Could automated transcription tools replace human court reporters?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the ABA Journal Legal Rebels podcast where we talk to men and women who are remaking the legal profession, changing the way the law is practiced, and setting standards that will guide us into the future.

Victor Li:

For the longest time, one of the staples of any Courtroom has been this pornography typing on a small machine that’s produced a seemingly random series of letters onto a small strip of paper about the same size as what cash registers used to produce receipts. Being a court reporter required extensive training and superhuman attention span. One missed sentence or one inaccurate transcription at the entire trial record could be compromised. Transcription technology has successfully for a while now, but its accuracy has never been that high, meaning that human court reporters have remained the gold standard. However, recent advances in technology as well as a shortage of court reporters nationwide and the increased use of virtual depositions and hearings has led to an opening for automated transcription tools. Now, artificial intelligence can make automated transcription even more accurate. As the tech becomes better and better, is it possible that they could eventually replace human court reporters? My name is Victor Li and I’m assistant managing editor of the ABA Journal. On today’s episode of the Legal Rebels Podcast, my guest is Karl Seelbach, co-owner of Skribe, an AI-based court reporting and transcription service. He’s here today to talk about the current state of automated court reporting and how generative AI has changed the industry. Welcome to the show, Karl.

Karl Seelbach:

Thanks for having me.

Victor Li:

So obviously I just gave a very, very quick version of your bio. Can you tell me a little bit more about yourself and your background?

Karl Seelbach:

Absolutely, yeah. I’m a litigator. I’m based in Austin, Texas, and I have been an attorney now for, this is my 18th year of practice and had a fairly straight path out of law school. I went to law school at South Texas College of Law in Houston, Texas. Joined a large firm about 350 attorneys, Winsted great law firm, and worked there for a couple of years in the Houston office before I transferred to their Austin, Texas office. And so I worked with them for all the way up until making partner. Actually, I worked with them for about nine to 10 years, and then in 2015 opened my own law firm with a really good friend of mine, Doyle, and we do primarily personal injury defense and also some commercial Litigation and real estate Litigation and have grown that firm over the last, I guess almost nine years as well, having my own firm. So yeah, I lived just outside of Austin with my wife and two kiddos and just a really big tech advocate, kind of tech geek I guess you could say. I tend to be an early adopter and just really, really love technology and have embraced it ever since I started as kind of a baby lawyer years ago.

Victor Li:

Gotcha. Is that firm still active or are you full-time with Skribe now?

Karl Seelbach:

It is. So I am one of the founders of Skribe. My co-founder is Tom Irby. He is the CEO full-time, along with the other full-time team members on the Skribe team. I’m still practicing attorney. In fact, I just flew in yesterday from Norfolk, Virginia where I was at an outside council meeting for the past three days with one of the nation’s largest retailers. I love what I do. I have kind of overlapping missions or goals with my two companies, and that’s really discovering the truth of what happened is kind of at the core of what I do on the personal injury defense side and on the Skribe side, bringing down the cost of capturing testimony and speeding up that process and letting attorneys take more depositions so that they can get to the truth faster. And so I’m still managing partner of the law firm, still very involved in the law firm. And then on the Skribe side of things, I do a lot of podcasts and webinars and help with the product planning and the feature roadmap and kind of some of the visionary elements of starting a company and taking it from foundation level of kind of building it out and getting started, which is what we did last year and is what we’re building on this year.

Victor Li:

Gotcha. So what made you decide to co-found Skribe? Was there a moment from your legal practice where you came to the realization that there had to be a better way of transcribing court proceedings?

Karl Seelbach:

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And right now, Skribe is focused primarily on depositions and also the uploading of past audio and video files. So we will be moving into courtrooms as well as other places where the spoken word needs to be captured. But currently the company just launched last year. We’re only about six to eight months into our live capture tool, which is called Skribe Live. And our primary focus right now is on depositions. But we have had a lot of interest from courts where they either for budget reasons or because of the shortage have a hard time getting a stenographer also called a court reporter. And we’ve also had some interest from insurance companies on potentially using what we’ve built for E Uos examinations under oath. So to go back to your question and answer your direct question of what prompted me to do this, was there kind of a point in time that I really decided this needs to be the way we capture testimony?

