Cataphora - Transcripts

Transcripts

Verbal admissions and document authentication made through the deposition and trial processes regularly determine the outcome of a legal dispute. In spite of this, both transcript analysis and document analysis continue to be performed using outmoded applications that ultimately fail to acknowledge or address the fundamental challenges to searching within individual documents or across multiple document types.

Deposition, Trial, and Hearing transcripts themselves contain two fundamental types of challenges:

Oral testimony is fraught with incomplete, inconsistent, and incorrect statements, which can be caused by faulty memory, slips of the tongue, or intent to deceive
Transcription errors frequently compound errors and inconsistencies that are present in oral testimony

The above-mentioned fundamental challenges present numerous practical challenges for legal professionals. Examples of these practical challenges include:

Correlating transcripts with deposition exhibits and large volumes of complex electronically stored information (ESI) produced during document discovery, including identifying documents that confirm or dispute witness statements
Identifying and normalizing variants

For example, "Babcock-Wilcox", "Babcock & Wilcock", and "Babcocks" (Turning all "synonyms" into one unique reference)

Disambiguating names

Names (e.g., Patterson New Jersey and Patterson Supply Co.)
Roles (e.g., employer, manufacturer, supervisor)

Segmenting the dialogue form in order to concentrate on specific speakers

Examining attorney
Witness
Defending attorney
The Court

Identifying cooperative versus adversarial behavior

Cataphora's approach to e-discovery is based on bringing all electronic sources of evidence together. Obtaining true understanding of that evidence means processing, searching, and analyzing not just email and e-documents, but every piece of electronic evidence. This can include transcripts, either from depositions or from trial, which are a key document type in many matters. As mentioned above, dealing with these kinds of documents means having to use a separate tool, or treating transcripts just like any other document. By contrast, Cataphora offers a set of processing, search, and analysis tools specifically built for these kinds of transcripts.

Cataphora's transcript technologies take advantage of the fact that these are records of spoken dialog: We use our industry leading linguistic and analytical expertise to process them in a way that takes advantage of characteristics that are unique to spoken language. We start with specialized processing that is tailored to the dialog structure of these documents. We then make them searchable in a way that takes full advantage of that structure, such as enabling searches based on who is speaking. Because of the inherent uncertainty and variation in transcribing the spoken word, searching transcripts can be more difficult than searching standard electronic evidence. Our technology uses advanced techniques from speech recognition and clustering to enable search and analysis that enables customers to apply our entire search and analytics toolbox including, for example, our emotive tone detection.

By integrating deposition and trial transcripts into a holistic approach to electronic evidence, we can provide our customers with the tools they need to find the facts and answer the key questions, whether in transcripts, e-mails or patterns of behavior.