Efficient deposition designations for modern litigation teams with Opus 2

Great. I think we’ll go ahead and get started now. Good morning and welcome to the Opus 2 and Ilta webinar entitled efficient deposition designations for modern litigation teams with Opus 2. Deposition designations are an essential part of the trial preparation and one that can prove unnecessarily costly if you’re not applying technology to your processes. In this product briefing, you will learn how your modern litigation teams can streamline deposition designations with Opus 2 to a single connected platform where you can analyze, build, improve your case. So good morning, my name is Don Fuchs. I’m a former practicing attorney and currently serve as Senior VP of Sales and Business Development at Opus 2. I would like to introduce our speaker today, Kim Bookout. Kim currently plays an important role on our client success team at Opus 2 by advising our clients to help them optimize their litigation processes, utilizing Opus 2 platform. Before joining Opus 2, Kim started her career as a litigation paralegal in law firms before transitioning into a litigation support role, where she advised legal teams on e discovery best practices and performed hot seat duties in dozens of cases. She worked for several firms over the years, most recently at Baker Hostetler before we welcomed her onto the team at Opus 2. A couple of housekeeping items. The presentation probably will go for somewhere around forty-five minutes. We will have a question and answer session towards the end. You’ll note on your panel below that there’s a Q and A option. So if you do have questions throughout the presentation, I encourage you to type them into the Q and A panel, and then we’ll address them towards the end of the presentation. If for some reason we can’t get through all the questions, then we’ll certainly follow-up individually on those items that we didn’t get to. And with that, I would like to turn it over to Kim Bookout. Again, thank you so much for joining us. And Kim, I’m going to turn it over to you now. Great. Thank you so much, Don, for that introduction, and welcome everybody. This subject of deposition designations, I would love to say, is near and dear to my heart. It sometimes feels like near and fear to my heart, but I feel like I have spent so much time in this world. I have the gray hairs to prove it, and I hope we can talk about this today, and you’ll learn something and think about something, and it’s going to help you as you get ready for trial or those exchanges. So the first slide I have, just to kind of set the table, is what is a deposition designation? It is simply an identification by page and line number of any testimony that a party intends to introduce at trial. Now in federal court, this will be found in Federal Rule of Civil Procedure thirty two. If you’re in state court, you’re just gonna have to check your local rules to see how they define when and how you can use a deposition designation, but regardless of what court you’re in, they are most often introduced by video. Now sometimes this used to happen, particularly more so back in the low tech days, sometimes when video wasn’t available, you would have to read you would kind of designate a person on your trial team to play the part of a witness, and that person would get on the stand and basically read the transcript, which, as you can imagine, was extremely boring. We’re so happy when video became easily available and synced because before video was synced, we would have to kind of manually review the entire deposition and then just create those video clips manually, which was painful. It would take days. So technology has really helped us out a lot here. So before we get to the good stuff about how technology can help you, we’re gonna have to deal with some bad stuff. So what are some mistakes that we’re making with deposition designations? All of these that I’m going to share are things that I’ve learned from my own experience. I’ve seen firsthand The names have been changed to protect the innocent or idiots, however you see it, but we’re gonna go through some of these. I think you might have seen some of them as well. Now some of these are not so obvious. They’re the before deposition mistakes. So the big one I see is really not communicating your needs to your court reporting company. They are your partners here, so you should be kind of contacting them, seeing what they’re offering, seeing what kind of new technology maybe they have in place, understanding what your software needs are. So for instance, if I have a software like Opus 2, I’m gonna ask for an LEF or a PTX, an ASCII file, or an MDB, which is what provides that really convenient sync that we’re looking for to make those easy clips. Now, you know, if you’re working in another software, you just need to know, be aware of what you’re working with, and then ask the court reporter for those files that you don’t find yourself, you know, two months out of trial and realizing that you don’t have any video or any sync for any of your videos, and that’s just something else that is now on your pretrial checklist that you have to do that you could have avoided. And then also now that we’re kind of been in this pandemic for a couple of years, I’m sure all of you guys have gotten very familiar with virtual depositions. I’m not sure if they’re ever going to go away because they’ve proven so convenient, but one of the things that you should be thinking about is, is this gonna be a virtual deposition, or is this going to be in person? If it’s going to be virtual, how am I gonna be introducing these exhibits? And a lot of court reporting companies now have these exhibit capture technology