Karl Seelbach:
In a world where we have companies trying to solve self-driving cars and all types of AI, surely we can do better than having a stenographer type on a machine that was invented in 1877.
Chris Dreyer:
We live in a world where cars drive themselves. AI edits your emails and can plan your vacation. Voice-activated apps control the lighting, temperature, and music in your home. Our world is fast, connected, immediate. So why are depositions taken on machines created 150 years ago? Why does it take weeks to get your transcriptions?
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm your host, Chris Dreyer, Founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the legal marketing company the best firms hire when they want the rankings, trafficking cases other law firm marketing agencies can't deliver. My guest today is Karl Seelbach, Founder of Skribe.ai, the modern solution that makes you look less like Fred Flintstone and more like Tony Stark. It's a better way to take and analyze testimony that is 10 times the speed in half the cost. Skribe integrates with Zoom to capture video testimony for remote and hybrid depositions, helping legal professionals lower costs, increase efficiencies, and improve workflow. It represents a major shift from traditional methods promising to address longstanding challenges in the legal industry. Karl explains the problems with the current deposition process
Karl Seelbach:
For the last 150-plus years, law firms have by and large hired stenographers from a court reporting agency to type on a funny looking keyboard that was invented in 1877, a stenography machine, to take phonetic notes of what was said, and then after the deposition, scope those notes and translate them into readable text that you and I and the other attorneys can read. It's a slow system, it's expensive. The middleman puts a lot of extra cost into the equation. We have to wait weeks for a deposition transcript, and sometimes more. We spend a lot of time trying to chase down like, "Where's the transcript?" If you want it quicker, you got to pay rush fees. It almost feels like you're being held hostage.
One of the things that inspired me to found Skribe and start this company was with modern software I just thought, "There's got to be a better way to do this. We can solve this with software." And so, after COVID hit and we started doing more and more things online, including depositions, that opened up the opportunity really to come to athe market with a software alternative. It's a combination of humans and software, so I don't want your listeners to think, "Oh my gosh, how am I going to do a deposition with just an app?" There is more to it than that. Skribe staffs the events with a certified notary in the state where the case is pending.
That notary, excuse me, serves as a liaison for the event. They swear in the witness. They provide technical support, monitor the audio and the video. They take down unique spellings of words and names. They do a lot of the same things that old-fashioned court reporter would do, but we think they do it better, and for a much lower price.
Chris Dreyer:
How often do you get these, the human-only, the old-school version backing like, "What the hell does this even say?" Does that happen, or is it edited enough to where it's clear? I guess there's a lot of inconsistencies with the-
Karl Seelbach:
Old-fashioned shorthand court reporter transcripts are not perfect. We have all received transcripts back that have mistakes in them, that had either missing words or the wrong words, they're not flawless to begin with. Now, the approach that we take is it's a two-step process. On day one, after the deposition is complete, within about an hour to two you get a video-synced transcript that's been generated with software. So you can search it, you can read it, you can create ensure video clips from it just by highlighting the text, finish the deposition in the morning, and be reviewing it and chopping it up in the afternoon to get ready for the next thing on their plate.
The two-step process is, we take that transcript and over the next three to five days, it is professionally proofread by transcriptionists. And any errors in the software-generated transcript, whether it be a grammar, or a typo, or a spelling, all of those things are corrected. And it's legally formatted, and it is in our experience and our customer's experience, as accurate or better than a stenographer transcript. And we don't charge any extra for it to be delivered within five days. So you end up getting video-synced to a rough the first day in an app and a PDF, and then the final transcript within five days.
Chris Dreyer:
What is the difference in the time? So you don't get it in two weeks, how impactful can that be? Where does the real value come in? Obviously, the speed's amazing. You get to work immediate, but-
Karl Seelbach:
So, I think for us, the way we think about speed is, it's not just important in today's world, in today's law practice, it's a requirement. And the world moves fast, the faster that you can move on to the next task in the case, the next major item in the case, the quicker you can actually turn your cases. You can want to think about the cumulative effect across your entire docket. And we actually offer a pilot program if any of your listeners are interested. You're not tied in, there's no upfront cost. And we grab five attorneys from your firm, five staff members, and then at the end of that pilot we provide a report to show the time and the cost savings, as well as some of the features that they've gained from it. And so if you think about like, "Okay, usually I have to wait three to four weeks for my deposition, with Skribe I get it the same day." What can that do for you?
