Clearbrief vs Litem: how they compare in 2026

The models are the product, and the choice of architecture is what sets it apart. Citation detection across a document, the patented scoring of how well a sentence is supported by the page it cites, and concept search across uploaded discovery all run on machine learning and natural language processing. The vendor deliberately keeps generative models out of the checking function, saying classic AI means the checker cannot introduce hallucinations of its own, while shipping separate generative features for drafting. Remove the models and nothing remains but a Word toolbar. Not being generative is not the same as not being AI, and that distinction is the point of this product.

The models are the product, with no conventional software layer beneath them. The company describes AI workflows and tools across the litigation lifecycle: starting in discovery, assisting through depositions in real time, and offering agentic features for later phases. Every named product line is an inference function rather than a storage or workflow layer. They are analysis of transcripts and testimony, a facts capability over the case record, and an agent for later phases. Real time help during a live deposition is not something a database does. The alternative is reading transcripts end to end by hand, which the product replaces rather than speeds up, and a customer reports preparation time cut in half. Remove the models and nothing remains that a litigator would license. The agreement fits that reading. It defines third party large language model providers as a term and disclaims warranties specifically for AI generated content, which is a company contracting around model output rather than software.

Grounding is real, documented and automated, short of published measurement of the checker itself. The retrieval method is concrete. Citations are detected in the Word document and matched against case law databases: LexisNexis where the user holds a subscription, and Fastcase and vLex where they do not, with Westlaw citations mapped across to those databases. Where a source cannot be displayed automatically, the product still reports that the citation is verifiable and accepts a manual upload. Output links every citation to the specific page and text the reader can open. The failure mode is named clearly: because checking runs on classic AI rather than generative models, the vendor says there is no risk of the checker adding hallucinations of its own. What is missing is measurement of the product's own performance. A search of the vendor site, blog, sandbox site and trade coverage found no false positive or false negative rate for citation detection, no accuracy figure for the support score, no test set and no independent evaluation.

Accuracy is addressed candidly, but only as a disclaimer, with no measurement. Clause 9.6 of the master services agreement is explicit. No warranty is given on the accuracy, completeness or reliability of AI generated content, the customer is solely responsible for it, and the customer must verify output before use. That is a plain statement in the operative contract. Everything on the other side is absent. No accuracy figure, benchmark or evaluation is published for any feature. Nothing describes how a summary or extracted fact is tied to the underlying transcript. That matters here because deposition testimony has a natural citation form in page and line numbers, and the vendor's own blog writes about citing transcripts correctly. Nothing addresses hallucination by name. The five solution pages were not opened and may describe grounding.

A real published commitment with concrete review surfaces, and the product exists to serve oversight rather than to reduce it. The vendor states that source linked outputs keep humans in control and the evidence in view, and the Cite Check Report is explicitly built for the partner signing a filing, listing every citation with hyperlinks so each flagged issue can be reviewed in context. The founder frames the problem as partners being sanctioned for citation errors they did not personally make, which is a supervision argument. Not located: the threshold at which a semantic score is treated as low, whether that threshold is configurable, and what the vendor commits to when its own checker misses something. That last point matters here, because a verification tool that fails silently leaves a lawyer more confident than before they used it.

Oversight is set out in the agreement rather than described in the product, and the allocation is thorough. Clause 9.5 places vetting, output review and privilege preservation on the customer, naming three separate obligations. Clause 9.6 requires AI generated content to be verified before use. Clause 3.3 restricts who may use the system at all: attorney users must be licensed and in good standing in the United States, and paralegal use must not constitute the practice of law. The identity and competence of the reviewer is therefore contractual, and a firm knows who must check the output and what they answer for. The product side is missing. Nothing published says what runs unattended, where a review checkpoint sits in the interface, what confidence or uncertainty is shown, or how the agentic features for later phases differ in autonomy from the analysis features.

User categories and testimonials stand in for deployment evidence. The vendor states the product is used by courts, Am Law firms, government agencies, arbitrators and legal teams handling high stakes matters, which is a notable set because courts and arbitrators are adopters rather than customers in the ordinary sense, and an attributed testimonial describes the LexisNexis backed hallucination detection in practice. Searched the vendor site, the blog, the sandbox site and trade coverage and located no named organization paired with figures and a date, no case study, and no assessable method. Categories of adopter are not the same as a named deployment.

