If you follow Cloud Court, you know we’ve written many times about Testimony Intelligence, our TI solution – Gibson – and how it delivers extraordinary advantages in large volume litigation. Today, I want to take a beat and illustrate how Gibson picks up where traditional eDiscovery tools leave off.
eDiscovery tools are indispensable in document-dense litigation matters. They serve as organized repositories of evidence and the tools they provide and the professionals that wield them bring order to documentary chaos. The key documents and evidence these tools help identify invariably set the stage for what comes next: testimony. After all, documents are important – no question. But at the end of the day, it's the human testimony interpreting and providing context to those documents and facts that really makes or breaks a case.
But why is Testimony Intelligence a conceptual leap forward, and how does it complement eDiscovery?
Reviewing deposition and trial testimony is, by any measure, time consuming. And yet today, almost every litigation team is doing with testimony what it used to do with document productions before the advent of modern eDiscovery tools, namely: Reviewing. Every. Single. Page.
Here at Cloud Court, we’re big fans of efficiency. As veterans of hundreds of litigation matters, some of them involving massive testimonial records, we’ve developed Gibson, a suite of Testimony Intelligence tools that not only give teams an edge in litigation, but also to help them claw back the most precious resource any litigation team has: time.
Gibson’s proprietary technologies extract and organize a massive amount of data hidden in transcripts. Its AI tools hover like a magnet over aggregated deposition data to deliver actionable analytics and to identify with precision all testimony on any topic in seconds. Essentially, Gibson does for testimony what modern eDiscovery tools do for documentary evidence.
No one has ever done this before, and so when we explain what we’re doing, people naturally have questions. A common one is, "Can't I just stick my transcripts into an eDiscovery tool?" The short answer is: Sure you can! But are you doing that today? The answer is invariably, “No.” When we ask why not, and people take a moment to think it though, their reaction is the same: because it’s not that useful.
Why? Because eDiscovery just treats witness transcripts as just another document, and that's not really helpful for extracting testimony intelligence from transcripts. Consider:
eDiscovery tools treat documentary content as text. They do not differentiate between what an attorney says and what a witness says. Gibson does.
eDiscovery tools do not employ attorney and witness taxonomies, allowing you to identify testimony on any topic offered by any class of witness (experts, 30(b)(6), fact, etc.), nor do they differentiate based on disposition (adverse, neutral, aligned). Gibson does.
eDiscovery does not give you a visual snapshot of the contents of a given deposition.
eDiscovery databases typically contain documents from a single case. Gibson can easily contain, compare, and contrast aggregate testimony data: data that was previously siloed across disparate attorneys, firms, matters, and time.
eDiscovery does not allow you to compare the testimony of two witnesses or transcripts (or more) of your own choosing, nor does it help with attorney or witness metrics or prediction. Gibson facilitates analysis of behavioral metrics and much more.
In sum, eDiscovery is a powerful and necessary tool, and the information it finds in a dense discovery record informs attorneys and witnesses in advance of depositions and trials. That said, eDiscovery tools evolved to help litigators manage, search and review documentary evidence, not testimony. Testimony is a fundamentally different animal, and one that requires purpose-built tools.
Gibson, Cloud Court’s Testimony Intelligence solution, is a natural complement to eDiscovery because it picks up exactly where eDiscovery ends. If you’re an efficiency-minded litigation professional and are interested in seeing more, contact us.