What Filevine’s new AI tool could mean for the future of depositions

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to the A v 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:

Take it from me. Legal journalists get tons of press releases and interview requests about some latest state-of-the-art product that is revolutionary, pioneering, innovative, and groundbreaking. Sometimes all four of those things. Obviously not everything is the second coming of sliced bread, and journalists are trained to be skeptical. There isn’t much that will shock or awes, but then File Vine unveiled its depo copilot and everything changed. The generative AI tool is not just designed to transcribe depositions, but it also acts as a quasi attorney. It looks for inconsistencies in the transcript and suggests questions to ask. It analyzes the transcript in real time to see if there are any issues that need to be cleared up or areas of weakness to address. In other words, it made us shocked and odd. My name is Victor Li and I’m assistant managing editor for the A b ABA Journal. My guest on today’s episode of the Legal Rebels Podcast is Alex McLaughlin, vice President of Product of ine. Alex is here to talk about depo copilot as well as issues relating to generative AI and what it means for the future of depositions. Welcome to the show, Alex.

Alex McLaughlin:

Thanks, Victor. Excited to be here.

Victor Li:

Yeah, thank you for doing this. Appreciate it. So obviously I just gave a very quick one line version of your bio. Can you tell me a little bit more about yourself and your background?

Alex McLaughlin:

Yeah, so I’ve been in and around the legal tech space for over 15 years now, which is I think every little kid dreams of growing up and being in legal tech. Kind of fell backwards into it. I worked in it for a plaintiff’s firm for over a decade. Started out as their just kind of in-house, it Gyi. And that position really began to transform and getting more and more into working with our attorneys during trial and helping to really prepare strategies and demonstrative exhibits and ways to present evidence to the juries. While I was there, worked on a lot of really interesting and large cases. One of the last ones that I got to work on was the National Opiate Litigation. My firm was liaison counsel in that lawsuit, and so really got to experience some of the more in depth sides of really one of the biggest cases that this country has ever seen. During all that time, my firm also adopted File Vine, and so after a few years of using File Vine and really talking back and forth with Ryan Anderson of ways that I saw the product improving, decided to make the leap and actually come over and begin working here directly and trying to help influence the product and build the next generation of legal tech tools.

Victor Li:

And so you or do you not have a law degree? I was just curious.

Alex McLaughlin:

No, I am not a lawyer. I’ve sat through more trials than most lawyers have and sat in about as many depos as an attorney has. But it’s always been from the support side and not from the legal side. I had planned on becoming a lawyer until I began working in a law firm and realized that it wasn’t for me.

Victor Li:

Well, it’s good that you found out before you sank hundreds of dollars of your own money or a bank’s money into education. So what was it that made you decide to take the leap from going from your law firm to file Vine?

Alex McLaughlin:

Yeah, I saw that there was still just an enormous amount of growth potential in the legal tech space, seeing how manual everything was in the legal industry and that there was an opportunity for software to really not just be that tool or utility that’s used, but it can help make the work easier, make it better, and work alongside the user. And this was before generative AI was a thing. This was just seeing how inefficient law firm policies and procedures and SOPs were and really wanted to help make that better for law firms. And also the grind of a decade in the legal industry is quite a bit. And so it was great to look for an exciting change and something, a company that I really liked and saw a bright future with.

Victor Li:

Gotcha. And so this question might be a little kind odd, but I’ll ask it anyway. It’s my show, I can ask these things. So the fact that you were not kind of approaching everything from the background of a JD Practicing attorney and whatnot, and looking at it more from a tech perspective, I mean, did that kind of help you with your decision to move to a tech company? Because the reason why I ask is very often with lawyers is they feel like, well, what I do can’t be replicated by machines. What I do is so unique and so bespoke that it’s not like artificial intelligence or even the tech before that could ever make even a reasonable facsimile of what I do. So was the fact that you were approaching it from a non jd, non-practicing lawyer background, did that help you in being able to make that move?