The answer is yes. It’s a combination of two things. When I was a young lawyer, I worked with some great litigators, Jeff Joyce, John McFarland, and others at Winstead who gave me the opportunity from day one to take depositions. I mean, as a first year attorney, I got to fly to New Jersey from Texas and start taking depositions just in the first few months of practice. And so from there until starting my own firm, I took hundreds of depositions and defended hundreds of depositions, and I was always frustrated at how archaic that process was. To me, it felt like it took too long for me to get the transcript unless I wanted to pay extremely high rush fees, double or triple to get the transcript faster. I always felt like the video was delivered to me in a very disjointed way. It used to come in on a DVD or a thumb drive.

Now a lot of court reporting agencies just send a link to either a box or some type of online repository, but it wasn’t ever connected to the transcript. And as someone who’s loves technology loves apps, I felt like there should be a modern way to do this to where everything is delivered, it’s synchronized. I can go in and create video clips and show my client. So I always wanted a solution like that and looked for it. And there wasn’t one. But the moment moment that really stands out is a couple of years ago, this is post covid, and I’ll talk about the impact of Covid on this in just a minute. But a couple of years ago, I was taking orthopedic surgeon’s deposition. And so this was probably 2022, I think towards the end of 2022. And we’d all signed on a lot of these doctor depositions take place in the evening.

So I was sitting in my law office in Austin remoting in, because most depositions now are taken remotely, and this was still, I guess towards the tail end of Covid. A lot of us were back in the office at that point. But this was a remote deposition and it was probably about 5 30, 6 o’clock. And everybody signed onto the Zoom me opposing Counsel, the doctor and the court reporter. And we had hired from a national court reporting company. And I video all my depositions. I always have, because to me, video is the most powerful way to capture testimony. It gets the tone, it gets the inflection. You can begin to assess witness credibility easier. You can see the look on their face, the pausing. It’s just so effective. So anyway, we sign onto this deposition. I’ve been working on my outline. It’s a big multimillion dollar catastrophic injury case.

And I ask the court reporter, okay, I’m ready. Can you go ahead and hit record? And this sweet old lady court reporter pauses for just a moment and she says, Mr. Sach, I’m sorry, I can’t do that. And I said, well, what do you mean you can’t do that? I video all my depositions. Well, we don’t have a videographer here. And I said, well, we’re in a Zoom room. Can’t you just press record? I mean, you’re the host. Oh, no, no, no, they won’t let me do that. And there must’ve been a mix up. We can wait and a couple of hours and I can try to see if the court reporting company can get a videographer to sign on to this Zoom and so that they can press record and do the recording. And so I was so frustrated in that moment that two things happened.

One, I told opposing Counsel, I said, this is just nonsense. We need to record this. We both want a copy of the recording. Why don’t I send a Zoom link around from my Zoom account? I’ll record it, I’ll share it with you, and we’ll have a recording of this deposition. And she was very collegial. She agreed. And so that’s what we did. The second thing I did was as soon as that deposition was over, I reached out to Irby, my co-founder, who years ago owned a court reporting company that he sold to Veritext. And I said, look, now’s the time. This is crazy. We’re being charged for someone to press the record button. There’s got to be a better way to do this. Let’s build a solution.

Victor Li:

So for someone who might not be familiar with your products, how would you deSkribe it? How does it work? What does it do? What doesn’t it do?

Karl Seelbach:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So Skribe AI and that Skribe with a K is a way for attorneys to capture testimony themselves, nons, stenographic, right? Without a stenographer using software. And so it really is extremely simple. You notice the deposition, you schedule it either in the Skribe application or you send us a copy of your deposition notice. Either way is fine. At that point, Skribe supplies for the event, a notary liaison. We call them a liaison, but they’re a certified notary who helps facilitate the event. They handle swearing in the witness, they provide light technical support. They make sure that the attorney is comfortable using the recording controls and exhibit screen share and all of those things that some of us know how to do better than others. But if you know how to join a Zoom event, you can do a Skribe deposition because we are a Zoom ISV partner.