where they can deliver to you a video that has the witness’s face and that exhibit that they’re looking at, which, you know, might really help the jury connect to the two when you’re presenting it at trial. So it’s worth thinking about. Here are some mistakes that I see during depositions, and we’ll just go through a couple of them, and this is going to be from the lawyer perspective. So one of the things that I just recommend if you don’t have a lot of experience with taking depositions is ask the questions in deposition as though your jury is present. We really want you to be thinking about these deposition designations while you’re taking or defending that deposition. So, you know, this kind of leads to the next thing that the jury is going to see the witness’s face, but they’re going to hear your voice, And is your demeanor different than what you want to convey to your jury? So I have a pretty funny example of that. I live in Atlanta, and I had a was working hot seat on a trial that was down in South Georgia. Well, the opposing counsel came and did his opening statements and really put on this very folksy manner to connect with the jury, And then as I started playing these deposition designations, they get to see another side of this guy. He’s more like an Al Pacino, I’d say, and the jury, their eyes got really big and they’re kind of looking confused. You know, you just really wanna make sure that your demeanor is consistent with what you are presenting yourself to be with the jury. And then use a good depa all of, I mean, lawyers are really good at doing this. Use a good deposition outline so that the testimony you might wanna use in trial can be consolidated into continuous clips. Now all of the lawyers I’ve worked with have done a really great job of doing this, but sometimes I have seen or been in situations where I have to prepare what I call Frankenclips because they’re coming from all over the place, right? So I’m trying to assemble all of the testimony concerning a, you know, the formation of a contract, and I’m going to page seventeen, page two twelve, page three zero five to kind of compile that into a consolidated clip, and it’s kind of awkward for for me to do it, and then it’s also awkward for the jury to see it because they can tell that, you know, it’s kind of gotten a little bit later in the day and these are kind of frank and clipped around. So to the extent that you can have a good deposition outline to help you get all of that testimony in a concise way, it’s going to help further designating. So here are a few problems we see after depositions, and the big one that I kind of see is not taking the time to categorize or summarize your depositions as you get them in. This used to be very common practice in law firms. When I first started at a big firm, one of my very first jobs was taking about, you know, twenty seven transcripts that we had in a case and summarizing them, and it really helped me learn the facts of the case and be able to kind of easily recall that testimony as we were getting ready for summary judgment. Additionally, you know, like one of the reasons that people don’t do it as much now is our clients are very cost conscious, and we want to be careful with their dollars and we feel like, well, you know, this case might settle or it might be handled dispositively and, you know, would that be a waste of resources? And so what I say to that is that this does not need to be perfect. This can be handled by a junior associate or a paralegal on your case, just like I had done. It gives them some experience, and it’s gonna make your summary judgment and trial presentation less costly and more efficient, and that’s where you can really start getting into some big bucks. And then another thing is I found that we don’t always do a great job of provisioning for the technical aspects of our exchange in the pretrial order, and this really hits home for me with my e discovery background because I’ve spent so many hours at times painstakingly going through e discovery protocols and making sure that they’re consistent with what our expectations are and what we can technically provide to the other side. And so it’s kind of discouraging to me that we don’t see a little bit more of that put into a pretrial order. So when you make an exchange, what’s that gonna look like? Is it gonna be a CSV file? Is it gonna be an Excel? Are you intending to just exchange PDFs with page line references? What columns are going to be included? This is a good time to think about does your court have any preferences? You know, you don’t want to find out until, you know, a few days before your trial starts that your judge has a very specific preference on how he or she likes to review your designations and your trial software cannot accommodate that. So this is also a good time to call maybe their staff attorney and say, you know, does the court have any preferences on our designation exchange? Go ahead and start thinking about that and handling that and putting that into a pretrial order so you know exactly who’s responsible for what and you know what to expect on your designation exchange day. Okay. So this is some bad examples or some good examples of bad exchanges, I guess I should say, and this one is probably the most common. It’s just somebody has sent a PDF document letting you know what they intend to play. Well, the problem with this is that, you know, you have very inconsistent identification. So here I’ve got a page line, and then I’ve got a space and a dash and then end line. Here I have beginning pages and lines, but it doesn’t make sense. It’s clearly some kind of an error because we can’t begin at page seventeen, line three and end at page seventeen, line