Named firms from the defense bar, volume figures and one attributed outcome. Two customers are named on the vendor's own pages, Ogletree Deakins and Rutan & Tucker, both substantial defense firms. Scale is published as more than fifty Am Law 200 firms, more than 10,000 depositions handled a month and more than 20,000 professionals using the platform. Three people speak on the record, including Kyre Stucklin, Director of Innovation at Rutan & Tucker, and a litigator who reports preparation time cut by half, which ties a figure to a named person. Method and dates are missing: none of the volume figures has a measurement basis or period, and no case study sets out before and after results. One contractual fact belongs beside any logo strip. Clause 12.1 lets Deposely use customer names and logos, so a logo shows a contract rather than an endorsement.

Substantive commitments rest on a design choice, short of the full picture. The strongest element is Bring Your Own Storage, an enterprise option under which all uploaded documents stay in the organization's own cloud storage. That answers the confidentiality question by taking the vendor out of custody rather than by promising care. The vendor says the product is built for sensitive privileged legal work with enterprise grade security, privacy and access controls, and that work stays in the environment the team and IT already trust. A policy of not using client data for model training is reported in third party review material, not on a vendor page that was reached. Two gaps remain. Retention and deletion terms for customers not using Bring Your Own Storage are not published. Attorney client privilege and work product are used to describe the work rather than addressed as a handling question, and no segregation model between users or matters is published.

Training and retention are answered firmly in the agreement; separation and providers are not answered at all. On training, clause 5.4 ends with an express statement that Deposely will not train artificial intelligence models using customer data as training materials, which prohibits the activity in the operative contract. On retention, clause 6.4 requires immediate deletion of all proprietary information, including customer materials, promptly after termination, subject only to legal record keeping. Clause 5.4 also limits usage data to anonymized collection and aggregated disclosure. The privacy policy does not cut against either. It excludes content uploaded for business customers from its scope, so its language about improving algorithms and AI models reaches prospect and visitor data, not matter material. Privilege itself appears only in clause 9.5, which places its preservation on the customer rather than describing how the platform supports it. Nothing describes separation between customers or between matters, and no model provider is identified.

The vendor engages substantively with the professional duty the product exists to serve. It publishes material on how large firms put responsible AI into practice through citation checking policies, describes the courts' expectation that every sentence carries a verifiable citation in a standard format, and frames the risk as sanctions and reputational damage to the signing partner. That engages with candor to the court and with supervision of others' work, beyond a disclaimer. The audience is professional throughout: litigators, in house teams, courts, arbitrators and government agencies, with no consumer surface located. Competence is not addressed as such, no statement on the advice line is published, and no jurisdiction limits are stated beyond references to Bluebook and local style rules.

Three clauses in the contract do the work. Clause 9.4 states that Deposely is solely a technology provider and provides no legal services or advice. Clause 9.5 sets out the professional obligations that follow, placing vetting, output review and preservation of privilege on the customer, so the firm is told what it keeps rather than simply warned off reliance. Clause 3.3 goes beyond a disclaimer. It limits attorney users to those licensed and in good standing in the United States and provides that use by paralegals must not constitute the practice of law. That covers who may use the system and under what supervision, engages the unauthorized practice question directly, and carries a jurisdiction in the licensure requirement. No named authority is cited: no bar rule, ethics opinion or guidance document. That gap is recorded on the bar guidance signal.

A published position on responsible AI without a governance mechanism a buyer could audit. The vendor publishes on how firms should put responsible AI into practice through citation checking policies. Its decision to keep generative models out of the checking path is a real governance choice with a stated reason. The vendor site, blog, sandbox site and trade coverage were searched. No AI governance framework, AI management certification such as ISO 42001, named owner of model governance, or testing regime before release is published, and nothing addresses uneven output across matter types, parties or populations. That last point matters for a scoring product: a score that behaves differently across drafting styles or document types would be invisible to a user, and nothing published addresses it.

No governance material is published. The security page and privacy policy were read in full, and the master services agreement clause by clause, along with the site navigation, footer and trust center entry point. There is no responsible AI page, framework or set of principles, no person or function named as accountable for model behavior, no account of what is tested before a model or feature change ships, and no certification such as ISO 42001. The security page groups its content under software, governance and compliance, but every item there is an information security control rather than AI governance. Nothing addresses uneven output. On this product that has a specific form: a system analyzing spoken testimony will meet accents, speech patterns, interpreters and varying transcription quality, and nothing says whether performance across those conditions is measured or disclosed.