We’re an official partner with Zoom. We work hand in hand with some of their team members. And so it is a Zoom powered event for the live capture. What happens is on the backend, we are processing the video and generating the transcript after the event is over. So unlike the old days where you take a deposition, you’ll see the transcript in probably three weeks unless you pay rush fee within about an hour to two. So go get a cup of coffee, grab a bite to eat within an hour to two, you have the video recording of the event from the zoom room synced to an AI transcript, and you can read it, search it, create clips that can be shared through A URL, just like you and I would share a YouTube video clip and you’re off to the races. And then within three days of the event, three to five, you get a final legally formatted transcript that looks just like the transcripts that you’re used to seeing over the years from a stenographer. And those have been professionally proofread and any corrections that needed to be made to things like spellings or if there were any AI errors have been corrected in that final transcript. And that’s all for one very transparent price.

Victor Li:

And how accurate is it?

Karl Seelbach:

So the accuracy is, so it depends on which part of it you’re talking about. So by the time we deliver that final transcript in three to five days, it’s as accurate or better than a court reporter. And we say that because we’ve actually done side-by-side testing, and we’ve actually had some of our customers, our clients law firms tell us that, Hey, my opponent wasn’t comfortable Skribes, so they decided to hire their own court reporter. But I compared the court reporter’s transcript to Skribes transcript and Skribes is more accurate. And we’ve also done some of our own that was anecdotal, but we’ve actually done some of our own testing as well. Now, if you’re only talking about the rough transcript, the AI transcript that’s available the very same day, it’s over 90% accurate. And most of the inaccuracies are things like spellings of names or unique words.

Usually it’s names, either a person’s name or a street name or the name of a city that may be spelled multiple ways, things like that that the AI doesn’t necessarily know for sure. It will sometimes misspell, but the liaison who joins the event is also tasked with capturing those unique spellings on breaks. And so that’s one of the tasks that they perform is anytime unique terms are being used, they’ll capture the correct spelling so that when we go into clean up the rough transcript, we’re able to correct those things and what we’re seeing just in the last year. But the way things are headed over the next, say 1, 2, 3 years, the AI is continuing to improve. You think about the advancements just in the last year, year and a half around large language models, it is extremely impressive that these A SR tools that 10 years ago or even five years ago just weren’t good enough for this type of solution.

They are now because of the benefit of large language models, not only can the software capture the spoken word and somewhat similar to how a stenographer captures it, the software is listening phonetically to what is said, and it is spitting out the word that it thinks was spoken, but now it knows the context, right? That’s the benefit of the large language models. It can understand the context of those words just like a court reporter or a s scopist. And one thing that maybe your listeners may not know, I didn’t know it until I got deeper into this type of stuff, is a lot of times a court reporter, a stenographer will type a transcript, which is phonetic notes as you pointed out during the intro. And then they will either themselves or they will hire an assistant who is a S scopist to convert those phonetic notes to text you and I can read. And the way that they do that is similar to how the software does it, is they’re looking at the context to make sure that the word based on their phonetic notes is the word that said in the context of this sentence or the context of this paragraph.

Victor Li:

Gotcha. So we’ll talk a little bit more about that after this quick break for a word from our sponsor. And we’re back. So let’s talk the current state of court transcription. You talked about depositions and the difference between depositions and actual in court proceedings like trials and whatnot. Is it still mostly human court reporters across the board, or is it like now depositions are mostly done by tech or is it some kind of combination of the two?

Karl Seelbach:

So keep in mind, a lot of these statistics are private, right? This isn’t necessarily public information that you can just easily get from an online database, but based on what we know from studying the market, the vast majority of depositions that are taken in the United States are still done the old fashioned way. And there’s a couple of reasons for that. One is just education. A lot of attorneys don’t know that stenographic depositions are permissible under the rules. And that’s true under the federal rules. It’s true under the Texas rules and most state rules. Now, there are some states where it’s not permissible, but by and large, it’s either permitted by default or the parties can stipulate to do it without a stenographer. So the threshold question that we get most of the time, and a lot of these attorneys are smart attorneys, but they’ve been doing it the same way for 20 years.