two. It’s either reversed or it could be that they had intended to put page seventeen, line twenty two, and they just fat fingered it. So it’s yet another thing that now I have try to go run down and figure out what they intended. And then here’s a good one. You gotta have, like, a mixed bag. So we’ve got two designations with a bit of overlap here, so I’m not exactly sure how they intended to to play or identify those. And then lastly, this is just another easy typographical error that can be avoided. And at the end of the day, you know, you’re either going to want to import this into your technology so that these transcripts can be generated, or if you’re really doing it an old fashioned way, you’re going to be using some kind of software to highlight the the transcripts, and this is just kind of makes it a little confusing. So here’s an even worse designation exchange, and this is something that I actually have received before, just a bunch of pages of PDF pages of testimony with either some highlighting or just circling of the text. And so that doesn’t seem so bad when you’re looking at these four pages here, but when you have, you know, twenty seven depositions and you’re looking at six thousand pages, trying to translate that into a format that is gonna be useful for us is gonna be challenging. So I don’t recommend you guys do this ever. Now we’re gonna kinda change the subject and start talking about some ways that you can really effectively use technology for your designations. The first thing is know your file formats. So I have some examples here on the Opus 2 side. If you’re using another software, just make sure you get to know those formats. So for us, what we like for transcripts is that LEF, which I already mentioned, and MDB, which is essential. And then here are another list of file types that we can accept. So we’re somewhat fairly agnostic on the file type that we take, and most of these are very commonly included in the package that you’ll get from your court reporter. And then your video format. So m p four is, like, the most common and most modern video format type that we see now. MPEGs are also perfectly fine. They lend themselves to this sync very well, and then this is kind of where we want to start attacking things that happen before the deposition ever, arrives. So what are you using? What kind of technology are you using? And how are you thinking about preparing for depositions at the early stage? And when I say early stage, I mean from the very moment you get a hint of a legal action from your client. So here I’ve got our software. We’re gonna go ahead and take a look at database here. You’ll see I’ve got pleadings, key documents, deposition outlines. I’ve got a myriad of color coded folders here, and I’m gonna start with characters because that might be the first thing I’m getting an understanding of from my client, who was there, who was involved. So here you’ll see, you know, we have our pictures. Some of these folks might look familiar to you. This is my fictional case between Dan Connor and Ron Swanson, my fictional construction litigation. So here I get some information about these people, I can get it in to the database so it starts to help others, and as I’m listening to my client or reading the interrogatory responses, I can start adding these new entities in. So I’m going to add myself, I can pick up a little picture which will be handy so now everyone knows what I look like, I can enter some information that again is just going to help me and my team moving forward, and for us, all of this is customizable, so whatever you’re trying to track, we can help you do that. You can add this description information, which can help as you’re onboarding new team members, for instance. It’s really nice for them to have one place to go to see the who’s who of your case. You can go ahead and and start putting in their deposition schedule so that you actually have a calendar feature here where you can see which depositions you’ve got coming up, and then once you’ve seen that, you can kinda quickly go through and start looking at these people’s kind of depot profiles. So I’m gonna switch this view from my list view and start looking at it in a bit of a different way. So now I wanna see my witnesses by how they were they similar to one another. So I’ve got Darlene right now. She’s my person of interest. I might want to move her over and add her as a fact witness. I’m gonna notice up her depot. I can just drag this around, and all of those underlying details will also be edited. I can also change my view to look at who’s key. You know, when you’re first starting, you might have almost everybody slotted in to not set, and as you go, you can start dragging them around because you’re learning more information about them. And then, of course, our deposition view where I can kind of see who’s scheduled. I can look at their documents, make sure, yes, these are all documents I might want to use with them. I can annotate these documents just like I would if I were using a highlighter and doing it on paper. I’m adding a sticky note and a highlight and an issue code, and I’m attaching it to this document so that it’s gonna be there for me when I need it. So once I’m done and I like all of these documents, I can go ahead and export them out. And the cool thing is I can export them out with those annotations. So with those highlights, with those sticky notes, that’s the set I have for myself. When that transcript comes back, it’s going to live here. I’ve got all of my facts from my fact chronology, which I’ll show you in a few moments. I can export this out into an Excel, and then I’ve got all the notes from within the documents that my attorneys and