Contracts, leases, policies, long email chains. Two tricks make Claude genuinely good at them, and one of them is just word order.
Trick 1: the document goes on top
For anything longer than a page, put the document at the top of your prompt and your question at the very end. Not the other way around.
This sounds too small to matter. It isn't. Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, found that putting long documents before the question instead of after can improve answer quality by as much as 30 percent. Claude reads top to bottom, and a question it reads right before answering stays sharp. A question buried above 20 pages of lease gets fuzzy.
Trick 2: quotes first, answer second
For anything where being wrong is expensive, add one step: have Claude pull the exact sentences that matter before it answers, and answer only from those. Now every claim in the answer traces back to a line you can check in the original. No more "the contract says" without receipts.
Copy-paste prompt (document goes above it)
{paste the full document here first}
First, pull out the exact sentences from the document above that talk about {cancellation and refunds}. Then, using only those sentences, answer this question: {what happens if I cancel with 20 days notice?} If the document doesn't say, tell me it doesn't say.
Notice the last line. It's the safety line from lesson 4 wearing work clothes. A contract that's silent on your question is an answer too, and you want Claude to tell you that instead of improvising.