Today on the podcast Tyson sat down with MaxLawCon 2021 co-title sponsor Readback Active Reporting.
The market insights are almost obvious, but the solutions have been evasive. The shortage of court reporters has been well known for many years. The shortage was acute prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s getting worse. Reporters are in an enviable position of enjoying strong demand for their services, but that doesn’t provide an incentive to innovate.
Additionally, attorneys and clients have been growing increasingly frustrated with escalating costs – especially the add-ons. There are fees per page, fees for copies, fees for rough copies, fees for rushing, fees for appearing, and on and on.
Finally, elite litigators were gladly paying much higher fees for real-time reporting in which they could see the transcript as the steno operator worked. We learned that they were getting an advantage, and we wanted to figure out how to deliver a similarly powerful experience to everyone. Tune in to this episode to learn how they’ve done just that.
Watch the interview here.
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Transcript: Active Reporting w/ Nick Mahurin and Dean Whalen
Speaker 1
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.
Tyson Mutrux
All right, welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Tyson nutrix. Jim is on assignment. And today we have a couple guys from infor where they’re going to tell us about their deposition reporting service called read back. reback was actually one of the title sponsors of Max law con 2021. First we have Nick Harun. He’s the founder and CEO Dean Whelan is an attorney and former litigator who has been with the company for many years and is in for Where’s chief legal officer. Nick, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Nick Mahurin
monetize some thanks for having us. Of course, you know, I was born and raised in Indiana, a flyover state my favorite hobby, by the way is flying. And I noticed on Twitter that you started that journey. So congrats on that. I’m a lifelong information technology entrepreneur. And I was educated as an engineer, and I’ve loved applying it solutions to business problems for over 30 years now. And four is definitely my most ambitious endeavor of my career. It’s approaching 20 years old and a workforce of nearly 300 people. At infor we like to say that we enable the performance of busy professionals and highly regulated industries, such as healthcare insurance. And of course, the law. As you know, those fields have highly demanding documentation burdens, and we pull time and costs and other burdens out of the process with advanced technologies, including workflow automation, machine learning, and with four patents and some good success we made about 15 acquisitions and our second decade today, we’re saying goodbye to stand out to create an entirely new category of reporting for depositions. And we’re calling it active reporting. It’s a game changer. And we’re delighted to be here and tell you about it.
Tyson Mutrux
Excellent. And we’ll get into some of the details that in a little bit, Dean, tell us
Dean Whalen
about yourself. Thanks, Tyson. Born and raised in Massachusetts, admitted to the bar and Massachusetts in 1985. I was an assistant district attorney for a few years and then I went into the private practice of law in a small town. So I was a heavy litigator for over 20 years. And then I joined a company that was a transcription company. That was an a core reporting company that was acquired by NYX. Company. And here we are.
Tyson Mutrux
Excellent. So Nick time about reback. So what is it that you all do? Because we’ve not talked about that yet? Like, what do you do? I know at the conference, you talked about what it is yet a big reveal. But what is it that you will do for attorneys?
Nick Mahurin
Well, you know, we think of court recording or stenographic reporting Tyson as producing the verbatim official record of a deposition. And, you know, one of my favorite authors on the subject, Jim Garrity likes to say, Depositions are the new trial. And so we know just how important Depositions are in current and going forward civil litigation. So what we do is sort of what court reporting firms have always done, or at least for the last 100 years or so, and provide that verbatim record. It’s the how we do it. That is so much different. In Dane, would you pick up on that being the attorney to tell Tyson about the
Dean Whalen
I think what we really have to do is define what the problem was. And so with stenographic reporting, many litigators will tell you that there’s high per page costs, high add on fees, long turnaround times. And so with active reporting, we’re kind of eliminating all of those problems. What we’re going to give you with this is a certified transcript in one business day, a rough draft an hour after the proceeding is done. And we’re going to give you a live stream of the actual text during the proceedings that’s going to allow you to collaborate with experts collaborate with CO counsel, we believe that this is going to revolutionize the deposition industry because of the speed. And like Nick says, we’re giving a verbatim transcript, which is what traditional Stendal does. And in my mind as an attorney, a verbatim transcript is a verbatim transcript, however you get it.
