[BUG] commercial-legal practice profile does not persist across Cowork chat sessions on Windows
Preflight Checklist
- [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
- [x] This is a single bug report (please file separate reports for different bugs)
- [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code
What's Wrong?
he commercial-legal plugin does not make the practice profile created by cold-start-interview available to subsequent Cowork chat sessions on Windows.
I ran:
/commercial-legal:cold-start-interview
and completed the full setup interview. The skill reported that it had written the practice profile to:
~/.claude/plugins/config/claude-for-legal/commercial-legal/CLAUDE.md
However, after opening a new Cowork chat on the same machine, /commercial-legal:review and /commercial-legal:customize could not find the practice profile and prompted me to run cold-start-interview again.
The profile appeared to be readable within the original chat. Investigation showed that a file written through the generic shell was stored in an isolated Linux environment associated with that session, rather than in the documented configuration directory on the Windows host.
The Cowork host-file tools also could not access the documented configuration path:
Write and Edit rejected the path because it was outside the session's connected folders.
request_cowork_directory could not access ~/.claude/plugins/config because that directory did not exist or was not accessible.
Requesting ~/.claude was rejected because it overlapped a protected host location containing scheduled-tasks.
The setup therefore appeared to complete successfully, but the resulting profile was unavailable in a new Cowork chat.
What Should Happen?
After cold-start-interview completes, the generated practice profile should remain available to subsequent Cowork chat sessions for the same user and machine.
When a later Cowork chat runs /commercial-legal:review, /commercial-legal:customize, or another commercial-legal skill, it should automatically load the stored playbook positions, escalation rules, and other practice settings.
The user should not have to repeat the setup interview or attach the generated profile manually to every new chat.
If Cowork cannot write the profile to a persistent location, cold-start-interview should report that failure during setup. It should not report successful completion after writing only to a session-local environment.
Error Messages/Logs
Expected configuration path:
~/.claude/plugins/config/claude-for-legal/commercial-legal/CLAUDE.md
Write/Edit error:
C:\Users\<user>\.claude\plugins\config\claude-for-legal\commercial-legal\CLAUDE.md is outside this session's connected folders, so Write can't reach it. Request it with the request_cowork_directory tool.
request_cowork_directory result for ~/.claude/plugins/config:
The directory doesn't exist or isn't accessible.
request_cowork_directory result for ~/.claude:
Directory C:\Users\<user>\.claude overlaps a protected host location (C:\Users\<user>\.claude\scheduled-tasks) and cannot be mounted.
Observed result in a subsequent Cowork chat
(English summary and translation of the original Japanese UI message; not verbatim):
The practice profile file at
~/.claude/plugins/config/claude-for-legal/commercial-legal/CLAUDE.md
could not be found.
The plugin then prompted me to run
/commercial-legal:cold-start-interview
again.
A screenshot showing the original Japanese message is attached.Steps to Reproduce
Prerequisite: The commercial-legal plugin from the claude-for-legal marketplace is already installed and enabled in Cowork.
1.Open Claude Cowork on Windows.
2.Start a new Cowork chat.
3.Run:
/commercial-legal:cold-start-interview
4.Select the full interview and complete the requested setup, including the role, practice setting, playbook side, playbook positions, and escalation rules.
5,Confirm that the skill reports that it wrote the practice profile to:
~/.claude/plugins/config/claude-for-legal/commercial-legal/CLAUDE.md
Open a separate, new Cowork chat on the same machine.
7.Attach a contract and run:
/commercial-legal:review
Alternatively, run:
/commercial-legal:customize
8.Observe that the new chat cannot find the practice profile and prompts the user to run cold-start-interview again.
9.If the original chat is still open, return to it. The profile created through the generic shell may remain readable in that original session even though it is unavailable to the new session.
Claude Model
Sonnet (default)
Is this a regression?
I don't know
Last Working Version
Unknown — I have not confirmed a Cowork version in which this workflow persisted the practice profile correctly across chat sessions.
