Clearbrief Pricing: Clearbrief AI Cost, Review and Alternatives
Clearbrief is one of the only legal AI vendors that publishes a rate at all. Here is what the 300 dollar plan buys, the half of the job it deliberately does not touch, and how to tell which half you are actually trying to solve.
How courts have ruled
Sample results, illustrative only. Informational research, not legal advice. Verify every citation.
In short
Clearbrief is a Microsoft Word add-in that checks whether the sentences in your legal writing are actually supported by your evidence, and flags case citations that do not resolve to a real decision. It costs 300 dollars per user per month on the Solo plan, published on clearbrief.com and buyable without a sales call, with a custom-priced Enterprise Unlimited tier above it. It was founded in 2020 by Jacqueline Schafer and remains independent. The thing most reviews miss: Clearbrief works from documents you already have, so it verifies what is on the page and does not find you the case you have not cited yet. Those are two different purchases, and firms routinely budget for one and discover they needed both. If the half you need is finding the on-point US authority, Cases does that for a published 29 dollars per month. This is informational research, not legal advice, and you should always read the case before citing it.
Last updated September 2026
How we checked this. Every Clearbrief figure on this page was read from clearbrief.com on 3 September 2026, from the page source and again rendered, because the site builds much of its content client side. We also requested a URL that has never existed, which returned a clean 404, so anything else that 404s on that host is genuine evidence of absence rather than a bot block. Figures we could not find on a Clearbrief page are labeled Reported and attributed to whoever published them.
The distinction every roundup skips
Finding the law and proving the facts are two different purchases
Nearly every legal AI comparison lines these products up in one ranked list, as though they were competing to do the same thing. They are not. Litigation work splits into two jobs that barely overlap. The first is finding authority you do not yet have, which is search across a case law library. The second is proving that what is already on your page is true, which is verification against your record and against the reporter. Clearbrief is unusually good at the second and does not attempt the first, and it says so plainly by working from the documents you bring it.
| Tool | Finds authority you have not cited yet | Verifies what is already on the page | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clearbrief | No. It works from documents you already have | Yes, and this is the whole product. It checks whether your sentence is actually supported by your record, and flags citations that do not resolve | 300 dollars per user per month, published |
| Cases | Yes. Plain English search across US federal and state case law | Partly. Every result is a real citation you open and read. There is no citator | 29 dollars per month, published |
| Westlaw Advantage | Yes, with the deepest US primary law library in the market | Yes, KeyCite is the reference citator | 492.00 dollars per user per month at list |
| Lexis+ with Protégé | Yes, the other full library | Yes, Shepard's | Not published |
| vLex Vincent AI | Yes, and often free to you through a state bar | Yes, Authority Check | Not published |
| CoCounsel Legal | Yes, through bundled Westlaw Advantage | Yes, through KeyCite | Not published |
| Harvey, Legora | Partly. Research is one module inside a drafting platform | Not published in citator terms | Not published, and both have a seat floor |
Read across a row rather than down a column and the budgeting mistake becomes visible. The full-library incumbents cover both jobs in one line item, which is a large part of why they cost what they cost. Everything cheaper covers one job well. So a firm that buys Clearbrief and nothing else has bought excellent verification and no research, and a firm that buys research alone has to verify by hand. Neither is wrong, but you should choose it on purpose. We keep the running cost comparison across the whole field on our legal research pricing page.
We will be direct about our own row, because it is the one we have an interest in. Cases is case law search. We do not have a citator, we say so on our citation checking page, and we would rather tell you that than have you find out after paying. If verifying that a case is still good law is your central problem, the answer is KeyCite, Shepard's, or the Authority Check your bar may already give you, and we compare those on KeyCite vs Shepard's.
Published, reported, and quoted
What you can actually verify about Clearbrief pricing
Here is the field sorted by whether a vendor page will confirm the figure. We never merge those two columns, because the difference between a number you can read on a vendor site and a number somebody blogged is the difference between a rate and a rumor. Clearbrief lands on the right side of that line, which is rarer in legal AI than it should be.