So their knee jerk reaction is, what are you talking about? You can’t do it without a court reporter or you can’t have a transcript without a court reporter. And the fact is, can you just have to look a little closer at the rules and the federal rules, it’s rule 30 B three and the Texas rules, it’s 2 0 3 0.6 that talk about using a transcript or a stenographic recording. And so if anyone has questions on that, feel free to, they can reach out to me. I’m happy to provide sample notices, sample stipulations if their state needs one. But right now, Skribe is primarily focused on depositions. But to come back to your question about courts, and I guess rewind just a little bit, depositions primarily are taking place stenographic, but we’re seeing a big shift to non-ST Stenographic solutions, whether that’s do it yourself solutions where attorneys are sick and tired of the cost and they’re just spinning up their own software and recording it, or they’re turning to companies like Skribe to handle it all for them, provide that notary, provide that turnkey experience at a much lower price than what it costs to hire a court reporting agency.

Now on the court side of things, the adoption is a little, I would say slower. We haven’t approached any courts yet. We’re still at kind of that startup phase. It is absolutely on our roadmap. We’ve had some early conversations and some interest, particularly from counties or courts where maybe they can’t afford to hire a staff court reporter. Maybe they’re having trouble finding a court reporter. And so I think that opportunity definitely exists. And there are some jurisdictions, mine just doesn’t happen to be one of them in Texas. So I mainly speak to what I know firsthand. But there are some jurisdictions nationwide that have adopted digital recording, but they’re not necessarily transcribing all of it. A lot of them are using audio recording. Even some federal courts in some of the Texas district courts and magistrate judges, they’re using audio recording to capture the hearing or in some cases a trial, but the attorneys don’t, and their clients don’t always have easy access to a transcript from that. And so I think there’s an opportunity there to modernize that entire process and get attorneys and their clients a much less expensive and a much faster way to not only capture the testimony, but to go in and analyze it and read it and search it.

Victor Li:

Gotcha. So you talked a little bit about how generative AI has changed things. Could you talk a little bit more about that? How exactly has generative AI tools like chat, GPT and similar large language models and whatnot, how has that helped improve the technology of transcription and the automated transcription and whatnot?

Karl Seelbach:

Yeah, so I’m happy to speak to that. I’m also happy to speak to other ways that generative AI is impacting Litigation in general. But if we focus on the first part of your question, which is specific to legal transcription, it really is providing context is so important. So if you rewind and you think in the days of Dragon dictation or maybe your first experience with talking to your phone assistant, whether that’s Siri or Alexa or Androids, whatever it is, before large language models were brought in to improve the quality of the transcription, the software was really trying to predict the word based on the phonetics of what was said without the benefit of context. And so it worked okay, but it would often predict the wrong word, and the word really didn’t fit that well into the sentence, but that was the best the software could do because it’s just going off of the syllables that are spoken and the phonetics associated with that.

The reason large language models have been so impactful and they’re taking the accuracy up to just surprisingly high levels, is the software is now able to predict the word, just like a human stenographer would take phonetic notes and try to figure out what that word that was spoken was based on the phonetics. And then because of large language models, contextualize it so that if there is, again, I’m not an engineer, I’m not a software developer, so if I butcher this, sorry, but just hypothetically, let’s say that the software thinks that this word, maybe it’s this word, 95% confidence score, that it’s this word 93% confidence score that it could be this other option B. Now it’s able to look at it in context of the sentence that was spoken just like a human stenographer would to say, oh, you know what it is option B, that must be what they said because that’s what makes sense in the context of the sentence. And that’s just like, again, a stenographer would sit in on a deposition and listen firsthand as to what was said. They are, by the way, they are audio recording, if not video recording. They’re audio recording the depositions. And then when they scope those transcripts out manually, they’re relying on the audio recording if there is any confusion about what was said. So it is a really is a example of software mimicking a manual process that’s been done the same way since the STENOGRAPH machine was invented in 1877.

Victor Li:

It’s a pretty app metaphor for the legal profession in general. I find this is how it was always done, so therefore this has to be the way it’ll be done in the future. Right.

