The #1 AI Deposition Summary Tool in Today’s Legal Market
Empowering Paralegals with esumry for Fast & Accurate Deposition Summaries
Depositions often hold the keys to winning—or losing—a case.
Yet, the process of summarizing a deposition transcript is notoriously time-consuming, tedious, and prone to human error. In an era where law firms and in-house legal teams are expected to do more with less, leveraging technology has shifted from “nice-to-have” to “essential.”
Depositions often hold the keys to winning—or losing—a case. Yet, the process of summarizing a deposition transcript is notoriously time-consuming, tedious, and prone to human error. In an era where law firms and in-house legal teams are expected to do more with less, leveraging technology has shifted from “nice-to-have” to “essential.”
One of the most impactful ways to embrace this change is using AI-assisted legal tech like esumry, a platform designed specifically for creating curated deposition summaries. Below, we’ll explore how esumry’s advanced features help paralegals (and attorneys) work smarter, save time, ensure higher accuracy, and maintain ethical standards required by state bar regulators.
The High Stakes of Deposition Summaries
Trial lawyers know that high-quality deposition summaries are essential in litigation. They guide trial strategy, inform motion practice, help prepare for mediation, and provide fingertip access to key statements that might become pivotal in court. A well-crafted deposition summary can save an attorney hours of flipping through lengthy transcripts, allowing them to evaluate relevant facts, admissions, or inconsistencies swiftly. Conversely, a poorly done summary can lead attorneys astray or cause them to miss vital details—sometimes with catastrophic consequences for the case.
But someone must draft them. Historically, attorneys either prepared these summaries themselves or delegated them to paralegals. No matter who does them, it requires spending hours poring over transcripts, identifying relevant passages, and then keying the information into a table, along with page-line references.
The need is for an accurate and cohesive summary. The chance for error can be high, especially under pressing deadlines. Because it is time-consuming, summarizing depositions can eat into the attorney or paralegal’s capacity to address other critical tasks in the case.
Even for attorneys with clients that will happily pay for all the billable hours required (not!), it is a task that few litigation professionals enjoy. This is where technology can make a tangible impact on a litigation team’s efficiency and accuracy.
Traditional Manual Method
Paralegals (or attorneys) must read through page after page of the transcript, manually annotating relevant testimony or marking sections to revisit later. Summaries are typed up from these highlights into a table-formatted document, often requiring multiple rounds of edits. Sometimes the process starts with a paper transcript, but even when reviewing PDFs, it will require keeping two screens open, constantly flipping from one to the other. There is also a risk of inconsistency since different paralegals (or attorneys) may produce summaries of varying detail, style, or thoroughness.
Summaries with esumry
esumry’s AI automatically generates a narrative summary of the key testimony in the deposition. This is highly useful for users that did not attend it. Users are then able to easily select specific testimony from each deposition to be included in the page-line digest, allowing for creation of curated summaries that align with the needs of each case. Summaries and digests are created three to four times faster than the manual method. Finally, esumry is designed for paralegal (or attorney) oversight during the creation process, ensuring final accuracy and adherence to ethical standards.
With esumry, the task of reading hundreds of pages shrinks dramatically, freeing users to concentrate on higher-level tasks. But speed isn’t the sole advantage; ensuring accurate, well-structured summaries is equally essential, and that’s precisely where esumry excels—while still letting you remain in control.
Key Benefits for Litigation Paralegals
Job Satisfaction
Paralegals often bear the brunt of time-consuming tasks like deposition summaries. Relying on manual effort can lead to burnout, especially under tight deadlines. By offloading the tedious parts of summarizing, creating tables, and the like to AI, paralegals can focus on refining and validating the summary, turning an otherwise tedious job into more intellectually engaging work. And in one-third the time.
Far from making paralegals obsolete, esumry elevates their role. Skilled paralegals become indispensable as they review and add context, seamlessly integrating these outputs into a cohesive work product. Paralegals get to work on a higher level of content and analysis, which leads to greater job satisfaction and a sense of contribution to the team.
Minimal Training Required
One of the biggest hurdles in adopting new technology is the learning curve. However, esumry has been crafted with paralegals in mind, offering a straightforward interface that doesn’t require a coding background or technical expertise. Training only takes 15 minutes, enabling paralegals to get up and running without missing a beat. The platform’s design emphasizes ease of use, allowing paralegals to directly focus on the content rather than wrestling with complicated features, configuring dashboards, and the like.
Improved Collaboration
Once paralegals finalize a curated summary with esumry, it generates a Word document so attorneys can instantly review it in their preferred format. When attorneys see the high-quality summaries that paralegals produce using esumry, trust and collaboration naturally improve. With esumry, paralegals become more than just support staff—they become problem-solvers who can rapidly turn deposition content into strategic insights. This leads to greater recognition for their contributions, showcasing the value they add to the firm or department.
Despite all the amazing benefits of using esumry, we understand many paralegals don’t have technology purchasing power at their firms.
To try esumry for free for 2-weeks before you go tell your boss how amazing it is, you can sign up on our pricing page (no credit card required).
Try It Out!
We invite you to see firsthand how AI and automation can revolutionize your deposition analysis.
Get a 14-day free trial of esumry today and start transforming your litigation practice for the future.
The rest of this post is to share with your attorney after you experience how incredible esumry is for yourself.