| Product | Figure | Status | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clearbrief, Solo | 300 dollars per user per month | Published | Clearbrief pricing section, read 3 September 2026. The button reads "Purchase Now", so this is a real self-serve rate |
| Clearbrief, Enterprise Unlimited | Custom, volume discounts available | Quote only | Same section. The call to action is "Schedule meeting" and Clearbrief states it includes 1:1 training |
| Clearbrief, multi-year discount | Exists, amount not stated | Published | Clearbrief invites Solo buyers to email about multi-year agreements for lower pricing, without naming a figure |
| Clearbrief, per seat range | 150 to 350 dollars per user per month | Reported | Third party software directories. The vendor's own page shows a single figure, so prefer the published one |
| Westlaw Advantage, all states plus federal | 492.00 dollars per user per month at list, 399.75 on a three year term | Published | Thomson Reuters live checkout, read 1 September 2026. Online purchase is capped at firms of up to 10 attorneys |
| Paxton AI, Individual | 2,999 dollars per user per year, about 250 a month | Published | Paxton AI pricing page, read 1 September 2026 |
| midpage, Starter | 30 dollars per month | Published | midpage pricing page, read 1 September 2026 |
| Lexis+ with Protégé | No figure shown | Quote only | LexisNexis states pricing varies by organization size and content scope |
| Legora | No figure shown anywhere | Quote only | legora.com has no pricing page at all and no Pricing item in its navigation |
| Cases | 29 dollars per month | Published | Our own pricing page, self-serve, month to month, no sales call |
Clearbrief's own framing of the Solo tier is worth quoting, because it tells you how they expect the purchase to be justified: "One simple price. Even if you only use one of Clearbrief's core features, you'll get the ROI." That is a confident claim and, for a heavy motion practice, a defensible one. It is also an implicit admission that most buyers will not use the whole product, which is fair and true of nearly every platform in this market.
One caveat on the Westlaw row, because it is the figure most often quoted wrongly. The widely repeated 399.75 dollars per month is the three year commitment price with an 18 percent discount already applied. The undiscounted rate for the identical plan, on the same checkout screen, is 492.00 dollars per month. We corrected that on our Westlaw Advantage page after reading the live checkout on 1 September 2026.
What Clearbrief puts in writing
What Clearbrief actually does, feature by feature
Clearbrief's tagline is "Cite facts, not fake cases," and the product is narrower and more specific than that slogan suggests, which is a compliment. Everything below is named by Clearbrief on its own site. Where the vendor does not publish a limit, we say so instead of guessing.
Analyze and Add Fact-Cite
Select a sentence in Word and Clearbrief looks through your own record for the evidence that supports it, then inserts the citation. This is the founding feature and the one users describe as saving hours per brief.
Named and demonstrated on the homepage
Cite checking against LexisNexis
Clearbrief is hooked into LexisNexis, so it can tell you when a case citation in your draft does not resolve to a real decision. That is the specific check that catches an AI hallucination before a judge does.
Named, and described in a customer quote from Ballard Spahr
Tables of Authorities, exhibits and hyperlinking
One-click TOA generation, exhibit assembly, and hyperlinked filings so a judge can click a citation and land on the source. Several of Clearbrief's customer quotes credit the hyperlinks rather than the AI.
Named on the homepage
Table Builder, Timelines and Summaries
Extracts facts from large document sets and assembles them into timelines and tables. The medical-records timeline is the use case customers mention most, and one associate notes it avoided the duplication other tools produce.
Named, document limits not published
AI-generated investigation reports
Longer-form fact sections and investigation reports with hyperlinked citations attached. Aimed at the pre-suit and early-case-assessment stage rather than at daily research.
Named, scope not published
Instant cross-examination outline
Real-time search and fact-checking of testimony as it happens, producing a cross outline during trial. This is a genuinely unusual feature and it is aimed at trial lawyers, not at researchers.
Named on the homepage
Notice what is not in that list. There is no case law library, no plain-English question box that returns precedents you did not know about, and no citator in the KeyCite or Shepard's sense that tells you a decision has been overruled. Clearbrief checks that a citation resolves to a real case, which is a different and narrower claim than telling you the case is still good law. Both checks matter and they are not substitutes for each other.
The problem it is priced against
The fake citation problem is real, and it is still growing
Clearbrief sells against a risk that is easy to dismiss as a press cycle and is not. The AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin, which tracks court decisions worldwide involving hallucinated citations, recorded 2,009 decisions as of 3 September 2026. It stood at 719 in January 2026 and 1,668 at the start of July. The line has not flattened.
The important pattern in the US sanctions decisions is not the one people expect. Across the federal gen-AI sanctions rulings from February to April 2026 catalogued by Norton Rose Fulbright, no court sanctioned anyone for using AI. They sanctioned filings nobody read. In Whiting v. City of Athens, Tennessee, 170 F.4th 455, the Sixth Circuit ordered fees, double costs and 15,000 dollars in punitive sanctions against each of two lawyers. In Gamez v. County of Fresno, 2026 WL 925944, on facts that also involved fabricated citations, the court imposed no sanctions at all. The variable was what counsel did once the problem surfaced.
