Clearbrief

Clearbrief is an independent, venture-backed legal technology company founded in Seattle in 2020 by Jacqueline Schafer, a former litigator and assistant attorney general in Washington and Alaska. It builds AI software that runs inside Microsoft Word to verify citations against the record, surface supporting evidence and assemble tables of authorities and hyperlinked timelines.

Schafer started the company after years of manually checking whether the record supported what a brief asserted, and shipped the Word add-in in 2021 with seed funding from Madrona Venture Group and Sequoia. A 4 million dollar round followed in 2024, led by Authentic Ventures, How Women Invest and Reign Ventures, taking total funding to about 7.5 million dollars, and it has since signed integration and distribution arrangements with LexisNexis, Relativity, iManage, MyCase and the American Arbitration Association.

Clearbrief at a glance:

• Founded: Founded in 2020 in Seattle by Jacqueline Schafer, joined as chief technology officer by Jose Saura, a two decade Microsoft veteran.
• Headquarters: Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, running as a small distributed team that sells mainly in the United States with early expansion into Europe.
• Ownership: Independent and venture-backed, with about 7.5 million dollars raised from Madrona Venture Group, Sequoia, Authentic Ventures, How Women Invest and Reign Ventures.
• Legal Technology Portfolio: Sells one product, Clearbrief, a Microsoft Word add-in for citation verification, evidence linking, hyperlinked timelines and tables of authorities.
• Market Focus: Concentrated on litigation, serving law firms from solo practices to the AmLaw 200, courts and arbitrators, and in-house teams that prepare their own filings.

What legal teams should know: Clearbrief is a narrow, deep tool rather than a platform, so it earns its place where a department has real litigation or investigation drafting and adds little to contracting or spend work. The company is small and modestly funded, which keeps pricing accessible but belongs in a vendor risk review, while adoption is light because the product installs into Word instead of introducing a new system.