There is a line that sums up how I see this profession: to regulate technology, you first have to understand it. I take that further than most — the AI tools I use for part of my work, I wrote myself.
This is not an eccentricity. A great deal of legal work in Panama consists of reviewing volumes of published information: trademark bulletins, official gazettes, contracts that repeat the same badly drafted clauses. That work is done better and more cheaply with the right tool, and the right tools for Panamanian law almost never exist — the market is small, and nobody abroad has any reason to build them.
So I built them.
Trademark watch against DIGERPI
When DIGERPI publishes its bulletin, the clock starts running on the opposition period. Checking each application by hand against your portfolio is slow, and whatever slips through is gone for good.
This tool compares the published bulletin against your full portfolio and flags the applications that could be confused with your marks, ranked by level of risk. You receive a report covering what actually deserves attention, and you decide what to act on.
What changes in practice: instead of reviewing hundreds of records to find three, you review three.
Weekly Official Gazette digest
Laws, executive decrees, cabinet decrees, resolutions, municipal agreements, notices and edicts published during the week, each with a direct link to its official PDF.
Built for the legal department or the manager who needs to know what was published without giving up Monday morning to the full Gazette. If something concerns you, you go straight to the official text from the digest itself.
IP clause review
Reviews the intellectual property clauses of a contract under Panamanian law — assignment of rights, ownership, the scope of licences, warranties and indemnities — and flags where the drafting leaves gaps.
It is particularly useful in employment, consulting and software development agreements, which is where a company most often discovers, too late, that it does not own what it paid to have built.
How they are used
In most cases these tools sit behind the service: you engage the watch or the review, and I use them to deliver the result faster and at lower cost than reviewing by hand.
If your organisation has enough volume to want to run them directly, let’s talk.
Open source
Two of these tools — the weekly Official Gazette digest and the IP clause review — are published under the Apache 2.0 licence. Anyone can download, use, modify and adapt them to their own practice, without asking me and without paying anything.
That was deliberate. The Panamanian legal market is small, and nobody abroad is going to build the tools it needs — there is no business case for it. If someone takes them and makes them better, everyone practising here gains.
They are available at github.com/osvaq/claude-skills.
The trademark watch is a different case: what is published there is a limited trial version, and the full version is engaged as a service.
A caveat worth stating plainly
None of these tools replaces a lawyer’s judgement, and I do not present them as if they did. They process published information and organise it; the legal reading of what comes out remains professional work. Before acting on any result — filing an opposition, signing an agreement, adjusting a compliance position — the official text should be verified and the decision taken with advice.
And there is something I should say plainly, precisely because these tools run on artificial intelligence: AI gets things wrong. It can miss a record, misread a date, or misclassify a match. That is why everything they produce comes with a link to the source document — so that verification is actually possible in practice, rather than a disclaimer for decoration.
I say this because a legal tool that presents itself as infallible is a legal tool nobody should trust.
Interested in one of these tools, or in the service behind it? Write to me at tradslegal@outlook.com or on WhatsApp.