There is a sharper version of the same point that applies to every tool here, including ours. A citation that resolves to a dead page is not verified, it is unverifiable. That is not hypothetical: every Casetext permalink now returns HTTP 410 Gone, so a brief that cited one in 2024 today points at nothing. We walk through the whole pattern on AI hallucination cases in court.
Where the duty sits
ABA Formal Opinion 512, issued 29 July 2024, puts the obligation on the lawyer, not the software. It runs through competence under Rule 1.1, confidentiality under 1.6 including the point that boilerplate engagement-letter consent is not adequate, candor to the tribunal under 3.3, and supervision under 5.1 and 5.3.
No verification tool transfers that duty. What a tool like Clearbrief can do is make the check cheap enough that it actually happens on every filing, which is the part that fails in practice.
What third parties say
The outside evidence, attributed rather than repeated
We have not used Clearbrief on a live matter, so we are not going to review it as though we had. What follows is what other people have said, with the source attached, so you can weigh it yourself.
State Bar of Nevada AI Work Group
Scored Clearbrief 40.5 out of 50, the top result in its evaluation, ahead of vLex/Fastcase, Luminance, ChatGPT and Claude Pro. Published in the Work Group's March 2025 newsletter and quoted by Clearbrief. It is worth reading the source, because the panel evaluated specifically for solo and small practice needs.
Legalweek 2026
Named Litigation Technology of the Year, per Clearbrief's own homepage banner. Clearbrief also lists a 2026 Technology for Good award and 2025 wins for Legal Compliance Solution of the Year and Best Practice of Law App.
Adoption claims
Clearbrief states it is used across the AmLaw 200, by state and federal courts, government agencies, arbitrators, and in-house teams including Microsoft Legal, and that more than 3.2 million pleadings have been drafted or checked with it since launch in 2021. These are vendor claims and we could not independently audit them.
Named customers
Clearbrief publishes named, attributed quotes from Ballard Spahr, Dykema, Cozen O'Connor, Outten & Golden, The Simon Law Group, Jeff Lewis Law, and the National Veterans Legal Services Program via a Microsoft pro bono report. Attributed quotes from named lawyers at named firms are stronger evidence than an anonymous logo wall.
LexisNexis relationship
Clearbrief advertises an exclusive LexisNexis discount for its solo and small firm customers. That tells you Clearbrief is positioned as complementary to a research subscription rather than as a replacement for one, which matches what the product actually does.
The Nevada evaluation is the one worth your time, because it is the only item on that list produced by lawyers with no commercial interest in the outcome, and because it was scored specifically against solo and small firm needs rather than AmLaw workflows. It is also a useful reminder that a tool topping a scorecard for brief accuracy tells you nothing about how it performs at research, which the same panel assessed separately.
Match the spend to the practice
Who should buy Clearbrief, and who should not
At 3,600 dollars per user per year this is a real line item for a small firm, so the fit question deserves a straight answer rather than a shrug. The variable that decides it is how much you write with a record behind it.
| Practice | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Litigators who file briefs every week | Strong fit | The value is proportional to how much you write with a record behind it. If you are assembling fact sections from depositions and exhibits, 300 dollars a month against the hours it removes is a straightforward calculation. |
| Appellate and motion practices | Strong fit | Hyperlinked briefs and generated tables of authorities are worth the most where the record is enormous and the reader is a judge who will not dig. Clearbrief's own customer quotes lean heavily this way. |
| Anyone using generative AI to draft | Strong fit | If AI is anywhere in your drafting workflow, a verification layer stops being optional. The cite check against LexisNexis is the specific control that catches a fabricated case before filing. |
| Lawyers whose main job is finding the case | Wrong tool | Clearbrief works from documents you already have. It will not find you the on-point authority you have not cited yet. Paying 300 dollars a month for it and having no research subscription leaves the larger half of the job uncovered. |
| Transactional and in-house teams | Partial fit | The document analysis and table building carry over, but the core loop is built around a litigation record and a filing. If you never file, you are buying the periphery of the product. |
| Solos on a tight budget | Depends entirely on volume | At 3,600 dollars a year this is not a casual purchase for a one-lawyer firm. It earns out if you brief constantly. If you file a handful of motions a year, the honest answer is that the money goes further on research plus a citator. |
One structural point in Clearbrief's favor that has nothing to do with features. It sells a single seat, self-serve, month to month, at a rate it publishes. That is a short list in legal AI. Legora has a reported ten seat minimum and no pricing page, and Harvey a reported twenty five, so a firm of six lawyers is not priced out of those products, it is simply not allowed to buy them. Clearbrief will sell to a solo on a Tuesday. Whether a solo should buy is a different question, answered above.