my legal team have made. So I can just kind of quickly go through everyone who’s scheduled and kind of finalize those Depo Prep kits. Once I’m in my documents, I can start reviewing documents. You know, we just added me to the character list, so now I’m going to start giving myself some documents. For us, you know, our UI is really important, like how easy it is, and for us, it’s a right click. You know, a lot of things are just done with I right click to add it to a character. I can right click to add it to a chronology. I’ve got my nice preview window to the right so that I can kinda click through these pages, and so I’ve just added a few documents to myself. And now we’ll go back to characters and take a look. So now I’ve got those documents. My the partner on my case can kind of quickly go in, take a final glance through those, and push them out for for depo. So we did talk a little bit about chronology, so I do want to show that to you because a lot of times this is very foundational to building out those outlines. So here I’ve kind of got all of the facts that are in my case, I’ve got them issue coded, I’ve got them assigned to various characters, I can see underlying metadata for those source documents as well. So it’s a really nice, important feature that lawyers use all the time, whether they’re using technology or not. I can filter this for one of my characters. So maybe I want to see all the facts associated with Dan Connor. I can filter that. I can go ahead and review these. I can switch to a timeline view and use this more demonstratively. I can export this to a PowerPoint presentation where I can kind of edit it to my heart’s content. And then lastly, I’m gonna switch back to table view. You know, how do you get things out? So it’s important to get it in and then out. So I can export this as a PDF, as a PDF with the documents, an Excel, Word doc, or maybe I just want to export out all of those sources. I have options here because we know that lawyers need options. And I hit reset. I go back to my main view, back to documents, and now I might be ready to do another workflow, which is very common, which is that deposition outline. So I’ve got somebody who’s created a deposition outline in Word. I’ve loaded it in to Opus 2. I’ve created auto links so that those exhibits that you intend to introduce are hyperlinked to the PDF, and that’s also done by a right click. You just go to auto link and set your field that you’re keying off of, and those links magically appear. Once they do, you can open up this document here in in Opus 2 and start just running through and pulling up all of those exhibits. You’ll see this one has issue codes. It’s been added to a chronology. I have some legal notes in there, and when I am ready to go, I can, again, by right click, export out this outline with those annotations and with those linked documents. So now I’m getting a complete package that I can give to an attorney or somebody who’s maybe taking the deposition. So these are some really handy tools that you can use before depo to really help you prepare. The next thing is that stage, that kind of post depo stage we talked about, which is annotating the important testimony. And, you know, this, again, does not have to be perfect. You’ll see in my demo, it is not perfect, but we’re basically making some broad stroke determinations on what testimony relates to what is important to us in our case. So I’m back in my database, and I’m gonna go to deposition transcripts. I’m gonna open up this first one here, and you’ll see I first have got my word wheel, which is essential to anybody and is very common in any electronic format. I can do a quick keyword search within this transcript, find that testimony that I’m looking for, highlight it, and I’m gonna get that sticky note again. And now I’m going to issue tag this to damages. I’m gonna add a little bit of narrative. I don’t have to go crazy here. We don’t have to spend a ton of time, but I’ve already made a meaningful annotation to this transcript that’s gonna help somebody down the road. So I’m gonna find a few more key elements here just to show you a couple of different ways to to summarize this. So now I’m going to my full list of issue codes, which I can manage on the fly, adding some additional narrative here, and then saving. So, again, the reading is what probably what takes a long a bit of time, but the actual coding is a breeze. So I’m just gonna finish this one up. And now I’m gonna go to notes and kinda show you where these deposition summaries go to live. So right now, I have it in a view by witness. So I can export out all of that summary that I just made for Helen Chang and a variety of file types, but this is the benefit that you get of doing it electronically. If I don’t want to look at it by witness, rather I want to look at it by topic. What does everybody have to say about breach of contract? Now I can export out this report as a Word document, and maybe I have a more meaningful file because I get to see the text of what everyone had to say about breach of contract, and I get to see those legal annotations as well. This is going to help me when I get to brief writing, when I’m starting to think about what might I want to where’s my starting point for what I want to designate? This is where you would go. Sorry, I know I talk fast, so I’m just trying to get it all in. So this is kind of the meat of the matter. You have to be able to easily apply designations and prepare highlighted transcripts, and this might be what you guys all came for, what you’ve been waiting for. How are we gonna how can we help you with that? So I’m back into another database here where the first thing I’m gonna do is just set up those