A general posture with one strong design element and little published detail. Bring Your Own Storage is real and material: an organization can keep uploaded documents in its own cloud. The vendor also says it works with customer security and IT teams through procurement and review. Beyond that the published material is general, describing enterprise grade security, privacy and access controls that IT and security teams can trust. A search of the vendor site, blog, sandbox site and trade coverage found no retention period, deletion control, encryption detail, named subprocessor list, or incident or breach notification practice. Published filings are also hosted in the vendor's secure cloud for judges and clients to read, a second data location with no published terms attached.

The controls are specific where it counts, and two elements are missing. All stored data is encrypted at rest using industry standard algorithms, and transport requires TLS with HSTS, which names the mechanism. Access is restricted to authorized users, with two factor authentication available on accounts. Assurance is ongoing: third party security experts run regular penetration tests, and the software supply chain is regularly scanned for vulnerabilities. Deletion is contractual and immediate, with clause 6.4 requiring destruction of customer materials promptly after termination, subject to legal record keeping. On the other side, no incident or breach notification practice is published, and no subprocessor list exists for customer content; the agreement names third party large language model providers as a category without naming one. Retention during the term is not stated.

No published indemnity, liability cap, carve out, warranty on output or insurance position is published, and no customer terms of service is published as published on the property. Recorded as a pure absence on the surfaces reached. The shape of the gap is worth naming: this product is bought specifically to prevent sanctionable citation errors reaching a filing, and it publishes nothing about what happens if it misses one. A verification tool carries a different recourse question from a drafting tool, because its value is the assurance itself.

A complete allocation, published in full, with one provision that favors the customer. Clause 10.1 caps liability at twelve months of fees, waives consequential damages in both directions rather than only for the vendor, and carves indemnification obligations out of the cap, so the ceiling does not swallow the indemnity. Clause 8.1 is a mutual intellectual property infringement indemnity. Governing law is Washington, with arbitration before JAMS in Bellevue. The gap is on the output side. Clause 9.6 disclaims all warranties on the accuracy, completeness or reliability of AI generated content and makes the customer solely responsible for it, so there is no warranty on output, and no insurance position is stated anywhere. A reseller channel operates on separate terms, which were not reviewed.

The vendor names four document repository integrations in its own material: Relativity, iManage, NetDocuments and Clio. It describes them as letting a firm use its existing secure infrastructure while adding the checking layer on top. That is a fitting connector set for a litigation product, covering document management, ediscovery and small firm practice management. Delivery is a native Microsoft Word add-in, where drafting and signing happen, rather than a connector beside Word. Research integrations are named individually with their commercial terms: LexisNexis where the customer holds a subscription, and Fastcase and vLex where none is required, with Westlaw citations mapped across so they stay checkable. Not located: an integrations index page, or documentation for each integration describing what it moves, in which direction, and what an administrator configures.

Integration is a named product line, but no system is named on any page read. The platform navigation lists a dedicated integration offering alongside the deposition, facts, agent and agencies lines, so connectivity is sold as a capability of its own. The separate offering for court reporting agencies implies a path for transcripts from the agencies into the firms. The integration page was not opened and may say more. Nothing concrete was established. No document or case management system is named, nor any transcript or court reporting platform or repository, and no connector list, API or developer documentation is published. The product takes in transcripts produced by others and its output belongs in a case file, so how material arrives and where it goes afterwards is the integration question. Nothing published on the pages read answers it.

The deployment model is stated clearly, with a real customer controlled option, short of residency detail. Two models are published. One is the standard cloud service. The other is an enterprise Bring Your Own Storage option, under which uploaded documents stay in the organization's own cloud storage, which the vendor presents as giving more control over data residency and confidentiality. With customer held storage, the customer keeps custody. A search of the vendor site, blog, sandbox site and trade coverage found no hosting provider for the standard service, no named regions, no tenancy model, and no statement of where processing happens as distinct from storage. That matters because processing still occurs even when the customer holds the storage.

Nothing published addresses where the platform runs or how customers are separated within it. No cloud provider is named, no hosting region or country is stated, no residency option is offered, nothing distinguishes processing from storage, and no tenancy or isolation model is described. Cloud delivery is evident only by inference from a browser application at a login subdomain. The absence is consequential rather than formal on this product: the material processed is deposition testimony and case documents, which are among the most sensitive holdings a firm has, and a defense firm with client-imposed residency terms in its outside counsel guidelines has nothing published to assess. A Vanta-hosted trust center exists and returned page metadata with no readable body, which is recorded as a retrieval limit rather than as an absence.