Key Benefits for Attorneys
Litigation Effectiveness
Trial lawyers operate under relentless pressure—court dates, client deliverables, and billable-hour goals, to name a few. For attorneys who prefer to prepare their own deposition summaries, esumry will boost your effectiveness too.
The platform automates the initial deposition review, identifying critical lines of testimony in a concise, narrative summary. This allows users to quickly understand the witness testimony before even reading the deposition, which is highly useful if the user is your paralegal who did not attend the deposition. Rather than combing through entire transcripts for basic facts, users can quickly move to the analysis phase.
esumry processes depositions three to four times faster than traditional manual methods, drastically reducing the time from deposition to actionable summary. When the foundational task of summarizing depositions is handled efficiently with esumry, attorneys can dedicate their additional mental bandwidth to identifying inconsistencies in testimony, preparing for cross-examinations, and developing compelling arguments.
Business Development
Efficiency in legal practice isn’t just about doing more in less time—it’s about standing out in a crowded market. Law firms that deploy advanced, AI-driven tools often attract tech-savvy clients who prioritize modern, cost-effective legal services. Being known as a forward-thinking attorney or firm using esumry (and letting your paralegals use esumry) will help you stand out in client pitches.
Clients also appreciate attorneys who are well-prepared and efficient. By delivering summaries faster and focusing more time on strategy, attorneys can offer higher-quality representation, aiding both client retention and the prospect of higher rates.
Compliance
Attorneys must always be mindful of ethical and regulatory constraints. Using esumry doesn’t remove the critical human review process like some platforms; it simply expedites it. esumry ensures that a human remains in the loop, a fundamental requirement of state bar regulators who mandate that attorneys—and by extension, their teams—retain responsibility for the final work product.
Why Human-in-the-Loop Matters
Q: If AI is doing the heavy lifting, where does the human element fit in?
A: For both attorneys and paralegals, human oversight is not just a best practice—it’s an ethical necessity. AI can’t always interpret the nuances of legal contentions that arise from witness testimony. Therefore, it is essential for a trained legal professional to add the final layers of judgment, context, and legal knowledge. This human-in-the-loop approach taken by esumry strikes the perfect balance between AI’s speed and a legal professional’s expertise, yielding results that are both fast and precise. Additionally, as mentioned above, state bars require lawyers to maintain responsibility over their work product. esumry enables that compliance requirement so that users can confirm accuracy and edit as appropriate. Click here to read our post on the legal ethics of using generative AI for litigation.
Privacy and Data Security
Given the legal profession’s stringent ethical standards, the use of AI-driven tools understandably raises questions. Attorneys raise legitimate concerns about confidentiality, privacy, and data security. Rest assured, esumry addresses these concerns with robust features and design principles:
Data Encryption: We employ robust encryption protocols to secure data both in transit and at rest. This ensures that your sensitive information remains confidential and protected from unauthorized access.
Secure Access Controls: We implement strong access controls, including multi-factor authentication and role-based permissions, to restrict system access only to authorized personnel.
Penetration Testing: We conduct regular internal and external testing to identify and promptly address any vulnerabilities in our systems.
Employee Training: We provide comprehensive training to our employees on security best practices and ensure that they are aware of their responsibilities regarding the protection of customer data.
Security Audit: esumry is SOC 2, Type I certified, which is based on a stringent audit of our security policies. Contact us to learn more at security@esumry.com.
The bottom line? You can benefit from AI’s efficiency without compromising security.
Conclusion: A Winning Combination
Deposition summaries are the backbone of effective litigation strategy. Yet, the traditional approach to crafting them has long been a bottleneck—costly in time, resources, and sometimes, in accuracy. esumry shifts that paradigm by offering a reliable, AI-assisted platform that makes the summarizing process 3x–4x faster, while still requiring the crucial involvement of a legal professional. This human-in-the-loop design not only meets ethical and regulatory obligations but also enhances the overall quality of the summary.
For Paralegals, esumry transforms a once-tedious job into an opportunity for greater engagement and growth. Instead of painstakingly reading transcripts line by line, paralegals can leverage AI for the initial extraction and focus their expertise on refining, validating, and interpreting key testimony. The tool’s ease of use and minimal training requirements ensure that paralegals can quickly become productive with the software, thus demonstrating even more value to their attorneys and clients.
For Attorneys, the decision to empower paralegals with esumry is both pragmatic and strategic. It slashes the time spent on tedious tasks, mitigates risk, enhances client satisfaction, and frees up bandwidth for higher-value activities such as case strategy and courtroom preparation. And for those trial lawyers that prefer to do their own deposition summaries, they will get all the same benefits from using esumry that paralegals do!
When integrated thoughtfully, esumry isn’t just another software tool—it’s a powerful ally in the pursuit of efficient and accurate legal work. By capitalizing on AI’s speed and the skillful oversight of seasoned legal professionals, law firms can revolutionize their deposition summary process, keeping them competitive in an ever-changing legal landscape.
Ultimately, attorneys who let their paralegals use esumry stand to gain on multiple fronts: better case outcomes, happier teams, and satisfied clients who appreciate both the speed and precision of your practice. It’s time to embrace the future of litigation support—one deposition at a time.
Try It Out!
We invite you to see firsthand how AI and automation can revolutionize your deposition analysis.
Get a 14-day free trial of esumry today and start transforming your litigation practice for the future.
