7 ms·

Please take a moment to notice how horribly unfriendly a deposition transcript is. Thousands of these documents are produced every day, in a proprietary format

by dbot 9y ago

Please take a moment to notice how horribly unfriendly a deposition transcript is. Thousands of these documents are produced every day, in a proprietary format that is antiquated and near impossible to work with. The PDF is unusable given the line numbers, headers, footers, etc. The simple act of copying and pasting - for example, writing a brief, a blog, etc. - is painful. I know developers could create an amazing solution, but the legal community hasn't asked yet, unfortunately.

sanderjd 9y ago
What would the business model be? Or to ask the same thing a different way: who is wasting money with the status quo?
- staticautomatic 9y ago
  Litigants are wasting money with the status quo. Not because of the format, per se, but because of a lack of reasonably good NLP-based search and summary tools. Much money is spent paying people to review transcripts by hand, when the bulk of the heavy lifting could be done with software. I know the market well enough to manage the product development and sell it but lack the NLP skills to build it. Anyone interested in talking about it feel free to hit me up.
  - dsl 9y ago
    You don't understand how large court cases work. You're obligated to provide everything to the other side, doing so in a format that requires them to have a small army of people to read every line instead of being able to do a simple text search is exactly the point. There are even companies that specialize in taking large amounts of electronic data (email is a good example) and printing every single page so that opposing council ends up with enough paper to fill a room. Edit: I also have no idea how you'd sell a product that considerably reduces billable hours.
    - rayiner 9y ago
      You could sell it to plaintiffs lawyers and the increasing universe of firms that do fixed fee or capped arrangements. Plaintiffs lawyers have huge incentives to minimize per-case investment, but they don't use much legal tech. Which is pretty great evidence of how well it works. Also you can obviously search PDFs. People read every line of deposition transcripts because they're looking for admissions (places where the deponent slips up and reveals useful information).
    - Powerofmene 9y ago
      Exactly. Large cases often produce box after box of documents and frequently supply documents not related that were not requested. It is a game of burying them in paper because if there is a smoking gun (document that is critical to their side) they may not see it or when they find it, they have paid tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees for the attorneys to find it in the many boxes of documents. Often times one litigant can starve the less funded litigant out. Successfully starving a litigant out results in favorable settlements for the offending litigant.
    - sanderjd 9y ago
      > I also have no idea how you'd sell a product that considerably reduces billable hours. I think you'd want to sell it to the folks who are paying for those billable hours.
      - pgodzin 9y ago
        They're not the ones using it though
      - Angostura 9y ago
        You sell it to firms who would like to compete on price while showing clients that they do so due to their use of cutting-edge technology
      - ballenf 9y ago
        The nature means that you'd only reduce your adversary's costs, not your own.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - wglb 9y ago
    There is a significant industry based on e-discovery that never sees, or requires actual paper. Much more likely is an inhalation of the contents of a custodian's hard drive, or the ingestion of a full PST file (MS Outlook email form) into a system, or downloading email inboxes from Office 365 or Gmail. Once ingested, the documents are searched for words or phrases, tagged as relevant, privileged, or non-responsive. See the FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) for discussion of electronic documents in discovery. Not only are courts expecting parties in lawsuits to supply documents in electronic form, there are are now rules in some courts tailored to TAR, or technical assisted review, which often means LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis). So the idea of dropping tons of paper on the hapless opponent is an idea that is practically of antiquity, dating back to the MCI/ATT lawsuits. Large lawsuits simply don't work that way anymore.
drtillberg 9y ago
But it would be an act of faith and patience to redact and docket-file high-tech versions-- that is seamless for the low-tech PDF, which was pen-signed and docket-friendly. The PDF was even pulled from the docket and re-posted on scribd, with searchable text intact. There also would be a time-synchronized video and an e-transcript, yes, in proprietary non-open standards.
- noloblo 9y ago
  is there a link to the video?
bonyt 9y ago
A lot of the time they're also provided in other formats, including plain text. It's still got pages and line numbers (they're essential for citing to), and it uses an ASCII form feed for new page, but it's better to work with. You can actually pipe it to port 9100 on a common network printer and it'll come out about right. There is also software to work with these transcripts.
noloblo 9y ago
why is so many pages completely redacted? how do you read the unreadcted original
- Tomte 9y ago
  Being on the legal teams for plaintiff or defendant would be a start.
- jccooper 9y ago
  Unless they do something stupid like just draw block boxes over the real text, you don't. That's the purpose of redaction.
rodgerd 9y ago
Given developers are responsible for CSV, PDF (a complex programming language that renders documents as a side effect), XML, and JSON, I see no particular reason to share your optimism.
model_m_warrior 9y ago
For all the good press PDF is still a bitch to work with when trying make end to end workflows (particularly if you want to avoid opening acrobat or something).
model_m_warrior 9y ago
For all the good press PDF is still a bitch to work with when trying make end to end workflows (particularly if you want to avoid opening acrobat or something).
model_m_warrior 9y ago
For all the good press PDF is still a bitch to work with when trying make end to end workflows (particularly if you want to avoid opening acrobat or something).
rjeli 9y ago
There are a number of legal tech companies fighting to break into legal document management (ediscovery). I worked for Everlaw (a16z) and there's also Disco and Logikcull, among others
- wglb 9y ago
  Let's not forget Relativity :)
rayiner 9y ago
There is nothing antiquated about PDF. It's an incredibly widely supported standardized format that can cleanly handle everything from a Word document to a scan of a prisoner's hand written pro se brief to a printed document that someone has scribbled on. It preserves formatting information, which is incredibly important because court filings are regularly printed on paper. Not because there is no electronic workflow (the entire workflow is electronic at least in federal court), but because it's a pain in the ass to read and annotate things on a computer versus putting tabs in a binder. As to the line/page format, it's used because sentences or even words within depositions are quoted in briefs with citations to exactly where they appear. And frankly, if your software can't even grok a simple 2D format it's probably not intelligent enough to do any useful processing of the document. I'm always on the lookout for good legal technology. But legal technology purveyors are like those people who think programming IDEs should all be visual environments where you program by dragging and dropping connectors between blocks. It's like, no.
- keteb 9y ago
  Am I missing the part where PDFs are said to be bad? I read it as the structure of the content within the pdf is what is problematic > The PDF is unusable given the line numbers, headers, footers, etc
- ericd 9y ago
  It's the structure of the document that's the problem, not the file format. Copying and pasting out of it is painful.
- Angostura 9y ago
  I think you misunderstand the original comment. It isn't criticising the PDF format. It is crticising the format of the PDF
diN0bot 9y ago
not specific to depositions, but a piece that might help: api for pdf's https://www.pdfotter.com/ https://www.pdfotter.com/
justonepost 9y ago
No freaking kidding. It's 2017, where's the json..
vintageseltzer 9y ago
The goal of law firms is to maximize billable hours and make it difficult for non-lawyers to conduct legal work. Working efficiently is not the goal at all.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wglb 9y ago
This is a particular file format used for legal transcripts rendered as a PDF. The underlying format is not all that difficult to work with. Good legal software needs to be able to deal with hundreds of different file formats, from Lotus Notes to the oldest MS Word format or early forms of PowerPoint. The transcript format is a piece of cake relative to others.
wglb 9y ago
This is a particular file format used for legal transcripts rendered as a PDF. The underlying format is not all that difficult to work with. Good legal software needs to be able to deal with hundreds of different file formats, from Lotus Notes to the oldest MS Word format or early forms of PowerPoint. The transcript format is a piece of cake relative to others.