Karl Seelbach:

Well, and the one thing that I would point out, there’s always skeptics, right? I mean, there’s always people who just don’t want to change. It’s like the horses and buggy whips example. They don’t. I even saw something recently that I laughed a little bit as someone who follows Technology Dodge is coming out with a new charger and it’s going to be their first electric charger, and they’re getting ridiculed a little bit online because guess what they did? They added a speaker based external audible sound that sounds like a gas engine charger. And it’s people who are proponents of EVs, they’re rolling on the floor laughing. They’re like, what old guys were sitting around in the boardroom and thought that this would be a good idea to fake the sound of a gas engine on an electric vehicle? And I bring that up just because I think the one thing that is often overlooked when we talk about alternatives to stenography is that in the case of a video deposition or a video hearing or a video trial or audio, the video is the record.

And so if there is a dispute over what a transcript says, the big benefit of doing it nons, steno graphically is you can always refer back to the video itself. So our goal, and one of the things that’s on our feature roadmap is to always make sure that the video is one click away. And what I mean by that is in our web application, when we show the transcript and you’re logged in and you’re searching everywhere, there’s a word in the transcript, you can right click or highlight the paragraph and right click and you can play the corresponding segment of testimony. And eventually we’re going to be bringing features like that to our PDF transcripts as well. And the goal is to make sure that the source of truth is always just a finger click away.

Victor Li:

All right. Let’s take another quick break for a word from our sponsor, and we’re back. So let me ask you sort of some forward looking questions now. I mean, where do you see this technology heading? I mean, obviously the various court reporters groups, some of them see this as an existential threat. Some of them are talking about how technology will never be able to replace the accuracy of a human and human observation. And kind of like all the stuff you said about with context and tone and whatnot, do you see this technology as sort of replacing them or supplementing them? It seems like they would work well in tandem to have both of them working together to try to figure out what was actually said and what the context was and whatnot. Or would that be too cost prohibitive?

Karl Seelbach:

I think the answer is it’s a combination of both. We are not out aSkribe as a company is not out to eliminate court reporting as a profession. We see many benefits to using as stenographer, particularly if cost is not a problem and the attorneys and their clients are not cost sensitive and maybe speed is not an issue and they don’t mind waiting three or four weeks to get their deposition materials or they don’t mind paying rush fees. There are a lot of cases out there, high stakes cases. I have friends at large firms that bill a thousand dollars an hour just for their attorney time or more. And in those cases, there’s probably not as many reasons to look at alternatives, but what we’re seeing is there’s a large number and a growing number of attorneys and their clients who are actually to the point where they cannot afford to take a deposition in a case and have to forego capturing testimony that could actually help them do a better job for their clients because the cost has become so high.

We’re also seeing from some of our early clients that while they came to us originally for the cost savings, they’re now actually telling us that one of the coolest features to them is the speed. It’s the time savings, it’s the finishing a deposition at two o’clock and jumping back in and digesting it and analyzing it at three or four o’clock the same day and getting ready for the next thing they need to do. Whether that next thing is another deposition or a hearing or a trial or a motion. I can’t tell you how many times before we launched this company, I would take a deposition and I’d think to myself, I think it was really good. I’m pretty sure that I got what I needed. And then I’d go back. Let’s say I’d fly home or drive home and the next day I’d try to start summarizing it for my client.

And only 12 hours has gone by, but I’m already kind of questioning, okay, what exactly did the witness say on this point? I think I got him to say what I needed. And so the ability to not have to rely on memory and to be able to actually quickly reference your deposition record, it really does change the game. And so the other part of your question that I want to turn to, if it’s okay, is you asked me where this is headed and where we’re going in the future. Do you want me to go ahead and tackle that? I definitely have some thoughts on that. Sure, absolutely. So there’s a couple of layers to this onion that I’ll kind of peel back on where I see this market. I do think it’ll continue to be options in the market, a traditional court reporting as well as digital solutions like what Skribe offers.

So I don’t think it’s going to be the flip of a switch and the market’s just going to instantly switch to one versus the other. And I think that’s healthy. I think competition is healthy. And I think any efforts to oppose or quash what Skribe is doing and what others are doing is really just an effort to try to avoid having competition, right? They want a monopoly on the market. There’s no other good explanation for it. If the source of truth is the concern, what’s better than having it on video? And so that component to it, I obviously have strong feelings about, but when I think about where this is headed and frankly where Skribe is headed, we are looking at ways to improve every aspect of the experience from preparing for the deposition to what you do after the deposition. And so imagine having software help you draft your deposition outline, analyze the documents that you may intend to use at the deposition.

