With spring coming upon us soon, this seems a good time to take stock of where we are today, what’s coming up, and how our progress stacks up against past proclamations we’ve made.
From Depositions…
We introduced our Deposition Summaries product in Summer 2024 to virtually instant acclaim by those who had seen it. We continue to be flattered by reviews such as, “one of the best applications of AI to a legal process I have ever seen”, “…gives an attorney the tools they need to win…”, “exceptional”, and more. We took a different take on summaries: we started by asking the question: “what does an attorney need from a deposition?”, instead of “how can I apply AI to the way things have always been done?” That change in framing meant that our offerings go well beyond basic summarization to actually providing expert-quality analyses. They help surface contradictions, identify impeachment points, offer cross-examination strategies, develop chronologies, enable readers to assess witness credibility, and provide context for exhibits presented during the deposition. In so doing, they are not only comprehensive, but also insightful and actionable.
To Arbitrations & Trials…
Depositions are one type of legal proceeding. Arbitrations and trials are other more complex proceedings where the strength of case preparation truly makes its presence felt, and where law firms rightfully spend a significant amount of time and resources to secure the best possible outcome for their client. That’s why, based on numerous conversations with trusted clients, we rolled out our Arbitration Summaries and Trial Summaries over the winter (late 2024 / early 2025). As with depositions, our products go well beyond summarization and into the realm of expert-quality analysis: elucidating the key issues and remedies sought, jury selection and key issues (for trials), surfacing detailed chronologies and assessing their relevance to claims, capturing evidence presented and challenges, significant findings from fact witness and expert witness testimony, procedural issues, overall proceeding dynamics, and much more.
To summarize: our deposition, arbitration, and trial summaries accelerate attorneys’ understanding of three things: (1) what’s in the proceeding transcript; (2) what’s important to me; (3) what should I do next.
Proclamation Check: Our arbitration summaries are now approved for use by a premier player in this space, as of this writing.
…Across Multiple Days…
There’s a practical element to expanding coverage of proceeding types as well. Typical depositions tend to be single-volume, meaning a single deposition for a witness in a case. But typical arbitrations and trials are usually multi-day events, and the most useful summaries are those that consolidate the findings from across the multiple days into a coherent narrative. That’s where our Consolidated Summaries Add-On comes in. It works on multi-volume summaries for all supported proceeding types (deposition, arbitration, trial).
It gets even better. Let’s say you have a multi-day proceeding. Clients can use our outputs from the first day to prepare for the second day, or from the 1st day through the 17th day to prepare for the 18th day of a trial. That’s not only because of the speed at which we process your summaries (lots of vendors can do that), but the sheer quality of the summary output that makes it a value-add to your trial prep (not too many vendors can claim that).
Proclamation Check: We had announced that the Consolidated Summary Add-On was in limited release last month (Feb 2025), and as of this writing, it’s live for all our customers.
…For Multiple PDF Document Types.
While perfectly formatted ASCII transcripts are every software engineer’s dream, the real world doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes you have transcripts only in PDF format; worse, they are poorly-created scans of decades-old documents, tilted, with a couple hairs thrown in for good measure, and maybe in the 4:1 PDF mini format. You may also have PDFs of scribbles of plans made on single sheets of paper, complex flow diagrams, medical records with handwritten doctors’ annotations on them, and more. [Some Threadeo team members have notoriously poor handwriting, so we empathize]. Making sense of all this in the context of a legal proceeding can be challenging. That’s why we’ve developed PDF Analyzer, which is still in development as we write this but making excellent progress.
Proclamation Check: We just received approval for use of PDF Analyzer with a large law firm who is using it for a significant matter. The use case here was to provide them with our deposition summaries, which until now worked only with ASCII transcripts, but now with the messy PDFs which was all that they could provide us.
New Proclamation: PDF Analyzer will soon be able to do a lot more, but for now, the best analogy is crawl —> walk —> run.
Conclusion
As we continue to roll out products that offer an ever-increasing level of benefits to an ever-increasing spectrum of legal professionals, we haven’t lost sight of the fundamentals: (1) listen more to what the customer needs and less to the voice that tells you “we’ve always done it this way”; (2) find out the most ambitious thing that you can realistically deliver on in a reasonable period of time; (3) deliver; (4) repeat steps 1-3.
That’s how we march on.