by dbot 9y ago

sanderjd 9y ago

What would the business model be? Or to ask the same thing a different way: who is wasting money with the status quo?

staticautomatic 9y ago
Litigants are wasting money with the status quo. Not because of the format, per se, but because of a lack of reasonably good NLP-based search and summary tools. Much money is spent paying people to review transcripts by hand, when the bulk of the heavy lifting could be done with software. I know the market well enough to manage the product development and sell it but lack the NLP skills to build it. Anyone interested in talking about it feel free to hit me up.
- dsl 9y ago
  You don't understand how large court cases work. You're obligated to provide everything to the other side, doing so in a format that requires them to have a small army of people to read every line instead of being able to do a simple text search is exactly the point. There are even companies that specialize in taking large amounts of electronic data (email is a good example) and printing every single page so that opposing council ends up with enough paper to fill a room. Edit: I also have no idea how you'd sell a product that considerably reduces billable hours.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    You could sell it to plaintiffs lawyers and the increasing universe of firms that do fixed fee or capped arrangements. Plaintiffs lawyers have huge incentives to minimize per-case investment, but they don't use much legal tech. Which is pretty great evidence of how well it works. Also you can obviously search PDFs. People read every line of deposition transcripts because they're looking for admissions (places where the deponent slips up and reveals useful information).
  - Powerofmene 9y ago
    Exactly. Large cases often produce box after box of documents and frequently supply documents not related that were not requested. It is a game of burying them in paper because if there is a smoking gun (document that is critical to their side) they may not see it or when they find it, they have paid tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees for the attorneys to find it in the many boxes of documents. Often times one litigant can starve the less funded litigant out. Successfully starving a litigant out results in favorable settlements for the offending litigant.
  - sanderjd 9y ago
    > I also have no idea how you'd sell a product that considerably reduces billable hours. I think you'd want to sell it to the folks who are paying for those billable hours.
    - pgodzin 9y ago
      They're not the ones using it though
    - Angostura 9y ago
      You sell it to firms who would like to compete on price while showing clients that they do so due to their use of cutting-edge technology
    - ballenf 9y ago
      The nature means that you'd only reduce your adversary's costs, not your own.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- wglb 9y ago
  There is a significant industry based on e-discovery that never sees, or requires actual paper. Much more likely is an inhalation of the contents of a custodian's hard drive, or the ingestion of a full PST file (MS Outlook email form) into a system, or downloading email inboxes from Office 365 or Gmail. Once ingested, the documents are searched for words or phrases, tagged as relevant, privileged, or non-responsive. See the FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) for discussion of electronic documents in discovery. Not only are courts expecting parties in lawsuits to supply documents in electronic form, there are are now rules in some courts tailored to TAR, or technical assisted review, which often means LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis). So the idea of dropping tons of paper on the hapless opponent is an idea that is practically of antiquity, dating back to the MCI/ATT lawsuits. Large lawsuits simply don't work that way anymore.