Tyson Mutrux
So this question is for you, Dana, because you’ve been on both sides of it. Right? You’ve been taking depositions, you’ve had your clients depositions take, and you know, you’ve been on the court reporting side of things. When you first heard about this, whenever Nick’s company acquired your court reporter company that you’re working for, like what were your initial thoughts?
Dean Whalen
So I joined a transcription company in 2005. And one of my favorite things I used to say is that they’ll never get speech recognition to the point where you can have the engine understand two people at the same time. Well, Nick, to his credit, has four patents in a speech recognition engine that can do that. That gets active reporting started. And then we use the humans transcriptionist to actually produce the transcript. So my first reaction was, it’s here, right? The technology to do this has arrived. And Nick urine is the guy to bring it. So this is how we can create a new category. I was skeptical in 2005. And now it’s 2021. And here we are. I will
Tyson Mutrux
tell you, Nick, I’ve talked to other attorneys about this. And they are skeptical, right? They’re like, what does he have patents for? Like, yeah, he’s got patents for like, Listen, man, I’m gonna let you answer, Nick, because I believe in you. I believe. I know that there’s attorneys out there doubt. Because they said, Well, why don’t I just put otter up? There they go, like, why don’t I do something like that? So?
Nick Mahurin
Yeah, sure, of course, that’s why we’re excited about it. Because we’re doing something meaningful. If you don’t have any doubters, you probably weren’t doing something revolutionary. You were trying probably just polishing something that was already on the shelf. So I’m gonna talk to you about a couple of insights that came together to make this possible Tyson. First, you know, there’s clearly a shortage of steno operators. And so we’ve struggled to cover jobs for clients for years now, it’s gotten worse and so forth during the pandemic. And you know, I’m kind of an outsider, right, because I’ve been working in the space of AI, machine learning, speech recognition and documentation for decades. But I’m a little bit newer to court reporting. And I was really stunned to see just how slow and I would argue in effective, some of our services and court reporting were because they were just antiquated to match what the industry expected. So what I was finding is, I was looking at this. And the Insight was, well, it takes us two weeks, a lot of time to get a transcript to a taping attorney. Why does it take that long? Well, first of all, it’s because there’s so much work needs to be done, the steno was not effective enough to get an accurate enough record. So it takes this steno operator of many, many hours outside the deposition room, just to clean up the draft, and so forth. And so that led me to think Well, wait a second, we’ve got to pay for that labor anyway, my healthcare customers, insurance customers, they expect stuff back in hours or a day, at the most, not weeks. They’d never tolerate that. And so I thought, why couldn’t we just stack multiple transcribers up and provide it during the proceeding. And in fact, I found that our premium customers, the ones with really deep pockets that cared a lot more about the quality and the experience, they got to how much it cost, they would order real time reporting for us. And we can’t provide it a lot, because so few central operators could even do it. But I was kind of like thinking, well, the technologies that we have available, along with a shift in the business model, where we stack people up during the deposition, and we empower them with AI that we already have that required, you know, minimal adaptation to get this done, could allow us to provide that real time experience to all litigators, not ones that have 20 or $30,000, to spend in a week on a series of depositions. But ones that only have, you know, the conventional amount to spend. And I thought, if we could make that available to to everybody, that would be really cool. And to Dean’s credit, he helped me understand things like access to justice, and the pace of justice, and so forth, that really resonate in the legal community to see how this would really help everybody benefit. So the tech insight was that we could set all these people up to edit the document simultaneously. So we could provide the equivalent of real time recording. And then when we have a draft, that’s really good, there’s no reason that we can’t provide a rough within an hour. And when I say that, we haven’t talked about rates yet. But we’re going to use, you know, simple low flat rates. And so we’re not going to nickel and dime, if you’re not accustomed to ordering the rough, because you don’t want to pay extra for it. But it would help a little you can have it anyway. And we’re not going to charge extra to get you the like an expedite fee to get you this certified transcript in a day, that’s just going to be your standard operating loan. So our best work all the time,
Dean Whalen
Tyson if I could jump in on the on the Access to Justice piece really critical. I’d like to underscore that the cost to have a live feed in front of you as an attorney, and to get a rough draft. And then a certified transcript in one day is exorbitant. And why shouldn’t every litigator right, regardless of their clients pocketbook, have the ability at standard rates to get a premium service. And Nick always likes to say in everything we do, and we work in the healthcare industry, the insurance industry, we work with lawyers all over the place. He likes to say we, as a company, enable professionals to operate at the top of their game with all of these efficiencies. So to Nick’s credit, we’ve done a tremendous job at implementing something that I think makes sense is going to revolutionize the industry. And I think that you know, after the max law conference, which by the way, Tyson, the max law conference, that was unbelievable. It was awesome. After that conference, we had so much engagement. We have conversations going in 16 Different states right now with just Yeah, regular folks that that are litigators that are saying and at first, they’ve kind of looking out of the corner of their eyes saying what is this tell me about this and that and they’re going oh, one day? Yes. Let me try this. So thank you. You But
Tyson Mutrux
I’m glad you liked it. It was it’s a great group. But let me ask you something, because I’ve had conversations with the court reporters about this. And they’re excited because all that backend work, right? They’ve got all that frickin backend work that after the deposition that they don’t have to worry about, right? Like all that kind of goes away for the court reporter right, because most of it is done for them. They’re just going in there fine tuning making sure it’s all accurate. Am I understanding that correctly?
