Legal Tech firm extracts intelligence from depositions with Symbl.ai

Overview: 

Cloud Court is a legal-tech software company that enables corporations, law firms, government agencies, and insurance to extract knowledge and intelligence from depositions and prior testimony data. Research shows that most civil cases are resolved before a trial (via a judicial order or settlement) and a large civil case has a high number of depositions. That increases the importance of deposition analysis. Symbl.ai provides Cloud Court with the capability to extract topics and summaries from legal transcripts. That enables their customers in better knowledge consumption to improve case preparation and outcomes.

Challenge / Opportunity: 

Time-consuming and error-prone manual process: A deposition can last up to seven hours with transcriptions constituting several hundred pages. Litigators would spend hours analyzing depositions for topics discussed and rely on their memory during the trial, impacting productivity, and increasing the risk of error. 

Information loss: Searching through depositions using the traditional approach with predefined keywords is likely to miss topics that litigators wouldn’t normally search for or are unaware of. As a result, crucial information for the case is lost.

Subjectivity: Different litigators interpret depositions differently. In a large case with more than twenty depositions, that can lead to inconsistencies in the topics identified and therefore interpretation of the case.

Solution: 

Cloud Court uses Symbl’s APIs to extract topics and summary from their legal transcripts. Async API (Text) is used to process a transcript. The Summary and Topics APIs are then used to derive summary and relevant topics respectively. Key highlights of Symbl’s Topics model are:

• It improves on traditional keyword and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) driven models and better models the conversation.
• Topic Hierarchy, the one-to-many relationship of a Parent Topic to Child Topics, can be viewed by passing the parentRefs=true parameter in the Get topics request.

Outcome: 

Cloud Court has integrated its testimony intelligence platform with Symbl’s APIs for processing and generating knowledge from its legal data. That benefits Cloud Court and their clients in the following ways: 

Enhanced productivity: Automating topic detection reduces the time to review lengthy depositions from hours to seconds. This allows legal teams to focus more on case strategy.

Improved case outcomes: Organizing legal transcripts into topics enables legal professionals (such as prosecuting and defense attorneys) to effectively prepare for, conduct, and defend depositions.

As part of ongoing engagement with Symbl, Cloud Court is experimenting with other features of the platform such as Sentiment.