Clearbrief

“Saves time verifying citations”

Pros

Working with Clearbrief has been helpful in my role as an arbitrator especially when I need to review case materials, build timelines and check citations. And the feature I value most is the ability to verify both case law and factual citations. As it saves me a lot of time and effort because I do not have to manually track down every case and citation just to confirm accuracy and avoid any AI hallucinations in the parties briefs and submissions. I also appreciated that getting started with it was easy.

Cons

workflow still feels somewhat complicated although that may improve with more practice. The tool also seems to be built more with counsel in mind than arbitrators and those two roles have very different goals.

“broken links”

Pros

One of the most useful parts is being able to connect case documents when putting together a fact timeline and it helps a lot to have all of the key case materials gathered in one place for reference. Preparing a table of authorities is also valuable. It is also helpful that I can pull source documents through iManage.

Cons

Linking to a source document is not easy. Tying a statement to a specific part of a source document is also hard to figure out. I mean you cannot change much about how citations appear. After I build a timeline and add citations to a source document, I want the links to still work when I come back later but they don't. Also the table of authorities still generates without page numbers.

“Powerful OCR”

Pros

It is really powerful and it's much easier to use than Acrobat or Adobe.

Cons

There is definitely some complexity to it and the extra features come with a bit of a learning curve.