Alex McLaughlin:

Yeah, it’s definitely helped along the way. I don’t know how big of a help it was when I made the move, but it’s actually been terrific background and experience to have while I’ve been at File Vine is understanding the personality types that many of these lawyers have in that exact personality juice described. I go in, I’ve become an expert in the space, I have this way of doing it this way, can’t possibly be replicated. I’ve got the secret sauce, the magic way of doing it. And especially now seeing that across thousands and thousands of firms, no offense to anybody out there, but most of them don’t have a special secret sauce. It is a very formulaic process that others are doing. They may have come up with it on their own and are doing a great job with it, but it is something that a lot of folks are doing and repeating out there and finding ways for tech to come in and help bolster that, whether they know what’s happening or not is something that we really try to do and make them more efficient and better at what they do.

Victor Li:

Gotcha. And so you joined File Vine before generative AI became widely known about. Can you talk a little bit about what the company was doing before the advent of that technology and how things have changed since it came out?

Alex McLaughlin:

Yeah, so I joined File Vine in 2020, so actually during the heart of Covid it was May of 2020. So making the leap from a law firm to a remote startup was a really easy conversation to have with my wife. But during that time, the big focus there was really opening up the market for F Vine. F Vine, historically 2022 and earlier was known as a personal injury platform. And really that hasn’t been the case for the last several years now. So we spent a ton of time opening up and building document management tools, better case management tools that fit general practice and a complete time and billing suite inside of the application to open up to the non-con contingency side of the world. And that was really the big focus is how do we store our documents better? How do we work up our cases better?

How do we track our time and invoice for our time better? And it’s been the mission of File Vine to do all of those things in one place, whether really nobody is doing those things in one software application or nobody was at that time, and we wanted to bring all of those together because when you have all of those tools together, it eliminates the context switching that these attorneys need to do to jump between applications to accomplish the task that they need to accomplish. And so that was the core mission and ethos was documents, case management time and billing as robust as they could be under one umbrella.

Victor Li:

Well, you had mentioned that you went there during the heart of the pandemic. I mean, was there that concern in the back of your mind like, okay, this company has really ambitious plans, but they’re doing it at a time when, look, we don’t know when things are going to open up again. We don’t know how things are going to change. We don’t know what the economy is going to look like when things do open up if they do. Was that a concerning thing for you that hey, these guys are really making an aggressive push, but this could really backfire?

Alex McLaughlin:

Honestly, no. It was actually part of the reason I was more comfortable going is all of these law firms going remote, all of these law firms taking on more cases are needing to find ways to work through more cases faster as courts are opening back up, it just shined the light on, hey, there’s going to be a bigger and bigger need for software, for automations, for efficiencies in this space. And it was a place that I thought was a really, really a great opportunity to jump in and be a part of.

Victor Li:

Okay. Alright. So let’s take a quick break for a word from our sponsor and then we’ll continue with this and we’re back. So let’s talk about Depo copilot real quickly. I give a very brief description of it in the intro, but can you talk a little bit how it works and what makes it different from other products out there?

Alex McLaughlin:

Yeah, so Depo copilot is a first of its kind tool in that it combines both the real time transcription that some platforms have out there with generative AI to give analysis on that transcript while you’re still in the room with the witness. The problem that we identified and we wanted to solve is this all too common case of an attorney walking out of the room from a deposition and going, oh no, I’m trying to censor myself there. Usually it’s a much worse term.

Victor Li:

They say other things.

Alex McLaughlin:

Yeah, I can’t believe I didn’t follow up on that golden thing that they said, I can’t believe I forgot to ask this question, or did they answer that question the way that I think they did? Did they give a clear answer? I think it looked right, but I’m not really sure how this is going to look and you don’t get a chance to fix those mistakes until trial if you make them. And so we wanted to find a way to solve those problems in the moment we saw an opportunity, we saw the technology and said, Hey, I think this is possible. I think we can actually make lawyers better in the moment before they leave the room and make their depos better and potentially save a case just by clearing up a piece of testimony or asking the right question or digging into an issue that was called out by the software.

Victor Li:

This is for my curiosity, and then this might be getting too much into nitty gritty, but how do you train your model to do something like that? I mean, do you just have it read a bunch of old transcripts and then bring in lawyers to consult on that or how do you train that model?