Claude Code Version
N/A — this issue was reproduced in Claude Cowork, not the Claude Code CLI. The exact Cowork desktop version running during reproduction was not confirmed.
Platform
Other
Operating System
Windows
Terminal/Shell
Other
Additional Information
This issue was reproduced in Claude Cowork, not the Claude Code CLI.
The issue form requires a Claude Code version and asks the reporter to confirm use of the latest Claude Code version. Claude Code was not involved in this reproduction, so no Claude Code version is available.
The claude-for-legal documentation states that each plugin writes its practice profile to:
~/.claude/plugins/config/claude-for-legal/<plugin>/CLAUDE.md
The commercial-legal cold-start-interview skill specifically instructs the agent to create the required parent directories and write:
~/.claude/plugins/config/claude-for-legal/commercial-legal/CLAUDE.md
In the affected Cowork environment, the documented path could not be reached through the available host-file tools. The writable home directory exposed by the generic shell was session-local and did not provide cross-session persistence.
This may indicate an incompatibility between Cowork's storage model and plugins designed around Claude Code's persistent ~/.claude convention. This report only confirms the behavior of commercial-legal in the environment described above.
Possibly related issue
This may share the same underlying Cowork persistence problem as #51398, “Cowork Desktop: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA} is not persistent across conversations.”
Issue #51398 concerns a different plugin path and use case: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA}, expected to resolve to a persistent ~/.claude/plugins/data/{id}/ directory, instead resolves to a session-specific path under /sessions/<session-id>/mnt/.claude/plugins/data/.... Files written there are unavailable to subsequent Cowork conversations.
The present report concerns:
~/.claude/plugins/config/claude-for-legal/commercial-legal/CLAUDE.md
This path stores a legal practice profile rather than MCP authentication data. The present issue was also reproduced on Windows, whereas #51398 was reported on macOS.
Therefore, this does not appear to be an exact duplicate of #51398. However, both reports may reflect the same underlying issue: paths under ~/.claude/plugins/... resolving to, or being writable only within, conversation-specific Cowork environments instead of persistent storage shared across conversations.
I am filing this separately because it affects a different documented path, plugin, operating system, and user-facing workflow. Please link or consolidate the reports if they are determined to have the same root cause.
Unverified workaround involving manual directory creation
I have not tested whether manually creating the exact directory below on the Windows host would allow that narrower directory to be mounted:
C:\Users\<user>\.claude\plugins\config\claude-for-legal\commercial-legal
The normal cold-start-interview workflow is instructed to create the required directories itself, but it reported successful completion without confirming that the profile would remain available to subsequent Cowork sessions.
Current workaround
Manually copy a sanitized version of the generated practice profile to a normal Windows folder.
Create a dedicated Cowork Project.
Add the profile and playbook files to that Project as knowledge/context.
Start contract reviews from that Project and explicitly instruct the plugin to use the Project files.
This avoids repeating the interview but does not use the plugin's documented persistence mechanism. A skill that explicitly checks the fixed ~/.claude/plugins/config/... path may still report that setup has not been completed.
Evidence
The following evidence is attached or available:
A screenshot showing that setup appeared to complete.
A screenshot from a separate Cowork chat showing that the practice profile could not be found.
The exact Write/Edit and request_cowork_directory error messages.
The original generated CLAUDE.md and legal.local.md will not be attached because they contain identifying and confidential information.
If configuration files are required for diagnosis, I can prepare separate sanitized reproductions in which all company names, personal names, law-firm names, contact details, contract positions, escalation thresholds, and other identifying or confidential information are replaced with neutral placeholders.
Preflight Checklist
I have searched existing issues and this has not been reported as an exact duplicate.
This is a single bug report.
Claude Code was not used because this issue was reproduced in Claude Cowork. Therefore, I cannot truthfully confirm that I am using the latest version of Claude Code.