Robert Ambrogi Blog
What if you could have an invisible guardian angel sitting on your shoulder during a deposition, whispering in your ear to point out questions you’ve asked awkwardly, inconsistencies in the witness’s testimony, and points needing follow-up or explication?
In effect, that is what a new product introduced this week by Filevine can do for you. Called Depo CoPilot, it uses generative AI to transcribe and analyze your depositions in real time, as they are happening.
While there are other products on the market that transcribe depositions in real time, I have never seen a product that provides the kind of real-time analysis that Depo CoPilot offers.
Why does this matter? Because every litigator has been there at some point – finished a deposition and gone back and looked at the transcript, only to realize a question had been so mangled as to render the answer meaningless, or that a critical point was never clearly established, or that a needed follow-up was left hanging.
With Depo CoPilot, a lawyer can identify goals for a deposition, and the AI will continually analyze the recording to evaluate whether that goal has been met. The product offers a set of suggested goals, or the lawyer can define his or her own goals.
Filevine offers this example:
“For example, you could create a goal to “get the deponent to give an opinion on the positioning of the patient.” As the meeting is recorded, every few minutes, the copilot analyzes whether this goal has been met and suggests a status for the goal: either at risk or accomplished. When the CoPilot finds them, it provides a list of references in the transcription that provide evidence for the goal either being accomplished or being at risk. You can review the references and confirm or deny the goal’s status.”
As this example depicts, Depo CoPilot is monitoring in real time whether you’ve met your goals and highlighting excerpts from the transcript that demonstrate this one way or the other.
Of course, this means you will have to break away from the questioning every so often to check the results in Depo CoPilot, or have an associate monitor it for you.
In addition to telling you whether you’ve met your goals, Depo CoPilot also offers insights into other aspects of the deposition. Specifically, it can:
- Find inconsistencies in the deponent’s testimony.
- Suggest follow-up questions.
- Point out unanswered questions and ambiguous answers.
As the deposition is ongoing, Depo CoPilot keeps track of these insights and provides references to the transcript for you to review.
Apart from these AI features, Depo CoPilot is notable even for the way it handles transcriptions. Each piece of text is time-stamped, and icons characterize each utterance as a question, an answer, or a third-party statement.
It can record depositions either by using your own microphone in a live setting or by having it join your meeting for online depositions.
Depo CoPilot is available to everyone, not just Filevine customers. Only those who attended this week’s LEX Summit have current, free access to the product, but everyone else can join the waitlist for the product at depocopilot.com. It is a standalone product not requiring users to have Filevine as their case management platform.