designations. So I’m just gonna go to manage designations and add a few for us to start with. So what are the first designations we get? We usually get the party’s affirmative designations, so here you can select any color you want for that highlighting. I typically just use a very standard color format, but one thing that’s handy about doing this electronically is if you find that you have to change the colors, like for instance, your judge is color blind, which has happened to me, you can easily go in and edit those. So now we’re gonna open up Helen Chang’s deposition, and we’re gonna start making a few designations here. So, again, I’m just gonna try to find some key testimony that I might wanna play at trial. And this is gonna be very familiar to you. It’s just like how we made an annotation. We’re gonna select testimony, but instead of making a sticky note, we’re going to switch to designation mode. In this workflow, I am making my defendant affirmative designations. I’m just going to make a few here, Save a few. I mean, when you see how easy it is, there’s really no reason that you would be doing it in Adobe, versus a software that was designed to handle this type of highlighting. Okay. So I’ve handled one transcript. Now I’m gonna go into another transcript where we already have some plaintiff designations, and I’m gonna go through and add some objections and some counter designations. This would be what we would kind of consider phase two. So I’m gonna select that testimony and I’m going to object to it. You’ll see I don’t have that designation here, so I’m going to add it on the fly, and that’s permissions based. If you have the right permissions, you can manage all of these things as you go. Change this. I usually have these in some some shade of, you know, red or orange or something to kind of really scream out object we object. Now I might wanna add some kind of just standard objection languages that I can just pick and choose as I’m going. So, you know, you don’t have to do this. You can certainly just type in your objection narrative into the objection box, but I think it’s handy to have some presets just to save you a little bit of time and maybe add some efficiencies. Now I’m gonna add one for my counter designations because I might as well do my counter designations at the same time I’m doing my objections. And I’m gonna give this also a blue color because I like to keep us all all parties in the same color scheme. So now I’m ready to start actually lodging these objections. So I’ve made an objection, and now I’m gonna add that objection type. So this one is gonna be relevance. This is gonna really help me when I’m finalizing that kind of objection chart that’s gonna go to the court or go to the other side. Gonna object to just a portion of this designation, as is common. And then let’s see what I’m gonna do here. We’ll go ahead and add, a a counter designation here. So you just get a a sense of these designation types and how they appear in the software. So now I’m kinda done, and I’m ready to export out this transcript with those highlights available so that I can display it for my team or I can provide it to the court. So I’m gonna go ahead and do that and give you guys a preview of what that looks like. So now I push that out. I’m gonna go pick it up. I get first a bit of a legend, and then I can kind of go through my transcript. And this is all very customizable, what font you want, whether you want a full transcript or a mini transcript. This can all be customized, but I just wanted to show you an example of what it could look like. Now that this is a big one that, you know, I I’ve spent a lot of time with with a lot of different types of software, and so you really just wanna make sure that you get what you need and that to the extent that this has to be shared or distributed, it’s in a format that that everyone’s gonna be able to agree upon. Now I’m gonna show you a couple of different ways to get import or get designations in and out, and this this is where the gray hairs come from, I think, is when you’re working on a trial schedule and you have, you know, you you a particular day that you have to exchange your initial designations, and your objections may be due ten to fifteen days after that. Well, if you’re dealing with any number of transcripts, I’ve worked in cases where, you know, we’ve had one hundred and sixty transcripts that we were designating. You’ve got to be able to generate out those transcripts for your legal team to review and object to quickly. If you have not done a good job of trying to get agreement about how to exchange your designations, this could be really painful. This could literally be somebody going in and highlighting all of that testimony, and that is what we want to avoid. That’s where the gray hairs have come from. So here, I’m going to show you guys a couple of ways that we can get designations pushed out. See, we’re going to go over to transcripts, and I’m going to kind of show you this one by one way first, which is sometimes what you end up doing. You know, you I’m going to for clarity, I’m going to hide these exhibits and the annotations that were just focused in on these designations, And you’ll see I’ve got objections. I’ve got defendant designations, and I’m gonna go ahead and go to my tools and export these designations. I get to pick which ones I wanna export. And do I wanna include those comments? Yes. I could export this as plain text, but if I’m playing really nicely with the other side, I’m gonna give them a CSV because they’re gonna give me a CSV and make my life easier. That’s kind of one by one, but you might find that you have to do this in bulk. So we have a a bulk designation wizard for