Milestone Reporting is one of the largest and fastest growing court reporting companies in Florida and the United States. Our growth is due to a lot of things, to name a few: affordability, great customer service and employees who truly care about our clients. That said, innovation and a willingness to embrace new ideas and change have made us the industry leader. We were the first court reporting company to fully embrace digital reporting. By doing so, we lowered our prices, lowered our turn-around times and greatly enhanced our scheduling abilities. Of course, at the time, all our competitors and the National Court Reporters Association (a stenography advocacy group) blasted digital reporting as inferior and even illegal. That was 15 years ago. Now the entire industry is shifting to digital reporting and embracing its advantages. We disrupted the industry in a positive way, and now we are doing so again.
All of us have some basic understanding of Artificial Intelligence and its increasing abilities. I am not going to attempt to explain the science behind it, just its application to court reporting. The two biggest applications for AI are real-time court reporting and deposition summaries. Many years ago, our company partnered with industry leaders like Stenograph (yes, Stenograph, the inventor of the Steno machine, makes digital reporting equipment) and Rev.com to bring speech-to-text recognition software to the reporting industry. Our reporters are now able to deploy AI during depositions to provide a real-time stream of everything being said. That means that all our reporters have the ability to stream the text of every word said during a deposition or other proceeding as fast as it is spoken. Prior to AI, only the top 2-5% of all stenographers were able to write at real-time speeds. With real-time, you can instantly review testimony, stream it to experts for review or stream it to colleagues who can offer you feedback during the deposition or proceeding.
Deposition Summaries produced by our AI are simply amazing. What would take an attorney 3-8 hours to produce can be completed by an AI in mere minutes. Every AI summary contains the following: a Table of Contents with a Page/Line Summary, Key Admissions and a Deposition Memo. As you would expect, the Page/Line Summary breaks out and summarizes the entire deposition while hyperlinking back to the original testimony. This makes it incredibly easy to find and understand testimony in the transcript. The Key Admissions portion is even more impressive to me. The AI can determine the underlying legal causes of action based on the testimony (for example, medical malpractice), and then identify the testimony in the deposition that is most relevant to the essential elements of the underlying claim. It is extremely accurate and no amount of writing by me will convey that adequately. Please try it for yourself and we will provide your first summary for free. Finally, the Deposition Memo acts as a narrative summary of the most important testimony identified by the AI.
So, the original question was whether your next court reporter will be a robot. The answer to that question is simply: no. AI is not meant to replace your reporters; it is meant to enhance them. A great analogy can be found in the radiology field. Over many years of testing, the radiology community has found that AI is actually more accurate than humans when it comes to reviewing mammograms for breast cancer. However, when humans work with AI to review mammograms, we have learned that they are even more accurate than AI or humans alone. Similarly, we are never going to turn over your transcripts or summaries to an AI alone. They are always monitored, reviewed and corrected by humans, thereby allowing our reporters to do things that a human alone could never do but maintain human control over the transcript.
When we changed the reporting industry with digital reporting almost 20 years ago, our competitors called it everything from inferior to illegal. Boy, they were wrong. We have increased in size by 1100% in Florida alone. Sadly, many of those same people are opposing the use of AI as they did digital. None of their opposition comes from genuine concern but from their inability to offer the same services and compete in the marketplace. The same people who will tell you that AI is untrustworthy in depositions will turn on the self-driving function of their Tesla or other modern car, they will rest comfortably on a plane that is being flown by autopilot, and they will turn over their healthcare to AI. The conversation should never be about whether we will use either humans or AI. Instead, it must be about how humans can work with AI to make the most efficient and accurate transcripts and summaries.
It truly is very difficult to describe the advantages of realtime transcripts and deposition summaries in a short article. I would encourage you to try them for yourself and, again, we will allow you to do so for free. Just reach out to scheduling@milestonereporting.com and reference this article.
Mike McDonner is the President of Milestone Reporting, Kentuckiana Reporters, Pike Reporting Company and several other leading court reporting firms across the United States.