Alex McLaughlin:

Yeah, it’s been an ongoing process. So it’s a lot of research on our side, an enormous investment in training and prompt engineering in particular to really ground the model and make sure that it understands what you’re doing, what the expectation is, who all the parties are in the case, what a deposition actually is, and then being able to say, okay, now that we have all this information, I’m going to pose a question to you and go and do this thing.

Victor Li:

It seems like most of the deposition software on the market is more concerned about accuracy of the transcription, making sure the words are correct, the context is correct, making sure that whatever kind of emotions are there are captured on the video and whatnot. Was that a problem for you guys or was that something that you guys tried to fix as well?

Alex McLaughlin:

No, that really wasn’t the market that we were going after. We knew that those tools were already out there and that people use them as we’re really getting into this industry further and further now. We’re seeing some people use them a lot, some people don’t use ’em at all, but the market for us wasn’t so much trying to replace the stenographer. It wasn’t trying to replace the post-production of the video. It was making sure that the time that you spent in this deposition, the money that you spent in this deposition, these things can cost 1500 $2,500 easily that you’re spending that money. Let’s make sure that while you’re there you ask every question that you need to, you get all the information that you need to, you don’t let something slip through the cracks. And because of that, the video wasn’t really important to us.

The transcript accuracy is important, but not on the level of a stenographer’s. Accuracy close enough is usually and almost always good enough for ai. The great thing is if you have a typo or a misspelling, the context around those words helps inform the AI model what it was that was actually being said. So if it conflates two words, it’s going to understand that you meant one thing and not the other based on the context around it. So the accuracy, while important, it didn’t need to be a hundred percent because of all these surrounding tools that really can solve that for us.

Victor Li:

So the transcription is not so much we’re going to submit this in court as a true and accurate copy. It’s more just like reference so that then your depo copilot can then have something to go on.

Alex McLaughlin:

Yeah, exactly. It’s meant for copilot to read off of, and it still is really, really powerful while you’re in the room to be able to search that transcript and say, all right, let me do a quick search. Did I search cerebral edema? Make sure I ask all my questions about that. Okay, I see the question here. I see the answer here. Or did they really say that they were out at 2:00 AM let’s search for 2:00 AM and see how late it was that they were called.

Victor Li:

Okay. So someone using your tool would still probably want an actual stenographer or some kind of official transcript of the proceedings, right?

Alex McLaughlin:

Yeah, it’s still a hundred percent required. Actually, we are an enhancement to the depo process. We can’t replace at this time because of state regulations. We can’t replace the court reporter. There’s some states that are now allowing virtual court reporting where you can transcribe an audio file after the fact, but most states and jurisdictions are still requiring that you actually have a person either listening to the recording or in the room or on the Zoom to do that sonography. And that’s not a market that we’re trying to replace with this tool.

Victor Li:

Okay. And so while we’re talking about replacement then, I mean it seems like this tool could potentially make some people uncomfortable as far as, okay, well why would I bring a junior associate along if I have this tool that can do the job and maybe even better? I mean, is that a concern of yours or do you think this is just something that can actually help maybe train junior associates better, give them more experience to allow them to kind of improve and as they then become first chairs or move along in their careers?

Alex McLaughlin:

Yeah, I think a little of both. A firm no longer necessarily needs a junior associate to tag along at the depot and listen in the junior associate, especially those first couple of years, doesn’t even know what they’re doing in the room. They’re not providing that much help. They might be taking notes, but if they take an inaccurate note, then how useful is it? So there’s still the learning and training aspect of a junior associate that is really, really important to this process. But the idea is that for those firms that are bringing in a more senior associate or even another partner or having someone else listen in, it should make that something that’s no longer needed and let them save that money instead of spending double the attorney hours. In a depo, you only have one person. The other great thing with copilot is it has multiple access points. So you, you’re in the room with the deponent or you’re on the Zoom with a deponent, another attorney can be watching the testimony roll in and watching the insights roll in from their phone, from their laptop, from a different location. They can all get into the depo at the same time to see what’s happening in that depo. And so it can actually be still a great training opportunity for those junior associates without ever even leaving the office. They can just watch and see the testimony roll in and follow along.