import and export. So we’re doing the same thing here. We’re picking what designation type we’d like to exchange, except for now we’re gonna go across all of our transcripts. We get a summary. We can export this out, and this is kind of what it looks like. So, again, I’ve done a good job. I’ve already defined what we’re gonna be delivering to the other side in my pretrial order, and so I know that I’m gonna give them a start page, a start line, an end page, an end line, and a range, and maybe those objection comments as well. I can edit this and then kind of send that off to the other side. When I get theirs back, I’m gonna use the bulk import tool. So what used to take hours and hours now can take minutes, which is helpful because it gets your legal team looking at that testimony quicker, lodging their objections faster, and being more prepared for those really tight turnarounds. And then this is another one where, you know, we think Opus 2 can really help you, and it’s really in preparing those provisional video clips. And more importantly, which always excites me, is seeing runtime reports. I mean, that has been a big one in my past when you know that you have x number of hours in your trial, and you’ve got to figure out which witnesses are getting slotted in when based on their run times. Now a lot of the trial presentation software can do this, but sometimes you need that information before you get to trial presentation itself, and so it’s nice to have a tool that easily shows that to you, and I’m going to show it off to you because, again, it’s something that I just love. So I’m back to my workspace, and now I am going to go to notes. And instead of going to transcripts like I did before, I’m going to designations. And now I’m looking at all of my designations that have been applied by my witness. So I can generate out a report for, you know, the legal team and say, hey, just here’s an FYI of everything that has been designated. You can get it out as a PDF, a Word document, or an Excel. It’s all color coded. It gives you the objection. It’s a nice little report to follow so you don’t have to kind of go through the entire transcript. Additionally, I can go ahead and start pushing out some along with the reports, maybe some of this video itself. So you’ll see up here, I have my total clip duration. So I know that Sally Sanders I know what her runtime is right from my very first screen without having to do anything else. I can go ahead and turn these context lines off so that I’m only looking at what was actually designated. I can play this clip in my app. If I like it, I can download it either as an m p four or an m p g. I can make little mini adjustments here. Right? I just wanna trim up the end, for instance. I like it. I can save it, and now that clip is going to have that adjusted end time. I can also along with exporting out the report, I can export out all of this video in a continuous clip. So I can get that out and give it to a you know, send it over to the people in my war room so that they can go ahead and start taking a look at it. You’ll get your export progress, and you’ll also get an email when that clip’s ready to download. So I think I have kind of gotten to the end. I know I went super fast, but I hope that just means that I left a little bit more time for questions. So if you have questions, go ahead and type them in, and we might also be able to let you guys go a little bit early today. Great. Thank you so much, Kim. That was fantastic. We do have a few questions that came in through the panel. So I’ll just go ahead and read them and we’ll answer them accordingly. Great. So first question that came in is if we receive poorly formatted designations from the other side, do we have to manually edit them or can your software help us automatically translate those into the proper format? Oh, that is a great question. So thanks for that, Don. Actually, I used to spend quite a bit of time, kind of cleaning up these designations using a text editor, making sure that I had like beginning line, end line. Now Opus 2 kind of takes a lot of that work out of it. You can kind of just paste in whatever designation that you get and let Opus 2 try to normalize the the start pages and end pages as much as it can, and then it will give you a report and you basically just say, yes, this looks good, or no, I’d like to make some further edits. So talking about a time saver, it’s a huge time saver and something that was really exciting for me to have access to. Right, thank you. Next, real quick question, is the recording of this webinar available? Short answer to that is yes, we will make it available afterwards. I believe that our marketing team will email that around, but certainly would be available from our website as well. Next question. Does opposing counsel also need to be working with Opus 2 to utilize the bulk adding? No. So as long as they give you, you know, this is where we kind of get into back to make sure that you ask for a CSV format or an Excel format of an exchange. As long as they give you their designations in a CSV or an Excel format, we can easily import them in and, like I said, generate out those highlighted transcripts within minutes rather than hours. We work really nicely with other software, so if, you know, we’re you’re using Opus 2 and they’re using something else, you know, we tend to read each other’s reports pretty well, but provision that in your pretrial order. You’re in control of that, of what goes into it. Well, you can maybe get in front of that case team and try to get some control over it because if you go ahead and say this is the format we’re exchanging in and it doesn’t work so well for them, well, you know, that was their