Questions buyers ask
Clearbrief, answered
How much does Clearbrief cost?
Clearbrief publishes one rate: 300 dollars per user per month for the Solo plan, with a "Purchase Now" button, so it is genuinely self-serve. The second tier, Enterprise Unlimited, is custom priced with volume discounts and routes you to a scheduled meeting. Clearbrief also invites Solo buyers to email about multi-year agreements for lower pricing but does not publish what that discount is. Third-party directories report a wider 150 to 350 dollar range; prefer the figure on the vendor's own page, which we read on 3 September 2026.
What does Clearbrief do?
Clearbrief is a Microsoft Word add-in that checks whether the sentences in your legal writing are actually supported by your evidence. Select a sentence and it searches your record for the source, then inserts a hyperlinked citation. It also generates tables of authorities, assembles exhibits, builds timelines from document sets, and cite-checks your case citations against LexisNexis to catch citations that do not resolve to a real decision.
Is Clearbrief free?
No. There is no free tier. The Solo plan is 300 dollars per user per month and Enterprise Unlimited is quoted. Clearbrief runs demos and, according to third-party write-ups, will arrange evaluation periods for firms that are seriously assessing it, but we found no self-serve free trial of a stated length published on clearbrief.com. If you want to test legal research specifically without a sales conversation, that is a different purchase, and cheaper.
Does Clearbrief have a free trial?
Clearbrief does not publish a trial of a stated length on its own site, which puts it in the same group as Legora and Harvey rather than with the vendors that post seven or fourteen days. The published route in is either buying the Solo plan outright at 300 dollars a month or scheduling a demo. Because Solo is month to month and self-serve, buying one month is effectively the trial, which is the same logic we apply to our own 29 dollar plan.
Who owns Clearbrief?
Clearbrief is an independent venture-backed company founded in 2020 by Jacqueline Schafer, a former appellate lawyer who serves as founder and chief executive. It has not been acquired. That is worth noting in this market, because the last legal research tool with self-serve pricing that lawyers loved was Casetext, and Thomson Reuters bought it in 2023 and shut the standalone product down on 1 April 2025.
Does Clearbrief work on a Mac?
We could not verify a clear answer on a Clearbrief page, so treat this as an open question to put to their team rather than a settled fact. What Clearbrief does publish is that the product is a Microsoft Word add-in distributed through the Microsoft Store, and there is a Clearbrief app listed on the Apple App Store. Word add-ins built on the modern Office platform generally run in Word for Mac, but if you are a Mac-only firm, confirm it in writing before you buy rather than relying on any third-party page, including this one.
Is Clearbrief worth it?
It depends on how much you write against a record. At 3,600 dollars per user per year, Clearbrief earns out quickly for a litigator assembling fact sections from thousands of pages, and slowly or never for a lawyer whose day is spent finding authority rather than proving facts. The sharper way to decide is to ask which half of the job you are actually paying to solve, because Clearbrief solves verification and does not solve discovery of new case law.
What are the alternatives to Clearbrief?
It depends on what you are replacing. For verifying that a case is still good law, the established citators are KeyCite inside Westlaw and Shepard's inside Lexis, with Authority Check in vLex and Fastcase often included in state bar dues. For hyperlinking and tables of authorities there are long-standing filing tools that do the mechanical part without the AI. For the actual research problem, which Clearbrief does not address, focused case law search costs a fraction of 300 dollars a month. Nothing else does exactly what Clearbrief does with your own record.
Does Clearbrief stop AI hallucinations in legal filings?
It targets the specific failure that causes them, which is a citation that never existed being left in a filing that nobody checked. Clearbrief checks citations against LexisNexis and tells you when one does not resolve. That is a real control, and it is aimed at a real and growing problem: the AI Hallucination Cases database recorded 2,009 court decisions involving hallucinated citations as of 3 September 2026. No tool removes the professional duty, though. Under ABA Formal Opinion 512 the verification obligation stays with the lawyer, and every US sanctions decision we have read turned on filings nobody read rather than on the use of AI itself.
Keep researching
The other half of the job
Verification tools check what you already wrote. Ask your question in plain English and get on-point US precedents with a real citation, for a published 29 dollars per month. Informational research, not legal advice, always verify the citation.