Victor Li:

So when it comes to Depo copilot, I wanted to ask you about your client base or your customer base. Is it mostly personal injury attorneys of people that you’ve historically worked with? Is it mainly them using using this tool, or have you gotten some adoption from other areas of law firms and whatnot?

Alex McLaughlin:

Yeah, no, we’re seeing adoption across the spectrum. So we’ve got PI firms using it. We’ve got criminal defense attorneys using it. We’ve got family law attorneys using it. We’ve got corporate, really anybody that’s doing any kind of litigation where you’re taking a deposition, we are already seeing usage in that space. So it’s something that is very cross-cutting. It’s not PI specific, it’s not any one practice area specific. It’s anybody taking a deposition in the realm of litigation that is using it already and who it was billed for.

Victor Li:

Alright, so let’s take a quick break for another word from our sponsor and we’re back. So let’s talk about the future. What’s next for File Vine? Are you guys going to keep working on Depo copilot to make it more advanced or is there something else that you guys are working on?

Alex McLaughlin:

Yes, to both Depo copilot, what we released at Lex last month is really a starting point. We see an enormous amount of room still to really make it just a standout in the market as we bring Depo copilot closer to File Vine. So right now, depo copilot is actually a standalone product. It’s something we want to bring closer to File Vine and really allow our users to navigate more seamlessly between the two. Whether that’s for setting it up or moving in your goals and information or bringing the transcript back into File Vine. A couple of other features we’re not quite ready to talk about yet. There’s an enormous amount of space there to really make it a standout product that we’re very, very excited about. So I see well into another year worth of improvements in work that we’ll be doing. We’ve got a couple of changes that’ll be rolling out here over the next month around goal analysis and some of the handling of the Zoom bot and things that we think will really help make it a stronger and stronger product offering. But then some bigger initiatives on the horizon as well. We can go into the whole file Vine side too. There’s an enormous amount of space in the file Vine, generative AI ecosystem that we have our eyes on as well. We’ve got six or seven other AI products that are part of the suite, and all of those are continuing to get attention and thought through and really redesigned and making sure that we’re serving the industry and solving the problems that are out there.

Victor Li:

What about trial testimony? I mean, deposition testimony is one thing and trial testimony do you think is kind of similar with regards to the way it’s set up or whatnot? I mean, is that something that you guys are looking at modifying or modifying or adapting this so that it can be used during trials?

Alex McLaughlin:

It is. It’s not a very big leap to move into the trial space. Actually. I think the biggest leap is going to be judges. I think it’s going to be difficult at times to get all parties to agree to a third party recording in the Courtroom at all times. But as far as the actual AI side of things, because the deposition testimony track is so similar to the examination and cross-examination of a witness, it should be a very natural transition into it. We are still focusing on depos for the time being, but it will be at some point a natural transition into hearing testimony, into trial testimony. I think there’s even other applications outside of this that it can be used for.

Victor Li:

So let’s talk generally about generative ai. I mean, where do you see generative AI heading and what do you think it’s going to be capable of in the next several years?

Alex McLaughlin:

Yeah, I think generative AI is getting more and more powerful and faster and faster. Some of the big things that we really think it can start to do is take in more and more data around the entirety of a case. So bringing in all of the documents, all of the data points, all of the artifacts in a case, and letting a user start to create artifacts from that, ask questions, conduct research, derive insights. It’s really a space that we think can revolutionize legal more than it’s done already. And it’s been great. What we’ve been able to do so far between extractions of data, out of documents, interpretation of documents, drafting things like demands or letters to clients, all things that you can do today. But as the AI models are getting more and more powerful, as we’re able to do more with retrieval augmented generation, it really will extend what we can do tremendously. It’ll be more accurate, more powerful. It’ll sound more like an attorney. It’s really a very exciting time.

Victor Li:

Gotcha. What about the drawbacks of generative ai? Maybe hallucinations might not be as big of a thing for File Vine or for copilot because you’re not doing research or that kind of stuff, but what are some of the drawbacks of generative ai and how are you guys trying to address that?