The vendor states SOC 2 Type 2 certification on its own blog, describing it as showing that it meets rigorous data protection standards and helping a lawyer meet the duty to protect client confidentiality through verified security controls. The same material describes the Bring Your Own Storage option as letting a firm control where client data is stored to meet jurisdictional requirements or firm retention policies, tying that feature to professional obligations. No coverage period, audit scope, report date, named auditing firm, trust portal or published request route is published. The vendor's stated diligence path is to work with a customer's security and IT teams through procurement, a sales route rather than self service. The certification is asserted on a marketing page without scope, currency or a route to evidence.

Two attestations are claimed with a trust center behind them, and the evidence itself is not published. The security page states SOC 2 Type II certification and describes what the standard demonstrates. It separately states that the company has audited its practices for HIPAA compliance, while noting that Litem is not typically a business associate under those regulations, which is a careful framing. Regular third party penetration testing is described as ongoing. A trust center exists at the company's own subdomain and is signposted from the security page. What a reviewer would test is absent. No auditor or certifying body is named for the SOC 2 work, no report period, issue date or expiry is published, no scope statement identifies which services are covered, and no penetration test summary or date is given. The trust center is hosted on Vanta and returned page metadata with no body, so its access tier is not established and it may say more.

The architecture is described clearly, and the components are not named. The vendor says the checking path runs on classic machine learning and natural language processing with a patented scoring system, not generative models. So a buyer knows the checking function does not depend on a third party foundation model. Generative features exist separately for drafting. A search of the vendor site, blog, sandbox site and trade coverage found no named model or provider behind the generative features, no statement of where models run, no subprocessor list, and no commitment to notify customers when the supply chain changes. Knowing the critical path avoids generative models is useful, but it does not tell a buyer what the rest of the stack is.

Outside model providers are acknowledged in the contract, one provider is named in a document that excludes the relevant data, and the two do not meet. Clause 5.3(f) of the master services agreement defines third party large language model providers as a term, so external models are in the path, but it names none. The privacy policy lists artificial intelligence and machine learning providers among the service providers that receive data, giving Google Cloud AI as the example. That policy states at the outset that it does not apply to files, documents and other content uploaded for business customers, and routes those to the customer agreement. So the naming covers prospect and visitor personal data, not deposition transcripts and case files. A firm cannot tell from anything published which providers see client material. No model or version is named, nothing says where inference runs or what a provider may keep, and there is no commitment to give notice of changes.

No pricing page is published, no rate is published, no unit of charge is stated and no tier structure appears on the surfaces reached. Third party review material states that pricing is custom quoted, which confirms the absence rather than filling it. Every commercial path located terminates in a demo or contact request. One published commercial fact worth recording, though it is not pricing: a recipient of a hyperlinked filing, including a judge or a client, does not need a Clearbrief subscription to open it.

No pricing information is published at any level. The navigation shows there is no pricing page to find: the platform menu lists the five solution lines plus security and contact, the resources menu lists careers, blog, help center and onboarding, and the footer repeats these with the privacy policy and agreement. Nothing names a plan, tier, unit of charge or structure. Nothing says whether the product is licensed per seat, per matter, per deposition or by transcript volume, which is the first question a buyer would ask of a product handling more than 10,000 depositions a month. Every call to action leads to a sales conversation through a scheduling link.

Segment coverage is described with substance and the practice focus is well defined. The stated users are litigators, in house legal teams, courts, arbitrators and government agencies, so the published adopters include the tribunal as well as the advocate. Practice focus is stated narrowly and consistently as litigation documents heavy with facts. Named uses cover briefs, tables of authorities, exhibit management, investigation reports for in house compliance teams, and real time trial support including cross examination outlines. Not located: firm size segmentation, jurisdictional coverage beyond references to Bluebook and local style rules, and any statement of which document types or practice areas the product is not built for.

Two buyer segments and a lifecycle description, with the edges left open. The company serves law firms and court reporting agencies, and backs the second with its own product line. The agencies that produce transcripts and the firms that use them are different buyers with different needs. Coverage across a case is described in phases: starting in discovery, assisting through depositions in real time, and extending into later phases with agentic features, and the five solution lines map onto that. Jurisdiction is stated indirectly but bindingly. Clause 3.3 requires attorney users to be licensed in the United States, which answers the question for a firm elsewhere. Named customers are large defense firms. The rest is missing: no practice area is named, no firm size is given, nothing distinguishes what plaintiff and defense sides get, and nothing says where coverage stops.