How I set up Counsel OS

The real benefits of Counsel OS appear when it can read and write to your matters. I set up Counsel OS alongside my Obsidian vault, and paired it with QMD, Tobi Lütke’s terrific search tool for markdown files. This lets Counsel OS find the relevant local files for whatever legal task it’s doing.

Here is the actual top level of my Obsidian vault, the one that syncs through iCloud:

Obsidian/
...
├── Counsel OS/     <- my legal practice
...

The legal-root folder

When you set up Counsel OS, it will ask you which folder you want to set as your legal-root folder. This folder is where Counsel OS stores files particular to your practice. The folder is structured as follows:

Counsel OS/
├── config.md        # the entire configuration
├── entities/        # counterparties, vendors, customers
├── law/             # 26 practice areas, plugin-managed
├── matters/
├── memory/          # decisions, precedent, things worth keeping
└── practice/
    ├── library/     # fallback clause language
    ├── methods/     # how I review, how I draft
    ├── profile.md
    ├── reference/
    └── standards/   # 24 clause positions

All of it is plain markdown. If I deleted the plugin tomorrow I would still have a readable practice: positions, matters, memory, all text files I can open anywhere. You can use a Dropbox or iCloud folder, so the vault is shared across your devices.

The search layer

The piece that makes this feel like one system instead of twelve folders is QMD, a small content-index MCP server. It indexes every markdown file in the vault, and is automatically called by Counsel OS to look up relevant information. It runs two kinds of search at once: keyword matching for when I know the exact term, and semantic search for when I only know what I mean.

Here is a real search I ran while writing this post:

what is our position on limitation of liability caps in vendor contracts?

And the top of the ranked list that came back, paths shown relative to the practice folder:

1. practice/standards/limitation-of-liability.md    0.93
2. practice/library/liability-and-indemnification.md  0.51
3. practice/methods/contract-review.md              0.43
4. practice/standards/index.md                      0.43
5. practice/standards/indemnification.md            0.35
6. entities/[redacted].md                           0.34

Nothing in the vault was written to make that search work. The files are just organized the way a lawyer thinks, and the index does the rest. Without QMD the plugin falls back to plain filesystem search, which works, just less well and more slowly.

Calling Counsel OS

I don’t really have to remember to call Counsel OS. Its skill files instruct Claude to invoke it automatically for relevant matters. I open Claude Code and ask it to review an agreement, pull up matter history, do some research, or draft a document. A skill called counsel reads the request and decides which layers it needs. However, you can always invoke it directly with the slash command.

The part I use most is memory. When counsel notices something durable in the middle of the work, it proposes a memory update that I can approve or reject.

Getting started

Install from the Claude plugin marketplace, run /counsel-os:setup, answer a short interview, and you have the folder structure above with 24 seeded positions to edit into your own. The README covers it in detail, including a demo that reviews a synthetic NDA without writing anything to your vault.

Next post: an actual piece of work product going through the redline pipeline.