Well, I have cases pending right now in my law firm where the other side on the case is telling the Arbitrator, "We've got a hearing in three weeks. I don't know if I'll be able to take the deposition and get the transcript back to be able to craft a to the motion that's pending," I'm like, "Hey, there is a solution for this. We can use Skribe to get it the same day, and you'll have a final transcript within three to five days." So I think in a lot of cases it's not uncommon for sometimes cases to get backed up against a deadline. Whether that's a discovery deadline, whether that's a motion coming up, whether that's we're getting close to trial and we need to cram in a couple more depositions. So, the ability to get things really quickly really helps with that, and it opens up new opportunities that just don't exist doing it the old-fashioned way.
Chris Dreyer:
Excellent, I love that. The velocity, the less time on desk, I believe you mentioned Zoom. Yeah, this is a Zoom integration. Does it play with Microsoft Teams?
Karl Seelbach:
Yeah, it's a great question. We don't have anything with Teams right now. We're actually an official ISV partner with Zoom. So, Zoom has a dedicated team that works hand in hand with the Skribe team to use Skribe , your attorneys, and their clients don't have to learn any new software. It's just launching the Zoom app from a Scribe link. Video is normally the most powerful form of evidence and historically, it's been underutilized, and I think that Scribe is going to change that. And what I mean by that is, historically when we got a video deposition and a transcript, it would sit either in a file cabinet, or we'll call it a digital file cabinet, a practice management system, and it would be very difficult to actually create video clips.
A lot of attorneys have told us if they need to create video clips, they either outsource it or they have someone at their firm that does it, and it's a process, and they have to highlight the transcript, and then wait for whoever they're going to send it to create the clips. And when they get the clips back, their individual video files, Skribe fixes all of that. So that same-day delivery includes a web application, where the video is synced to the text, and you can create and share video with a URL. If you sent me a YouTube clip, or a TikTok, or whatever, it comes as a URL that I just tap it, and it opens up my browser, and it plays the video.
So, that's how Skribe works. You can actually just create video clips that you can share by URL, and our customers are putting those links, we'll call them, they're putting them in their demand letters, they're putting them in their briefs, their mediation position statements, so that the judges, and the arbitrators, and the mediators, and whoever they're trying to persuade can actually click the link and watch the testimony.
Chris Dreyer:
Super smart. You can see those facial inflections, hear the tonality differences, I think that's incredible. I guess there's a shortage of court reporters that seems to be growing.
Karl Seelbach:
You hit the nail on the head. There's a shortage of stenographers. And that is as reported by the NCRA, the National Court Reporting Association. The average age of stenographers is over 55, and more and more are retiring. The young people, by and large, are not clamoring to go to stenography school. And, the number of claims and litigated files are on the rise. So you've got a very classic supply and demand problem. And what it's caused is a spike in cost. So the average cost to hire a stenographer through a middleman court reporting agency has easily doubled just in the last five to 10 years. And so, depositions have gotten, they've just gotten too expensive, and one of the things that Skribe stands for is we don't think that cost should stand in the way of finding the truth. And depositions are often the best way to get to the truth. Get someone sworn in, take that testimony, get them on the record.
And so, in a world where we have companies trying to solve self-driving cars and all types of AI, surely we can do better than having a stenographer type on a machine that was invented in 1877. And so, we think we can drive the cost significantly down. Right now, we're about a 50% cost savings over a traditional court reporting company. My goal is to bring it down even more. As we grow as a company and we can apply economies of scale to it, I really want attorneys to be able to take as many depositions as they want without giving cost a second thought.
Chris Dreyer:
Alex Hormozi smiling over here on the Tech side. Decrease in the effort and sacrificed decrease in the price, increasing speed. Definitely on the value equation, you're hitting all the components. Another thing too, and forgive me, this may be a very ignorant question, I'm going to warn my audience here. I've seen the TV shows, the Suits and the different lawyer shows. It seems like they go in to do these depositions, and they've got an old-school video camera, and then they're clicking the Audio Record button, and they're like, "Oh, pause, let's stop and do you really want to say that?" Can you take some of that old material, the old video clips, the old audio? Is there something you could use Skribe? Could Skribe help transcribe that? Is there any use case there?
