Get a Draft Through Compliance Review

Drafts sent whole to legal come back either hedged into uselessness or three weeks late, and writers respond by pre-hedging everything, which is worse than either. Reviewers are not trying to ruin the page; they receive a document with no indication of which sentences carry risk, so they treat all of it as risky. The fix sits on the content side: isolate the claims that genuinely need review, propose compliant alternatives yourself, and hand the reviewer a decision rather than a manuscript.

The skill file

---
name: compliance-review-without-gutting-the-draft
description: Use when publishing in a regulated sector and legal or compliance review keeps returning drafts unrecognisable or too late.
---

# Get a Draft Through Compliance Review

Drafts sent whole to legal come back either hedged into uselessness or three weeks late, and writers respond by pre-hedging everything, which is worse than either. Reviewers are not trying to ruin the page; they receive a document with no indication of which sentences carry risk, so they treat all of it as risky. The fix sits on the content side: isolate the claims that genuinely need review, propose compliant alternatives yourself, and hand the reviewer a decision rather than a manuscript.

## What you need first

- the applicable rules for your sector in writing, not a colleague's recollection of them
- the last ten review rounds and what each changed, which reveals the reviewer's real pattern
- a named reviewer and an agreed turnaround, not a shared inbox
- the draft with its factual and performance claims already marked

## Method

1. Build a list of previously approved wordings from past review rounds. Most of what a reviewer changes they have changed before, and reusing an approved phrasing requires no new decision from anyone.
2. Mark the draft into three classes before sending: claims needing review, claims already approved verbatim elsewhere, and everything else. This step alone removes most of the turnaround.
3. Put a compliant alternative next to every risky claim. Reviewers approve a choice quickly and rewrite prose slowly.
4. State what each claim rests on beside it. A performance figure carrying its source and period usually survives, while the same figure bare gets cut.
5. Ask for the rule behind any change you do not understand instead of just accepting it. Some changes are the regulation and some are the reviewer being careful, and only the first kind has to bind every future draft.
6. Add each decision to the approved-wordings list as it is made, so the next draft starts with more pre-approved material than this one did.
7. Agree what needs no review at all and get that scope in writing. Without a stated exemption everything drifts back into the queue within a quarter.

## What this produces

A reviewed draft plus a maintained list of pre-approved wordings and a written no-review scope.

## Where this goes wrong

- Pre-hedging the whole draft to avoid comments, which produces a page that says nothing and still comes back edited
- Treating each review as a one-off, so the same twenty corrections are made every month and turnaround never improves
- Editing the page after approval, which puts unreviewed wording live under a sign-off that no longer covers it

---

From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/compliance-review-without-gutting-the-draft

What you need first

• the applicable rules for your sector in writing, not a colleague's recollection of them
• the last ten review rounds and what each changed, which reveals the reviewer's real pattern
• a named reviewer and an agreed turnaround, not a shared inbox
• the draft with its factual and performance claims already marked

Method

1. 01 Build a list of previously approved wordings from past review rounds. Most of what a reviewer changes they have changed before, and reusing an approved phrasing requires no new decision from anyone.
2. 02 Mark the draft into three classes before sending: claims needing review, claims already approved verbatim elsewhere, and everything else. This step alone removes most of the turnaround.
3. 03 Put a compliant alternative next to every risky claim. Reviewers approve a choice quickly and rewrite prose slowly.
4. 04 State what each claim rests on beside it. A performance figure carrying its source and period usually survives, while the same figure bare gets cut.
5. 05 Ask for the rule behind any change you do not understand instead of just accepting it. Some changes are the regulation and some are the reviewer being careful, and only the first kind has to bind every future draft.
6. 06 Add each decision to the approved-wordings list as it is made, so the next draft starts with more pre-approved material than this one did.
7. 07 Agree what needs no review at all and get that scope in writing. Without a stated exemption everything drifts back into the queue within a quarter.

What this produces

A reviewed draft plus a maintained list of pre-approved wordings and a written no-review scope.

Where this goes wrong

• Pre-hedging the whole draft to avoid comments, which produces a page that says nothing and still comes back edited
• Treating each review as a one-off, so the same twenty corrections are made every month and turnaround never improves
• Editing the page after approval, which puts unreviewed wording live under a sign-off that no longer covers it

Use this skill in your own AI

The download is a plain markdown file with the name and trigger in its frontmatter. Where an assistant supports skills it can load itself, that frontmatter is what it reads to decide this one applies.

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