Jacqueline Schafer

Jacqueline Schafer is founder and CEO of Clearbrief, a Seattle, Washington, company whose Microsoft Word add-in finds, inserts and checks the facts and case law behind legal writing. She is a litigator who started the company after an asylum case showed her how much it helps when a judge can go straight from a brief to its evidence.

Litigating at Paul, Weiss

She began her career at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, then spent several years on appellate work as an assistant attorney general in Washington and Alaska, according to the ABA Journal. By 2018 she was in-house counsel at a national nonprofit.

An Asylum Case in 2018

That year she took her first pro bono asylum case, representing a mother and her toddler who faced deportation to Honduras. At the final hearing she pointed the judge to a medical declaration among her exhibits. "What truly appeared to make the difference was when the judge went directly to review the declaration himself," she told the ABA Journal. The case led her to picture court filings in which every cited fact is a link the judge can click.

Building Clearbrief

She started building Clearbrief in 2020 without a technical background, and learned about AI by asking people in the tech industry to meet her for coffee. "I had to be humble: I sounded like an idiot at first, and lawyers are afraid of looking foolish," she said. Early backers included Sequoia Capital, Madrona Venture Group and Avvo founder Mark Britton, according to Seyfarth Shaw.

Clearbrief serves hundreds of law firms, and Microsoft's in-house legal teams use it, GeekWire reported in 2024. Jose Saura, who spent two decades at Microsoft, is its CTO. "Our vision is that litigators and in-house teams will draft and analyze every single Word document with Clearbrief," she told LawNext.