Cataphora - Depositions and Transcripts

Depositions and Transcripts

Verbal admissions and document authentication made through the deposition and trial processes regularly determine the outcome of a legal dispute. While examining attorneys attempt to authenticate the documents they present and to obtain further evidence through verbal admissions, defending attorneys seek to limit the number of documents their witnesses authenticate and to avoid potentially harmful admissions.

In spite of the explosion of discoverable data produced in e‑discovery in recent years, most attorneys continue to prepare for deposition and trial with the aid of applications that were originally designed in the 1990s, i.e., in an era of purely paper or imaged paper productions. These systems have not changed much since then, and they ultimately fail to provide a solution for searching across both transcripts and massive volumes of unstructured data.

Because forming a cohesive interpretation of all evidence means analyzing email, electronic documents, and transcripts, Cataphora's approach to e‑discovery and evidence analysis is based upon bringing all sources of potential evidence together.

Deposition, Trial, and Hearing transcripts themselves contain two fundamental types of flaws to which low-tech solutions do not respond well:

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 mistakes and inconsistencies that are present in oral testimony.

Such inherent challenges present numerous practical obstacles for legal professionals, including:

Correlating transcripts with deposition exhibits and large volumes of complex electronically stored information (ESI) produced during document discovery, including identifying documents that confirm or contradict witness statements.
Identifying and normalizing variants: For example, "Babcock-Wilcox", "Babcock & Wilcock", and "Babcocks" (Turning all "synonyms" into one unique reference).
Disambiguating names (e.g., determining whether Patterson means Patterson New Jersey or Patterson Supply Co.) and roles (e.g., employer, manufacturer, supervisor).
Segmenting the dialogue form in order to concentrate on specific speakers such as examining attorney, witness, or defending attorney.
Identifying cooperative versus adversarial behavior.

Cataphora's transcript technologies take advantage of the spoken-dialog nature of transcripts, and indeed of other document types including instant messaging. We use our linguistic and analytical expertise to process these in ways that takes advantage of characteristics that are unique to spoken language. We begin with specialized processing that is tailored to the dialog structure of these documents. We then make them searchable in a manner 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, it is not unusual for searching transcripts to be more difficult than searching standard electronic documents. Our technology uses advanced techniques from speech recognition and clustering to enable search and analysis that enable 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, emails, electronic documents, or patterns of behavior.