Boston University School of Law Launches Clearbrief For Students, Faculty, and Clinics to Address AI Accuracy Risk
Clearbrief's Cite-Checking Tool
School-wide rollout makes BU Law one of the first law schools in the country to give every student a structured verification layer for AI-assisted legal work.
BOSTON, MA, UNITED STATES, August 3, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- BOSTON, MA — Boston University School of Law (BU Law) has selected Clearbrief as its citation verification platform, deploying the tool to all law students, faculty, and clinical programs. The rollout makes BU Law one of the first law schools in the country to give every student structured, workflow-integrated support for verifying legal citations and factual evidence — a direct response to the growing use of generative AI tools in legal education and the documented risks those tools carry in legal writing.
Clearbrief lives inside Microsoft Word and allows users to check citations against primary legal sources and underlying case documents in real time. Unlike generative AI tools, Clearbrief’s verification engine is deterministic — it does not generate content or introduce new language. Instead, it surfaces discrepancies, flags mischaracterized holdings, and traces factual assertions back to their source material, giving students and practitioners a reliable check on the accuracy of their work product before it leaves their hands.
The legal profession is navigating a period of heightened scrutiny regarding the use of generative AI. Courts across the country have made clear that lawyers remain responsible for the accuracy of every filing, brief, and legal memorandum they submit. Recent sanctions cases and evolving court guidance underscore the importance of verifying legal authorities and factual evidence, regardless of whether AI tools were used during the drafting process.
By integrating Clearbrief directly into legal drafting workflows, BU Law is equipping students, faculty, and clinical practitioners with a structured, evidence-backed approach to reviewing legal and factual citations. Caselaw can be reviewed directly through Clearbrief’s integrations with LexisNexis and Fastcase vLex (Clio), while citations to factual evidence display automatically for review via Clearbrief’s integrations with Relativity, iManage, Netdocs, and more.
Importantly, Clearbrief’s cite-checking tools that flag citation mistakes for users to investigate rely on deterministic rather than generative AI, enabling users to independently verify sources without introducing additional hallucination risk.
“We are preparing lawyers for a profession that is already using AI tools, and that means preparing them to verify what those tools produce. Clearbrief gives our students a concrete, repeatable way to do that, not as an afterthought, but as part of how they write. Every BU Law graduate should leave here knowing that accuracy is a professional obligation, not a checkbox.”
— Stephen Marks, Vice Dean of Faculty, Boston University School of Law.
The rollout will support both classroom instruction and experiential learning opportunities through BU Law’s clinical programs. Students working on real-world matters through clinics will have access to tools that streamline source verification while reinforcing professional obligations around diligence, competence, and accuracy.
“Law schools have a unique opportunity to shape how the next generation of lawyers approaches AI,” said Jacqueline Schafer, Founder and CEO of Clearbrief. “The lawyers showing up in court with hallucinated citations are using tools they don’t fully understand. BU Law is fixing that problem at the source. If students learn from day one that AI output requires verification, and they have a tool that makes that verification fast and concrete, that habit will follow them into practice. That is how you change professional norms — not with warnings, but with workflow.”
The implementation reflects BU Law’s broader commitment to innovation in legal education and to preparing students for a profession where AI tools are becoming commonplace but where accountability for legal work remains firmly human. The Clearbrief rollout has the added benefit of training BU Law graduates in the tools that the largest global law firms, courts, government agencies, and the American Arbitration are already using.
The partnership also positions BU Law to shape national conversations about AI governance in legal education. Clearbrief works with courts, government agencies, and law firms across the country, giving the company direct visibility into the operational challenges institutions face as AI-generated content becomes more prevalent in legal proceedings. BU Law’s clinical programs and faculty research create opportunities for joint scholarship, model curriculum development, and policy engagement around responsible AI adoption in law.
About Clearbrief
Clearbrief is the leading AI-powered legal citation and verification platform integrated directly into Microsoft Word, enabling lawyers, paralegals, law students, and courts to verify legal and factual citations, generate hyperlinked timelines, facts sections, and exhibits, and produce audit-ready reports without leaving their drafting environment. Clearbrief’s verification engine is deterministic, not generative, ensuring that every result is traceable to a primary source. Visit Clearbrief.ai or contact hello@Clearbrief.ai.
About Boston University School of Law
Boston University School of Law is a top-ranked law school recognized for academic rigor, nationally prominent faculty, and a strong tradition of public service and clinical education. BU Law’s programs span corporate law, public interest, litigation, intellectual property, health law, and international law, and its graduates practice at the highest levels of the bar, government, and the judiciary. The school is committed to preparing practice-ready lawyers equipped to lead in a rapidly changing legal environment.
Tara Ghei
Clearbrief
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