Imagine having software that after the deposition takes place, summarizes it for you and allows you to check the witness’s testimony to see how consistent or inconsistent it may be against the other testimony in the case or the key documents in the case. And some of these things are just scratching the surface. I mean, those are a couple of obvious examples. We have some other things on our roadmap for probably next year that are a little more advanced that large companies or insurance companies or large law firms would probably be very interested in that can begin to leverage larger sets of data and analyze those things to give them some insights into the testimony that their companies or giving or taking in the case of law firms. And then the one that probably some of your listeners may balk at, but I’m very curious to see where it goes, is AR and vr, virtual reality and augmented reality.

And I think if I would frame it for you this way, if I had told an average litigator in 2015 that someday they would take the vast majority of their deposition sitting at their home office or work office at their laptop, oh, I forget it. Yeah, they would’ve told me I was crazy. And so I think until you’ve tried Apple Vision Pro or until you’ve tried Meta’s latest headset and you’ve actually seen it and experienced it, you can’t write it off. Because I saw Lex Friedman podcast recorded video podcast that he did with Mark Zuckerberg, and they were testing some of the upcoming hardware not yet released upcoming hardware, and Lex Friedman was truly blown away. He said, it feels like we’re in the same room yet we’re thousands of miles away. I can see the wrinkles on your face. I can see everything. It’s like we’re sitting right next to each other.

And so I don’t think that change will come fast in the way that we take depositions or the way that we conduct hearings, but I do think it’s a possibility. And it’s just interesting to think about that because there’s an access to justice component to all of this, and people often use that phrase, and sometimes they’re just paying lip service to it. But one of the things that you’re seeing more and more courts say and do, in fact, there was an opinion just in the last, I think two or three weeks that was circulating amongst the legal tech circles where a judge said, no, I don’t think you need to do these depositions in person. Online depositions sufficient. There’s no big huge benefit to being in person. And by the way, the travel costs associated with having to travel to a deposition, with having to take off work or get childcare for the children, whoever it is, there is a significant time component and cost component, particularly when you start to think about the witnesses, right?

Forget about the attorneys for a minute. Think about the witness, who you want to take their deposition, and how convenient it is for them to join remotely versus how inconvenient it is for them to have to drive to some location, possibly pay to park, take off hours of their day for maybe an hour or two of testimony. So I think there’s some genuine cost and time savings that permeate far beyond just the attorneys themselves that post Covid, the rise of technology and Zoom have really opened the door to a better way of doing things. And I think that attorneys, because of covid are more willing to embrace some of these things than ever before.

Victor Li:

Yeah, I think the Apple vision stuff might have to wait a little bit for the cost to come down, unless you’re going to invest in a bunch of those sets and give ’em out to your clients.

Karl Seelbach:

I definitely think that the pro version is called Pro for a reason. It’s that common, I wouldn’t call it a tactic as much as I would call it a strategy. It’s that common approach of let’s bring something to the market at the high end, and let’s work out all the kinks on people who don’t care about the cost. They just want the latest and greatest tech. And then let’s come in later with a lower cost option. We’ll wait for the Vision Air or some other vision, future Apple product where the price gets closer to an iPhone. And I think at that point, you’ll begin to see some significant market penetration.

Victor Li:

Gotcha. And to wrap up, if our listeners wish to get in touch with you for any reason, what’s the best way to do that? The

Karl Seelbach:

Shortest email is probably the easiest one to say, right? It’s [email protected], KA, RL at Skribe at Skribe with A-K-S-K-R-I-B e.ai, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active on there as well, and I’d be happy to answer any questions, even give you a free trial of Skribe if you want to kick the tires. I’m happy to provide that to your listeners as well, and really appreciate you having me on.

Victor Li:

Yeah, no, thanks for joining us, Karl. I appreciate it.

Karl Seelbach:

Thanks. It was fun.

Victor Li:

If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please go to your favorite app and check out some other titles from Legal Talk Network. In the meantime, I’m Victor L, and I’ll see you next time on the ABA Journal’s Legal Rebels Podcast.

Speaker 1:

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