DepoDirect co-founder Todd Seligman talks us through the vital statistics of Los Angeles-founded online deposition platform, which aims to save law firms time and money, as well as expand access to justice.
How would you describe DepoDirect to a friend?
DepoDirect’s vision is to expand access to justice for everyone. The way we can help to achieve that in our own way is focused on innovating the court reporting services industry, as that is where are expertise is. The legal industry is typically slow to adopt new technologies, but what we are seeing in almost real time is the shift from an analog method of record preservation to a digital method. It’s Blockbuster to Netflix, for the legal industry.
Two major paradigm shifts have precipitated this change. One is that traditional court reporters, aka stenographers, have been retiring faster than new ones can replace them, causing a massive shortage and opening the door for alternative means of preserving the official record. And two, the pandemic forced attorneys into virtual litigation. These two combined have led to a behavior change whereby virtual litigation and alternative methods to capture the record are becoming the norm.
Our focus is to empower the legal industry with an improved virtual litigation workflow, through the use of artificial intelligence, to facilitate faster resolutions that improve win rate and increase revenue. We use speech to text AI combined with automation to record an official record of a legal proceeding, such as a deposition or hearing, in a virtual environment. Now, transcripts and videos can be delivered the same day as the event and exhibits are no longer physical copies, but rather digital versions that can be annotated and saved in one secure cloud system. Think of it as “Zoom for legal” with all the legal nuance built around it to make legal proceedings totally virtual, efficient and easy.
And to a techy?
AI speech to text is only getting better over time. Using generic NLP models, we can ingest specific types of data sets to refine and train them for very specific use cases. DepoDirect does this very thing for the legal industry. Using a huge amount of data, we have trained our own NLP model to become very good at both live transcribing legal events and asynchronously doing a second pass to improve it even more. Due to the pandemic, more than 50% of all legal proceedings will be done virtually in perpetuity. We have worked directly with the Zoom developers to automatically grab the video and audio streams during virtual legal proceedings to provide a real time legally nuanced transcript, as well as a same day rough transcript, synchronized with the video of the witness. Typically, this can take up to 10 business days for attorneys to receive. We can now do it with a few minutes. This provides us with a foundation we can then add more legally nuanced features to, such as bookmarking, private chat, clip editing and more. The result, is a more efficient litigation workflow, more powerful tools, and therefore a higher win rate for attorneys that utilize this technology.
When were you founded?
Founded in early 2021 with one co-founder and a dog in a garage, the early days were wild!
By who?
Myself and my co-founder Alex Loverde. We had both worked together in litigation services for 15 years and witnessed the archaic inefficiencies first hand. Depositions were done in person, in a law office. All parties sat in traffic, lugged bankers boxes of documents around, court reporters and videographers hauled in heavy physical hardware on trolley carts. The whole thing just seemed like it was stuck in the dinosaur age. We were using VHS tapes and DVD’s to record proceedings – VHS tapes! So we knew there was an opportunity there but were waiting for the industry to be ready for the digital transformation.
Who are your key managers/senior execs?
I manage recruiting and sales. My job as the CEO is the make sure we have the best talent working with us and that we are driving sales upward every month. Alex Loverde manages the operations workflow, consisting of recruiting digital reporters, training procedures, delivering transcripts/videos to clients. Michael Cantrell is our head of product and has been crucial in defining and prioritizing our product roadmap. John Wnek is our head of engineering and has done a fantastic job executing that product roadmap.
Who are your target clients?
Our clients are litigators and/or claims managers at insurance companies that need to manage high volume claims efficiently and effectively. To go a little deeper, plaintiff attorneys are attracted to the cost savings, while defense attorneys are more attracted by the potential for increased win rate using the best tools out there. DepoDirect lives at the cross-section of cost savings and performance, thereby appealing to both. Claims managers are always looking for ways to adjudicate thousands of cases in the most efficient way. For example, auto claims where you have a lot of small cases such as fender benders. DepoDirect provides a simple, easy to use virtual litigation solution that is both cost-effective and powerful in its ability to give attorneys the tools they need to produce faster resolutions.
What is your growth strategy?
We have a nice tailwind in that the legal industry’s need for this digital litigation solution is growing by the day. So the market is constantly emerging and more willing to look at new technologies such as DepoDirect. Our growth strategy is to continue to improve our AI technology, powerful performance tools and create a suite of products using that same technology to various target customers within the industry. For example, we have just launched a transcription product called DepoScribe.ai, that is used by legal transcribers to give them a legally formatted rough transcript within seconds, thereby doing the heavy lifting for them, so they never have to work from a blank page. We didn’t necessarily build anything new, we just used our existing technology and then marketed it to transcribers. Similarly, we will continue to leverage our AI speech to text technology with new tools for attorneys, which allows us to provide an ecosystem of products that appeals to attorneys, paralegals, legal assistants and transcribers.
And your key achievements?
DepoDirect began a nationwide pilot program with one of the largest insurance carriers in the industry at the beginning of this year. That deal took around ten months and was a nice win for us. We have over 250 law firms of various sizes using our product across the United States. DepoDirect has created its own “Virtual Reporting Academy ” that is free to join, and provides training to digital reporters to learn how to officiate legal proceedings the DepoDirect way. Recently, we launched DepoScribe.ai, to help legal transcribers never have to transcribe from a blank page again or use a generic AI speech to text product.
Have you received investment?
Yes, we raised a seed round of $2M in early 2022 from Okapi VC based in Southern California, and ffVC based in New York.
Have there been any key changes in direction since you were founded?
Originally, we tried to create a legal video conference platform from the ground up. On the surface, this seemed like a doable task, and we did build it and it worked really well with less than 3 people in the meeting. The issue was when you had 15 attorneys with varying devices, wifi, browsers, etc, we began to play Whac-A-Mole trying to fix the bugs. We had to realize that our value isn’t in building a video conferencing platform, its in the legally nuanced tools we knew were needed. And if we could just do that really well, it would be enough. Partnering with Zoom and focusing on what we do best was a big turning point.
What are the key challenges in your market?
The legal industry is seeing a technology renaissance, however is traditionally five to ten years behind technology adoption in other industries. So while the appetite for new technology is there, the challenge is that some attorneys are still reluctant to do anything different, even if that different thing means better performance for them. So its our job to communicate the value proposition effectively and constantly educate attorneys on how to utilize what we offer. Legal AI products are now exploding everywhere and it can be overwhelming for firms to sift through it all and determine what is actually useful and then know how to implement it firm wide. This is where standard operating sales procedures really become important, because we can then track what is working with communicating our message and what is not. The other challenge is the laws around methodology to preserve an official record. It varies from state to state, so we have to keep track of the codes of civil procedure and then communicate to the firms how to utilize the product given their specific jurisdiction. While these things pose challenges to us, we have developed ways to address them head on and continue to move the needle of adoption within the legal industry as the opportunity only grows over time.
Tell us something people don’t already know about the company?
DepoDirect offers a completely virtual litigation solution, and our workforce is also totally virtual. We do get together once or twice per quarter to get in one room and throw ideas on a whiteboard, which is vitally important to catalyze innovation and maintain morale. I think there is a nice balance that can be found in every company between in person and remote working dynamics but DepoDirect is a virtual first company, which makes sense considering we offer a virtual solution!
To learn more you can visit the DepoDirect website: https://www.depodirect.com/
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