job to add some additional formatting. Great, thank you. Next question, do you integrate with any eDiscovery platforms to simplify the deposition prep review? That’s another good question, and we are always working on partnering with our, you know, friends in eDiscovery. We have some some additional integrations that may be kind of coming up in the future, but right now, we have an integration with probably the biggest eDiscovery software out there, which is Relativity. So if I’ve got legal teams or first level reviewers that are doing some basic depot coding in Relativity, so I’m going through documents, tagging them to a witness, and now I just want to be able to quickly port them over to Opus 2, maintain that tagging so that when maybe my second level team gets into Opus 2 to do those final determinations, that character profile is a little bit more filled out. Great. Can we use your software to present the video to a jury so I’ll go ahead and and I’ll go ahead and tackle that one so for those of you who use Opus 2 globally, know, this is a more complicated answer. So, the short answer is our software really is designed for, you know, sort of that case preparation, case management and preparation leading up until trial so. That being said, the software allows you to get all of your evidence in data in very good order and very good format, But we stopped short of the trial presentation software with or function with this software. So, know, we do support exhibit stamping and features like that. Again, very, very easy for you to export The data from our tool out in his Kim had showed you know, like the deposition videos and designations. So very easy export that out into a trial presentation software That being said, we do have a service that we’ve been performing in the UK and APAC and Europe, where we actually do serve as the presentation software, we have a service where we do facilitate actual trial presentations within the court system and within arbitration forums globally. So we’re bringing that service over to the United States in in in the short term will focus more on you know international arbitrations. That’s something that is available, we do have us firms using that we have not focused our energy on you know sort of going into trial and providing the that service within trial. But we you know that that’s something that isn’t in our capability, so if you do have a trial it’s not that we would not provide the service so certainly talk to you about it, but it hasn’t been our focus. So just got a nice note in from one of our clients saying love Opus 2, you know, in the UK wish we could have this in the US, so you know happy to talk to you about that, as I had had mentioned. So maybe we can use you as a test case to start that on the trial side. But certainly for international arbitrations, we’re doing that today with US law firms. Okay, another question just came in and we still have a little more time, so I think we’ll keep doing that. So how do you motivate your litigation teams to do something different and to try software like this, even though they are currently doing everything manually? They often just don’t want to change. So Kim, I’ll let you take the first crack at that. Yeah, I’ve had some experience with that. You know, ultimately, I think when you can, like, there’s some pieces of using technology for deposition designations that no matter who you are are going to appeal to you because if you’ve been doing this, you know the pain points. So I think if you can really reach them and let them know, hey, remember those late nights of working till two a. Trying to generate out these transcripts? What if we can simplify this? Obviously, getting that first team, whether it be I mean, I’ve seen paralegals be kind of that agent of change within a law firm because they’ve decided to onboard some piece of technology. They may drag their legal team kicking and screaming, but at the end of the day, they’re responsible for making sure that all of this evidence is easily available and knowing where everything is for trial. So I’ve seen paralegals be that person. I’ve also seen a lot of partners be that person. So if a partner has one successful case, utilizing technology, they will be using it, forever. They will be bragging about it to other partners. They will be advocating it for the associates that are reporting to them that they should be using this. So it’s really finding that right person. Obviously, finding the problem. Where where can we help with technology, reaching that audience, and then finding that champion that’s going to really make sure that it is adopted within a group. And Don, I know you have a lot of experience with this too because you’ve been in legal technology for so long. You’ve been really instrumental in getting some of these, this technology out there and adopted. What are your thoughts? Yeah. So, if, you know, change management law firms is really kind of an art form. I think, I think you outlined, you know, the sort of the issue where lawyers get so busy, they’re comfortable doing things, even though, you know, I sort of cringe when I hear people talking about how they’re building their deposition prep and Word documents, they’re doing their chronology in a Word document, at least use Excel. But I think Kim’s right. You find the right partner. I also think you find the right case where the pain point is big enough where, so for example, if you have a dispersed team and there’s a massive chronology, or it’s a very large case with a lot of different chronology entries, and doing it manually just really probably would be so difficult, it’s not reasonable, or you have a lot of depositions to manage where doing it manually just