Nick Mahurin
That’s right, Tyson. So the court reporter still has an immense amount of responsibility to ensure that the proceeding is conducted fairly, that everything is captured, there’s no one audibles. And that the transcript gets built properly. But instead of working mad lessly, to punch the keys to try to get 80% of the record, that they’ll go fix with a digital recording over the coming couple of weeks, they can literally just monitor the construction of the document, so that they’re essentially proofing it in real time, you know, why what’s happening. So instead of, you know, working against deadlines, and being up until midnight, or 2am, the day before something’s due or something, they’ve gotten it off their plate, they can ship that rough off, you know, an hour later and, and sign off and certify a day later. Because like you said, the works getting done. And a really important thing is when we switched to primarily virtual proceedings during the pandemic, we found that lawyers had a love hate relationship with the switch. I think it went way better than most litigators thought it would go. But the number one complaint we heard from them was I’m trying to take a deposition here. I don’t want to fumble with technology, including showing exhibits, I worry a little bit that I’ll share the wrong screen or the you know, I’m on my game, I’m trying to prosecute this line of questioning and the witness is saying no, I don’t see what you’re talking about. They don’t really want that responsibility. And so when we free up the reporter to be what we’re now calling a guardian of the record, we can allow her or him to serve and actually not only mark exhibits, but share them and so forth, really taking away one of the primary objections that lawyers have shared with us about doing virtual
Tyson Mutrux
proceedings, and you have any pushback when it comes to just like the legality of it. I mean, everything from what I can tell seems pretty kosher. But have you had any pushback that yeah,
Nick Mahurin
so I’m not a lawyer. So I’m going to turn it over to Dean. But we all know that the circumstances of each jurisdiction have to be taken into consideration and lawyers need to make those decisions. But and that’s one of the reasons we have a chief legal officer. And I bet nobody has studied this more closely than Dean over the last six to nine months. But, you know, we’re going to continue to help people understand to inform and influence rule makers and provided information to help customers reach good conclusions. And, you know, Dane, you can talk rules. Yeah,
Dean Whalen
so reback complies with the rules of civil procedure. And one of the things that we have to look at obviously, is rule 30 in each jurisdiction, and rule 30 has its own number and each state and the federal rule 30 and 29. So when you look at those rules, right, the attorney can give in his notice that the deposition is going to be conducted, and that there’s going to be an audio capture of the deposition, and we’re going to provide the audio. So that’s first the official record you can use is the audio perfectly compliant with both federal and state rules, most state rules, there are some archaic rules out there that need to be shifted, and we’re working on that. And then we’re going to also supply the certified transcript of that. And there might be some purists out there that say, well, this isn’t done by stenographic means because some of the rules will put stenographic means but rule 29 allows for attorneys to stipulate to alternative means and Jim Garrity that Nick pointed to he’s the author of the book 10,000 depositions later in talking about doing depositions by alternative means he talks about the ability to stipulate. So, you know, it’s legal in most states, as far as the rules and in the states where it’s ambiguous. I wonder what an attorney is going to be greeted at, if he goes into federal court or state court and objects based on it being non stenographic means if it’s a verbatim transcript, and you have the audio to verify it, so I’m just gonna
Nick Mahurin
mention that, again. I’m not an attorney like you guys are, but Dean pointed to some case law to me where somebody did object and for a different service, not for hours. And the judge said, Well, if there’s an audio recording, it’s asked and answered, like, doesn’t matter how and when it was transcribed and stuff. And Tyson, I want to drive that point home because we’ve been talking about, you know, 35 in a day, rather than an hour and so forth. But one of the things that we decided to do one of the sacred cows we decided to tip over is the audio recording. As you may know, there’s a fair amount of case law out there that says that certified court reporters, whatever they put in that certified transcript is the record of what happened, even if lawyers don’t agree with it. And generally speaking, courts have held designers granted, that the audio recordings that those recorders have are protected under work product rules. So if you’re an attorney and you say, hey, there is an audio recording, I don’t agree that that’s what my client said, or that’s what the witness said, can we have the audio recorded? The courts have said, No, we’re just going to make it available, we figure what could be wrong with transparency on something so important. So the on the record recording is going to be delivered with the certified transcript, and just another sacred cow down.
