facts, with a short handoff naming unresolved terms, substantive review points, unavailable documents and required decisions. A proposed-document list or compliance checklist alone does not complete a sufficiently specified drafting request. For incomplete intake, return supported work and focused questions without describing the engagement as ready to implement.

Policies, when requested

Use the company’s actual current policies and identify their titles and company revisions. Preparing a new policy is a separate drafting task. If supplied or released, use canonical openagreements-information-security-policy and its maintained security-policy skill; read the actual form and current schema rather than assuming its ID means it is publicly available. Do not duplicate its substance here. An unreleased draft retains its source-verification and substantive-review gates; it is not an adopted company policy. A policy draft remains Draft / Pending approval absent adoption evidence. Company policy revision and template version are different identifiers.

A separate acknowledgment draft can list the identified policy versions. Do not invent delivery dates, signatures, adoption or training completion. Acknowledgment, training, employment acceptance and evidence that controls operate are distinct. Keep records in the customer’s chosen tools; no workforce database is required.