How BriefPoint chose the best .NET PDF library
Table of contents
“Nutrient saves us an almost indefinite amount of dev time.”
Use case
BriefPoint sought a reliable, enterprise-grade solution to convert diverse file types — including emails, images, and Office documents — into high-fidelity PDFs for legal discovery workflows.
Challenges
- Inability of the company’s previous open source conversion solution to reliably handle Office documents, email files, and other formats attorneys and clients needed to upload.
- Lack of confidence in document fidelity — broken tables and dropped content sections created PDFs that attorneys couldn’t trust to send to opposing counsel or courts.
- Uncertainty about whether building piecemeal open source pipelines format by format would ever reliably work.
Solutions
- Successfully replaced its previous converter with Nutrient .NET SDK, gaining reliable conversion across a wide range of file types.
- Able to confidently render documents with the fidelity legal workflows demand, ensuring attorneys can rely on produced PDFs for discovery and court submissions.
- Solved the build vs. buy dilemma by adopting Nutrient’s comprehensive SDK, with clear pathways to expand into redaction, HTML stamping, and PDF normalization as future roadmap items.
Results
- BriefPoint is now able to offer document capabilities to clients that would have taken at least a year to deliver any other way.
- BriefPoint’s engineering team today ships features instead of wrestling with unreliable open source tooling.
- BriefPoint now accelerates its product roadmap confidently, with redaction, PDF normalization, and HTML stamping all planned as near-term expansions within the same Nutrient integration.
Chris Maffin, CTO and co-founder of BriefPoint(opens in a new tab), has spent nearly three decades in software engineering. As his legal automation platform scaled, the document conversion layer needed to scale with it. He needed a solution built for the breadth and reliability legal workflows demand — without diverting his team from its core product.
The open source infrastructure problem
BriefPoint automates legal document workflows, with a focus on discovery requests and responses — the back-and-forth exchange of documents between attorneys, clients, and courts. The platform handles everything from generating discovery documents to managing the files that need to be produced as evidence. Producing documents introduced a challenging infrastructure problem: Attorneys and their clients upload files in all kinds of formats — Word documents, images, emails, and even medical imaging containers like Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) — and BriefPoint needed to convert them reliably to PDF.
The company’s previous open source conversion solution handled basic cases well enough — until BriefPoint’s use cases outgrew it. Office documents would come out broken, with tables and entire formatted sections disappearing.
BriefPoint goes beyond rendering PDFs — it also uses them to extract text and data for additional processing. This allows attorneys to easily share the resulting files directly with opposing counsel or courts. A jumbled or incomplete PDF isn’t just an inconvenience; it reflects on the attorney’s professionalism and undermines trust in the platform.
The team evaluated open source alternatives, but the picture wasn’t encouraging. Supporting emails might be possible with enough custom work, but what about the next format? And what about the one after that? There was no guarantee that even a substantial engineering investment would yield reliable results. “We weren’t sure if it would work anyway,” Maffin noted. “Even if we spent that engineering time to do it, there was no guarantee it was actually going to render emails well.” That realization pointed BriefPoint toward a purpose-built, enterprise-grade solution — and toward Nutrient.
Implementation that works with Claude
BriefPoint’s engineering team chose Nutrient .NET SDK for its rendering reliability and the breadth of capabilities the company’s legal workflows required. The implementation moved quickly — and the way it came together was a testament to Nutrient’s comprehensive documentation.
Maffin used Claude Code to scaffold the new PDF microservice entirely, giving it a straightforward instruction: Read Nutrient’s documentation and write a service that wraps the SDK. No hand-holding, and no iterating through broken outputs. Claude read the documentation, understood what each file format required, and built a working service on the first try.
For Maffin, that wasn’t just a productivity win — it was a signal about documentation quality. If an AI agent can navigate it and produce working code without intervention, the documentation is structured, accurate, and complete in a way that matters for developers building at speed.
“It met expectations and was pretty smooth to implement. I was expecting it just to work right out of the box, and it did.”
Within a single day, the team had Nutrient .NET SDK converting documents in a local development environment. The microservice was stood up, the routing logic was in place on the calling side, and BriefPoint had a working integration with a clear path to production.
No more broken PDF conversions with Nutrient
Before adopting Nutrient, BriefPoint’s document conversion layer was a liability. Its previous solution dropped content, broke formatting, and left entire file types unsupported — forcing attorneys and clients to manually convert and reupload files or accept unreliable outputs. After embedding Nutrient, BriefPoint can accept virtually any file a client uploads and convert it reliably, without placing that burden on the attorney or their client.
“Nutrient has enabled us to offer our clients features that we wouldn’t have been able to for at least a year,” Maffin shared. For a fast-moving legal AI company operating in a space where document reliability is foundational to trust, that kind of acceleration matters.
Results
Time to value
BriefPoint is now able to deliver document capabilities to clients that would have taken at least a year to ship any other way.
Engineering time
By choosing Nutrient over attempting to build in-house, BriefPoint sidestepped what Maffin calls “an almost indefinite” engineering investment — with no guarantee the result would have worked reliably.
Roadmap acceleration
BriefPoint enters the next phase of its product roadmap — redaction, PDF normalization, and HTML stamping — without starting from scratch, building on the same Nutrient integration already in place.
From open source to a reliable partner
With Nutrient’s support, BriefPoint was able to solve a foundational document infrastructure problem that had no clean path forward — moving from an open source patchwork that dropped content and left entire file types unsupported, to a reliable, extensible conversion layer that legal workflows can depend on. For BriefPoint, the value wasn’t just in fixing what was broken. It was in unlocking what comes next — and getting there far faster than it could have any other way.
Maffin and the team are already thinking about what the relationship looks like down the road: redaction workflows, PDF normalization, and potentially Nutrient’s web viewer for in-app annotation. The infrastructure foundation is in place, and BriefPoint is building on it.