Tyson Mutrux
So tell me this is there going to be a court reporter there as well.
Nick Mahurin
So we’re bifurcating essentially, or separating the functions of the court reporter Tyson as you conventionally thought of it, there will be a person. And just so we’re clear, and not mislabeling, we’re going to call that person a guardian of the record that will sort of officiate the proceeding, just like a court reporter does, and be responsible for the certification, swearing are both the things that you’re used to. The difference is that person will not be burdened by pounding the keyboard, and will be available to provide technical support, sharing of exhibits and so forth. Then we have this team that I’ve talked about, we call it the mist or the multi intelligence service team. So imagine for people that are not present in the proceeding, one of them is listening to the proceeding in real time typing editing the AI output, a second one is listening on a 10 second delay, so that they can correct any errors left behind by the first one, the third, another 10, second delay, and so forth. So that’s how in less than a minute, you have what we call real time, and your time would be a fraction of a second. So your time is a coined a phrase to mean fraction of a minute, accurate, verbatim transcript.
Tyson Mutrux
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Tyson Mutrux
That’s pretty incredible. I mean, there’s a lot more going into that. And I think most people think that’s actually a really, really cool thing. And what interests me is actually probably something that Nick, you might not think about, it’s what interests me is using this for my clients depositions where someone else is opposing it. And I would actually want to bring you all in because I would like to see what it says what the transcript says, from my clients, because I would like did my client really say that? And so I would like to see from that person.
Nick Mahurin
Yes, interesting. We’ve interviewed a number of our clients that were relying on real time, and again, paying those big bucks for that to be done by stenographic means, and I just ate up understanding how and why they saw value in that. And, you know, again, I won’t pretend to be a lawyer even to play one on a podcast. But it’s fascinating, right? If you think about other fields, think about an NFL quarterback, or a news anchor, or these people who, you know, go into a performance where the outcome is really important. In other fields, they almost always have a system that’s off camera, whether it’s the quarterback with the speaker in the air from the box that had a different perspective, or the offensive line coach or the news anchor that appears to be doing everything on their own, but they have a producer that’s helping them out, and so forth. And everybody will use this different, I suppose based on what they want to do. But we think taking a deposition or even defending a witness or representative witness can become a team sport, you could do some fact checking on the fly, you can, you know, rely on a co counsel that has a little different perspective, or an expert that says, Well wait a second, they just got away with saying XYZ you need to drill down into this. And the way we’ll do that is that on the screen, we have what we call the rough viewer that any attorney using Rebbeck will be able to see and will have annotations off to the right. And each party will have separate annotations. So if you had someone listening in from back at your office that was doing fact checking or a co counsel and another firm, they could highlight a little text and say, we’d really like you to get some clarification on this or this technically isn’t true. Try to get him to go further here. And you can just see that while you’re deposing or we’re representing the witness and interact. So it’s pretty cool.
Dean Whalen
And Tyson, you know, you indicated that you’d like to use it potentially to see what your clients saying. What I’m surprised at and speaking with litigators is the number of attorneys that have never been exposed to real time. So think about the shift from waiting to where For three weeks from your deposition to getting it in one day, the ability to move that file. Right. And sometimes we as litigators, stack depositions, right, we might want to do three in a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, it’s on the same case, being able to use that transcript from deposition one, especially if the stalking is important, and the questioning might change based on the answers, having the ability to review that during your deposition summaries, moving the files, we think that by speeding up the process, instead of the lawyer taking his file and putting it in the corner of his desk, and then digging it out a month later, when he gets the transcript or two weeks later, this is going to be able to contemporaneously move those files quicker.
