Legal Writing, Generative AI, Citation Verification, BriefCatch, Legal Technology, Law Firm AI Adoption, Courts and AI

<p>This week we talk with Ross Guberman, founder and CEO of BriefCatch, and Heather Rodriguez, the company’s enterprise account executive. Ross built BriefCatch to put the lessons from his books and workshops in front of lawyers while they write. It started as a rules engine that flagged everything from typos to sentence flow. He admits he was never a coder, and says he would have looked for a technical co-founder if he had known the term existed. Today BriefCatch pairs that original engine with generative AI to review whole briefs, motions and judicial opinions for persuasiveness and consistency. The company has spent much of 2026 on checking how accurately briefs describe cases and statutes.</p><p>That leads to RealityCheck, BriefCatch’s citation verification tool. Heather explains that it checks whether the cited opinion supports the proposition, pulls up the relevant language and flags potential problems. An experienced lawyer can disagree with its reading, and the lawyer still owns the argument. Ross adds that running RealityCheck on briefs from the 1990s through the 2010s turns up plenty of case law errors, so the problem predates generative AI. The talk then turns to how alike AI prose sounds, and Marlene warns she may lose her mind if she reads “it hits differently” one more time. Heather describes how BriefCatch offers choices the attorney can accept or reject. Ross gives the example of lawyers who use “indicate” for everything; the tool suggests more precise verbs such as specify, convey or reflect. On Anthropic’s plan to watermark text written by Claude, Ross praises the accuracy of the AI detector Pangram. He hopes the profession will start asking a better question about AI-assisted work: was it a good brief?</p><p><br></p><p>Heather then describes where enterprise adoption stands. The Legal Technology Hub map has grown so crowded you need a magnifying glass to read it. Firms now ask whether a product is the best fit for a specific use case and whether it can replace tools they already own. Workflow fit, ROI and security reviews dominate the conversation, and she has seen firms that love a product spend months in security and procurement. Ross credits his reputation in legal writing with helping BriefCatch earn trust, though the company still answers the same questionnaires as every vendor. He walks through the WordRake acquisition, closed in January, which brought Gary Kinder’s conciseness and plain language technology and a new customer base