Alex McLaughlin:

Yeah, I think hallucinations are a big part of it. A lot of it’s the kind of responsibility of how it’s deployed and how it’s used. One of the things that we have been very, very emphatic on from the beginning with File Vines AI is that it should reduce hallucinations. It should be grounded in fact, and it should be safeguarded from Ill-advised usage. So that means that we always try to ground the AI model in the data. We’re not asking it to come up with some crazy thing or find something. We’re very, very diligent in our prompting to ensure that we’re always getting it to say, Hey, ground yourself in the data. If it’s not there, then tell us you can’t do it. Don’t try to make us happy. And then putting ethical safeguards around things like asking legal advice, asking medical advice, asking professional determinations, the models that don’t, or the services rather that don’t offer, I think are really doing a disservice to anybody that they sell to because it opens them up for liability and it really can create a bad impression of AI in the industry. I mean, think about all that we heard early last year of attorneys getting sanctioned for having AI write a complaint, or they’re citing a case law that didn’t exist or was completely fabricated because it was developed with ai. So we really try hard to build these tools in as safe a way as possible to boost their accuracy, their efficacy, and their trustworthiness.

Victor Li:

So lemme change gears a little bit. File Find recently made a big splash at their recent user conference, booking Nelly to perform in Jake Gillian Hall as a keynote speaker. So I’m not going to ask you about the celebrities, but I am going to ask you sort of this question about F Vine and whatnot, and where you guys might be heading. So I recently got back from the Clio conference. Clio has grown by leaps and bounds just even from their first conference 12 years ago, and it was really kind of eyeopening just to see how big they’ve grown. So is that sort of where you guys are trying to get to get to that size where you’re throwing these big user conferences with thousands of people in attendance and whatnot? Or is there something else that you guys are working on?

Alex McLaughlin:

Yeah, I mean, we really love having as many of our customers out to the conference as we can get out there. There’s really nothing like getting all of those legal professionals together who are enthusiastic and excited about the platform together, talking, networking, coming up with ideas. Our product team loves that. We have our entire product team come out to our conferences to ensure that we are getting as much face time with our customers to learn from them, to hear from them. So yeah, we absolutely want to continue to grow the conference and make it larger and larger. I love the way that we do it. We have, it’s a great mix of professional learning, of inspirational talks of CLEs, but also a chance to really have a lot of fun between Lex Fest or the keynote speakers, not just being a traditional person in the legal space, but someone that’s unique and exciting to come see and talk to.

Victor Li:

Well, I think Jake Al played a lawyer recently, right? Is that why you guys got him, or

Alex McLaughlin:

He did. Yeah. He had just had a part in an Apple TV show where he was playing a lawyer, and so it was a natural extension of, Hey, you had to dive into this character, learn about the industry, learn about the market. How did you do that? What did you do? What did you feel about it? It was really a natural extension.

Victor Li:

Well, I figured it wasn’t because he recently played a bouncer who was enforcing the law in his own way.

Alex McLaughlin:

No, that was second up for why we choose or chose him.

Victor Li:

So in 12 years, I can expect File Vine to start sponsoring NHL teams like Clio, is that what you’re telling me?

Alex McLaughlin:

We can see where that goes. We actually, the Utah Jazz are a partner of File Vine, and so that’s why with Lex Fest was at the Delta Center, so it was pretty incredible to be able to host our event in a venue of that size.

Victor Li:

Okay, gotcha. I guess it’s a nice reference point, right? We see what they did and then you guys can kind of measure up. We will measure and see how far along you guys are, right?

Alex McLaughlin:

Yep, absolutely.

Victor Li:

And to wrap up, if our listeners wish to get in touch with YouDo or ask you a question, what’s the best way to do that?

Alex McLaughlin:

Yeah, the best way would be through our file Vine socials. So we’re really everywhere just using at File Vine. So whether it’s on X or LinkedIn or Instagram, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. There’s not too many Alex McLaughlins that work at File Vi, so if you do a search, you’ll be able to come up with me and I’m happy to talk more or answer any questions that come up.

Victor Li:

Great. Thanks for joining us today, Alex. I appreciate it.

Alex McLaughlin:

Yep, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Victor. It was great.

Victor Li:

Yep. If you enjoyed this podcast and we wanted 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 Li, and I’ll see you next time on the ABA Journal Legal Rebels

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