Tyson Mutrux
That’s a good point. I it’s something I actually have not thought about. I mean, we’ll stack you know, multiple depositions on a day, it would be great just to be like, Okay, let’s look at this, you know, transcript that we have right now, you know, it’s not the perfect transcript. I can see, you know, what they said, and I can use it for the next deposition, that’s in an hour. But that would be a lot of help to
Nick Mahurin
wait a second, Nick said this. Are you contradicting? Nick? I’ve got it right here.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, yeah. So Dean, let me ask you this. Is this something that’s available now? Or is this something that we’re gonna have to wait for?
Dean Whalen
Yes, so we’re making it available to the max law conference people, and anybody out there in Mac’s law that wants to call us, you know, read back that legal, they can contact us go on the website, the register, there’s no fee or obligation registered? When the site poke around? We got a library in there got discussions of compliance, once they register, we’re gonna send them a welcoming email, describing it some more reach out to him and say, Would you like to see it? Would you like to try it? So? Yes, it’s available, but only to max law. And our existing clients? Yeah, we’re calling
Nick Mahurin
it an early access program, Tyson. And we’re going to do this for between now and the end of the year, or the first of 2022, to make sure that we scale in a disciplined way and focus primarily on the quality of the services that we’re providing. Learn as much as we can from those early access customers, and then go to full market a general release in early 2022.
Tyson Mutrux
Very cool. All right, who wants the last word? I’ll give you the last word.
Nick Mahurin
Oh, I like to say just the concept of starting a conversation, even if rhetorical. Once you learn about all these capabilities as a litigator? What will you do with active reporting?
Tyson Mutrux
Are you asking me or is that just a rhetorical question that you’ve got everybody
Nick Mahurin
is for everybody listening? Because I think it’s something to be figured out, right? If somebody shows you a new gadget with 12 bells and whistles, you may not be able to even figure that out in 10 minutes, right? I assume that some people will start by saying, hey, one day is better than two weeks. So give me that. And after they’ve done 10 depositions, they might be Yeah, maybe I will take a look at this near time text. I mean, I thought it might be distracting. But maybe I can learn something or I’ve learned from people in the community whether it’s the maximum lawyer community or people in the the reback specific community that share best practices and say, let me tell you have this helps. So we’re kind of excited about starting that conversation.
Dean Whalen
Tyson, like, I’m a lawyer, even though he’s my CEO, I’m not giving him the last word. So I just want to say a thank you for this opportunity to get out to your audience conference itself, what I was impressed with, and I signed up as an attorney. And so I was in on virtually all of the speeches, there wasn’t any discussion of substantive law, you didn’t go there to learn how to do a case or a specific area of law. It was how to be a better person, how to be a better lawyer, how to operationalize your office and efficient and the speakers you had authentic, real. And many of them had stories where they had bottomed out for this, that was the other thing and come out of the ashes and are doing great now. Tremendous, it kept it real. And I really appreciated being there.
Tyson Mutrux
Like I said, it’s a really good group of people. It was one of those things where, you know, we were just so impressed by the speakers. It was such a cool event. For those of you that missed it. Sorry, helped you to come next year. But it was it was really cool. And thank you all, by the way for sponsoring it, because it would not have been possible without you. And our other sponsors, it was a tremendous amount of support, because as you can tell, it was a big event, it was way bigger than what we’ve ever done before. So we really needed the support from you also, as one of our title sponsors. We could not have done it without you. So thank you so much for that as well. All right. So if anyone’s interested in read back, go to read back dot legal. There’s actually app dot read back dot legal boards slash signup. That’s directly to the signup. In the end. We’ll have that in the show notes. I also have it in the comment section in the Facebook group. Nick. Dean, thank you so much for coming on. I really, really appreciate it.
Dean Whalen
Thank you, Tyson. Say hi to Jim.
Tyson Mutrux
We’ll do everybody.
Speaker 1
Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. To stay in contact with your hosts and to access more content. Go to maximum lawyer.com Have a great Week in catch you next time