isn’t going to work. I think that’s, you you find the right case where the tool solves the problem. Kim’s right. Once you get that critical mass, you have a few lawyers using it, they’ve had good success with it. Then other lawyers start paying attention, you grow it internally. The other thing I like to do as well is just have sort of that regular short educational session. Take advantage of the practice group meetings. You know, you, just because you, you do a presentation once doesn’t mean that a lawyer was really paying attention because they’re probably running through things they have to do. But if you catch them at the right time and you’re consistent about it, then maybe you’ll prevent that lawyer from storming into your office one day saying, Why don’t we have a proper case management tool? And you look at them like they’re crazy. Well, we do. We have for a couple of years, it’s called Opus 2. In fact, I’ve this in your practice group meeting, you know, two or three times. So I think it’s just, you know, it’s just finding your allies internally and then just doubling down on that. So again, we have a very good client success program. Kim’s actively involved with that. So it’s really, you know, it’s really something that we help our clients by investing in that process with them and provide best practices. There are firms that are better at it than other firms, and it’s because they actually employ tactical strategies and they’re regular and they’re methodical and purposeful about how they do it. And those firms do grow their technology successfully. Maybe not as fast as they would like to, but certainly faster than firms that take an ad hoc approach. Okay, next question. This looks like it would be very helpful for large cases that are near trial, but is it helpful for smaller cases that may not go to trial? This is a question we get asked all the time. So Kim, what are your thoughts? That’s right. Actually, in my experience, the law firms, it was it’s been kind of interesting because you think it’s always gonna be the big monster cases that utilize this. And sometimes it’s like the small single plaintiff employment actions that really, like, leverage a technology for this. Maybe they’re too small platforms. Right? They’re like, well, I just got a few thousand PDFs in from opposing counsel. Well, you know, it it from the small cases to the large cases, I think, you know, technology can help you and in any form of your practice. So that is like kind of what I was talking about when you get that whisper of a lawsuit or some wrongdoing, or maybe you start thinking about, you know, your approach with an internal investigation that has you’re now responsible for corralling a lot of facts. That early stage is where it can be really helpful. You might be able to a good example of this is, like, I worked on a class action lawsuit, and we had taken, you know, maybe a dozen depositions and then we ran some keywords across searches across all of the testimony and generated out reports and we were able to really quickly at that stage of litigation find so many differences amongst these representative class members that we were able to kind of crush that class. So that we didn’t ever have to get even close to trial, we were able to settle that matter and kind of call it a day and move on. Yeah, and I’ll add to that. I think that’s right. I’ll add to that. I think our clients, they get the best value out of our software, ones that have integrated it into their their process. So, the time you get that first client phone call, as a lawyer, you’re you’re always assessing, you know, your your your client’s case, and you’re always asking, you know, the question, what are they not telling me? So, I think if you start using the software early on, as your team gets involved and they’re using it, I think you’ll identify the fact patterns and the strength of your case versus your opponent’s case a lot sooner than doing things manually where they’re disconnected and not everybody on the team has access to everything. So, think our best, and that’s really, you know, from a vision standpoint, really the software is designed to help facilitate, you know, sort of best practices and collaboration through every phase of litigation, you know, whether you get to litigation or trial or not. Okay, last question that we have right now in the queue is your software cloud based? I’ll go ahead and take that. Short answer is yes, it is cloud based and that’s, you know, most of our clients prefer to use it that way. We do have a small handful of on prem clients, so we can deliver the solution on premise as well. But I think most firms today prefer cloud based and even large clients that traditionally have been opposed to it. I think we’re seeing the legal community move quickly in that way. So short answer, yes, absolutely. And we have all the security documentation that you might want to fall asleep reading. So we have we have all the best practices and redundancy that you would expect in a professional hosting environment. Okay well that’s all of our questions so we’re going to give you five minutes back Thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. If there’s any follow-up questions or you’d like to learn more about Opus 2 and how we can help your firm, we’re happy to engage with you. And So please don’t hesitate to reach out so thank you so much for your time Kim Thank you for a wonderful presentation. And and great content so everybody have a great day thanks so much and hopefully we will see you soon, we will be at New York Legalweek as well, so if you are at legal tech we’d be happy to meet with you, we have meeting rooms set aside and are available, so thank you everyone. Thanks.