Karl Seelbach:
Oh yeah, absolutely. So there's two sides to what Skribe offers: SSkribe Live, which is for capturing depositions, recorded statements, examinations under oath. Anytime you need to capture live testimony with a focus on remote or hybrid participation. We also have Skribe Library, which is for uploading past audio and video files. So it could be a deposition that you're opposing counsel took. In fact, one of the things that we're seeing happen more and more,- because attorneys only control one half of the equation when it comes to scheduling depositions. If your opposing counsel is still using an expensive old-fashioned court reporting firm, you can just order an unsynced video of the deposition, assuming it was video, and upload it to Skribe Library. And for $99 per hour, like file duration, you can get it fully transcribed, video-synced, all those features I was talking about earlier are included. So we're starting to see more and more of that as well. And we have some really cool AI features coming out later this year that it's really going to bolster that offering and the live offering.
Chris Dreyer:
Karl Co-founded his own practice in 2015 focusing on personal injury defense for Fortune 500 companies. His experience on both sides of personal injury cases gives him unique insights into litigation strategies and the inefficiencies in traditional court reporting. Karl explains how his early exposure to law shaped his career.
Karl Seelbach:
I grew up in a small town in northeast Texas, and my dad worked in oil and gas. And as a side gig, he does safety expert witness work in personal entry cases. And finally one day he just handed me an interesting catastrophic personal entry case and said, "Hey, read this section of the deposition," and then I was like, "Wow, this is awesome. This is really interesting." In college, the only other thing I flirted with was accounting and I decided that was too boring, and so I just kept going full steam head toward law school. It's a little bit ironic, because I went to school to be a plaintiff personal injury attorney, that's what I thought I wanted to do. I even spent my first summer after law school at South Texas working at what was then Williams Bailey in Houston. But ended up going through on-campus recruiting, thought that the salaries looked very attractive as a young kid without any money, and ended up going the big firm route. And that steered me towards the path of doing defense work.
And so, launched my own firm after working at a very big firm for nine years, launched my own firm in 2015, and have grown that and have a lot of personal injury defense clients. And so, when we first started the firm, we only had one client and we needed work, we needed to feed our families. So, Trek Doyle is my law partner who I started the firm with, and so we would take pretty much anything that walked in the door. and we took quite a few plaintiff personal injury cases. And I'm so glad that we did that, not only because we had some success with it, we even had a jury verdict in the Western District of Texas in a civil rights personal injury case, where we won. Got a, I think it was a $1.4 million verdict that Judge Sam Sparks decided to remit down. That's how it goes sometimes.
But I learned a lot about the process and what it's like to be on that side of the V, so to speak. And so it really gave me a lot of respect for the attorneys that are on the plaintiff side of the cases. The one thing that I notice when I'm mentoring my team, coaching my team, and working on the cases as a partner is, I really do separate out when I'm evaluating a case, the cases where I feel like the plaintiff's attorney has really dug in, there's attention to detail, they're being fairly meticulous. I always say aggressive, but in a professional way. If you're aggressive and you're just being an asshole, I promise you it actually doesn't help you. It ends up pissing off my client, which makes it hard for me to get them to pay you money. Staying professional throughout the course of the case is, I think, extremely important and will actually... Having a good relationship with the other side, unless they're being complete asshole to you, will ultimately benefit you in the long run.
But yeah, I just see so many cases where I show up to a mediation. Had this happen six months ago in a case for one of my home improvement clients, retailer, and the plainchelor didn't know the case at all. Thought her client had had a surgery that had never happened, was demanding all sorts of future lost wages when her client was back to work full-time, it was just a mess. And so you begin to lose credibility if either you or you send associates to mediations or depositions if they're not prepared. And so I think, I realize some of those firms are high-volume, but paying attention to the cases and really digging in and rolling up your sleeves will benefit you in the long run.
Chris Dreyer:
We've seen this scenario with State Farm waiting until 30 days before it's supposed to go to trial before there's these offers, and these attorneys are accruing these big expert witness costs that are on the books for a lot longer period of time, so it's impacted cashflow and things like that. How does that play into... I guess this is the strategy of the the stall you got to play with the cards you're dealt on both sides?
Karl Seelbach:
That's hard to say if it's strategy. Maybe some, it's not at my firm. Maybe there are some lawyers who do it as a tactic. I actually think, and I'll give this caveat to your listeners. I don't work directly with a ton of insurance companies. We have a couple of insurance clients that we work with. Most of my client's defense relationships are actually with the companies themselves. So without naming them, think Fortune 500 companies that you eat there, you shop there, you get your personal services there. So, a lot of my relationships are with the company, their in-house counsel, or their in-house Risk Manager. Sometimes there's a TPA, Third Party Administrator involved.