drtillberg 9y ago

But it would be an act of faith and patience to redact and docket-file high-tech versions-- that is seamless for the low-tech PDF, which was pen-signed and docket-friendly. The PDF was even pulled from the docket and re-posted on scribd, with searchable text intact. There also would be a time-synchronized video and an e-transcript, yes, in proprietary non-open standards.

noloblo 9y ago
is there a link to the video?

bonyt 9y ago

A lot of the time they're also provided in other formats, including plain text. It's still got pages and line numbers (they're essential for citing to), and it uses an ASCII form feed for new page, but it's better to work with. You can actually pipe it to port 9100 on a common network printer and it'll come out about right. There is also software to work with these transcripts.

noloblo 9y ago

why is so many pages completely redacted? how do you read the unreadcted original

Tomte 9y ago
Being on the legal teams for plaintiff or defendant would be a start.
jccooper 9y ago
Unless they do something stupid like just draw block boxes over the real text, you don't. That's the purpose of redaction.

rodgerd 9y ago

Given developers are responsible for CSV, PDF (a complex programming language that renders documents as a side effect), XML, and JSON, I see no particular reason to share your optimism.

model_m_warrior 9y ago

For all the good press PDF is still a bitch to work with when trying make end to end workflows (particularly if you want to avoid opening acrobat or something).

model_m_warrior 9y ago

For all the good press PDF is still a bitch to work with when trying make end to end workflows (particularly if you want to avoid opening acrobat or something).

model_m_warrior 9y ago

For all the good press PDF is still a bitch to work with when trying make end to end workflows (particularly if you want to avoid opening acrobat or something).

rjeli 9y ago

There are a number of legal tech companies fighting to break into legal document management (ediscovery). I worked for Everlaw (a16z) and there's also Disco and Logikcull, among others

wglb 9y ago
Let's not forget Relativity :)

rayiner 9y ago

There is nothing antiquated about PDF. It's an incredibly widely supported standardized format that can cleanly handle everything from a Word document to a scan of a prisoner's hand written pro se brief to a printed document that someone has scribbled on. It preserves formatting information, which is incredibly important because court filings are regularly printed on paper. Not because there is no electronic workflow (the entire workflow is electronic at least in federal court), but because it's a pain in the ass to read and annotate things on a computer versus putting tabs in a binder. As to the line/page format, it's used because sentences or even words within depositions are quoted in briefs with citations to exactly where they appear. And frankly, if your software can't even grok a simple 2D format it's probably not intelligent enough to do any useful processing of the document. I'm always on the lookout for good legal technology. But legal technology purveyors are like those people who think programming IDEs should all be visual environments where you program by dragging and dropping connectors between blocks. It's like, no.

keteb 9y ago
Am I missing the part where PDFs are said to be bad? I read it as the structure of the content within the pdf is what is problematic > The PDF is unusable given the line numbers, headers, footers, etc
ericd 9y ago
It's the structure of the document that's the problem, not the file format. Copying and pasting out of it is painful.
Angostura 9y ago
I think you misunderstand the original comment. It isn't criticising the PDF format. It is crticising the format of the PDF

diN0bot 9y ago

not specific to depositions, but a piece that might help: api for pdf's https://www.pdfotter.com/ https://www.pdfotter.com/

justonepost 9y ago

No freaking kidding. It's 2017, where's the json..

vintageseltzer 9y ago

The goal of law firms is to maximize billable hours and make it difficult for non-lawyers to conduct legal work. Working efficiently is not the goal at all.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

wglb 9y ago

This is a particular file format used for legal transcripts rendered as a PDF. The underlying format is not all that difficult to work with. Good legal software needs to be able to deal with hundreds of different file formats, from Lotus Notes to the oldest MS Word format or early forms of PowerPoint. The transcript format is a piece of cake relative to others.

wglb 9y ago