I actually have a slightly different take based on my experience the last 17 years. I think the problem is primarily procrastination. I don't think it's necessarily that it's being done intentionally. And it's one of the reasons I'm such a big fan of early mediations, even if it's just a half day, even if it's by Zoom, is you really need to get... To have a meaningful settlement discussion, I think, in the vast majority of cases, unless it's just a tiny little pissant case, I think you need to get the decision makers at the table. And the virtual table's fine, 99% of cases. I try to get everybody there because it will force everyone, the defense attorney and the plaintiff's lawyer and their client, to seriously sit down and think, "How are we going to try to settle this case? What are the warts on this case?" And for the defense side, we typically have to report, if we're doing our job well, at least 30 days before the mediation.
So, the other advice I would give to your attorneys that are listening who do plaintiff's work is, if you want something to be considered seriously considered by the people who hold the purse strings, you need to get in to the defense lawyer at least 45 days before the mediation. Demand supporting records, expert report. Whatever ammunition you think you have, I promise you, it may feel like it's kind of clever to wait until mediation or the day before to send some multi-million dollar demand or some smoking gun if you have one, but it is shooting yourself in the foot. Because if all of a sudden I show up to a mediation and there's new information that's never been shared before, and not starting demand that's all of a sudden super high in comparison to what we're expecting, it's probably going to be a wasted half-day or full-day mediation, because I'm not going to be able to just wave a magic wand and get new authority on the spot most of the time.
Chris Dreyer:
Very valuable advice, I appreciate that. And hearing from the other side, and I think that's very helpful.
Karl Seelbach:
The other thing I would encourage the plaintiffs bar to do is, try to support your demand with some data. Whether it's jury verdicts, whether it's prior arbitration awards that you redact out the names of the parties for confidentiality reasons, it becomes a lot easier for me to explain to my clients why they started way up here if I have some data to show them. It doesn't mean that I necessarily agree with the data, because I can find a bunch to take-nothing verdicts probably, too. At least it gives me a barometer and it gives me something to talk about with my client, as well as medical expenses, or past loss wages or future that are actually calculated in a meaningful way with backup documentation, tax returns, whatever. The more data you give the opposing side, the easier it's going to be for that defense lawyer to go get you money.
Chris Dreyer:
There's an exercise, it's the worst case scenario, and then minimum acceptable. So you show the worst case scenario, "Here's the big numbers that could happen," as opposed to not giving any context or scale.
Karl Seelbach:
We talk about that all the time in our reports. We have, we call it a minimum settlement range, and then the likely verdict exposure. And sometimes those things overlap, usually they don't overlap. And so, we have, it's not a formula per se, but we are looking at, "Look, there's this much in past medicals, they're inflated, we think they're going to need at least Y, they'll negotiate those liens off. The plaintiff's lawyer is not going to settle the case for zero, and their client to make money too. So there's some math that goes into that where you can begin to get a barometer of what's the lowest amount that could settle the case. It doesn't necessarily mean the plaintiff side will take it, but that's one way to analyze it.
When you're talking about the exposure, though, that's so much more subjective. Because as soon as you start talking about non-economic damages, it's subject to interpretation without some examples of what the arbitrators awarded in the past, or the judge, or the juries in that venue have done in the past. So, I really love analyzing the cases when they come in, and when I get that type of data, it does help me do it.
Chris Dreyer:
Thanks so much to Karl for his insights. Let's hit the takeaways. Decreased effort and increase velocity. It's as easy as finding the right vendors. Look for tools to automate repetitive tasks. Improve document management, or enhance client communication.
Karl Seelbach:
There's got to be a better way to do this. We can solve this with software.
Chris Dreyer:
Build relationships with the other side. Opposing counsel are humans too. Understanding the processes and constraints of the opposing side can lead to more productive negotiations. Being aggressive but professional can actually help you get better outcomes for your clients.
Karl Seelbach:
Staying professional throughout the course of the case is, I think, extremely important.
Chris Dreyer:
Video has power, use it. Video depositions are a powerful form of evidence. If you're one of the first to adopt this tech, you get the edge.
Karl Seelbach:
In my experience as a litigator, video is normally the most powerful form of evidence, and historically, it's been underutilized.
Chris Dreyer:
Huge thank you to Karl for coming on the show. For more information, check out the show notes. Before you go, do me a solid smash and smash that Follow button to subscribe. I'd sincerely appreciate it, and you won't want to miss out on the next episode of Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, Founder and CEO of Rankings.io. All right everybody, thanks for hanging out, see you next time, I'm out.
