Outsource Deposition Services: Benefits + How to Get Started
Rev discusses the benefits of outsourcing deposition services, including why you should use them and how to get started with off-site legal staff solutions.
Depositions are a regular and vital part of the legal process, but they’re not easy to complete or even use after the fact. Hours —if not days— can be spent hearing important testimony from witnesses and other key sources, and that’s not even taking into account the analysis process afterwards.
For practicality and ease of use, these recordings are almost always transcribed, but even when the testimony is turned into searchable, scannable text documents, reviewing these documents can be difficult and time-consuming. This is why many firms have chosen to outsource deposition services, in order to free up their staff for important tasks like strategy creation and planning. Legal outsourcing services (sometimes referred to as offshore legal services) are becoming more and more popular, partially because they make trial preparation and other “busywork” like summarising depositions much more efficient. Getting a high-quality deposition summary with a quick turnaround time at a relatively low cost can make a huge difference in case success.
When oursourcing deposition summaries, it’s important to find a service that prizes accuracy and will provide page-line summaries and deposition memos. This is a topic that Rev is uniquely qualified to discuss, due to our longtime experience in the legal space as well as our recent partnership with SmartDepo.
But what are some specific benefits of outsourcing deposition services? Read on!
1. They’re Cost-Effective
Legal talent is expensive, both for firms hiring and for clients utilizing. That’s why making sure your in-house legal staff solutions are utilized to the best of their abilities is important for your success. Scouring days of deposition transcripts —while a very important task— often isn’t their best use of time, especially as labor costs and billing rates continue to rise.
Firms that outsource deposition services should consider overhead costs when making the decision. When you outsource deposition services, you’re obviously cutting payroll costs, but you’re also saving money on operational costs like office space and business supplies—all tangential costs that come with having dedicated employees.
2. They Can Be Your Subject Matter Experts
Depending on the case, a deposition can cover incredibly complex or technical topics. While it’s always good to have an in-house subject matter expert on the case, it’s not always possible or cost-effective. Lawyers and paralegals are inherently good at researching and investigation, but truly becoming an expert on a topic for a single case isn’t an incredibly efficient use of time, especially for smaller firms.
By using outsourced deposition services, you can gain access to the specific expertise you need without someone on staff having to conduct days of research. Many off-site deposition services offer specific topic experts or AI that can act in their place.
If a deposition review requires deep expertise that the firm doesn’t already have, an outsourced deposition service can not only be more cost-effective, but it can also provide expert insights or point out valuable data that a “crash-course” in-house expert might miss.
3. Your Time Can Be Spent More Effectively
The 2023 Clio Legal Trends Report showed that lawyers spend just 2.9 hours a day on billable work. Considering the long hours lawyers can put in, that’s not a lot of billable time every week. By outsourcing time-consuming, non-strategic tasks like deposition reviews or summaries, firms can save hours of billable time every day. How long does it take one person to review hundreds of pages of deposition transcripts, and how many dollars in billable time is that?
For instance, Rev’s new partner SmartDepo offers deposition summaries as well as Pay-by-the-Page deposition review starting at a mere $1 per page. Compare that with a staffer’s billable rate, and the cost effectiveness is obvious.
4. Outsourcing Can Give Your Staff a Mental Break
Lawyer burnout is a real issue in the legal industry. Nearly 80% of legal professionals report feeling burnout "sometimes" in the past year. The overwhelming demands of the job can cause staff turnover, eroded performance, and even mental health issues.
While stress will always be part of the job, you can ease the mental strain on your staff by outsourcing some of the more menial or repetitive tasks. This not only lightens their workload, but by letting them focus on more “constructive” tasks, the work can also feel more rewarding. It’s hard to quantify what that’s worth, but being able to focus on “high value” work without being ground down by the repetitive day-to-day tasks is energizing, and an energized staff equals a productive staff.
5. Review Times Are Quicker
As we’ve said over and over again in this post, it takes time to thoroughly review a deposition transcript, not to mention the time it takes to write an accurate summary, highlight important information, and provide actionable insights. We’re not just talking about billable hours that can be better spent elsewhere here; we’re talking about the actual time it takes to complete the task. It can take an attorney days to sift through the information.
In contrast, an outsourced deposition review service—especially one that utilizes AI—can turn a deposition review complete with abstracts, key admissions, hyperlinked citations, table of contents, source dialogues, and page or line summaries typically within an hour or less.
When time is of the essence, legal outsourcing services are far more efficient than in-house staffing.
What Type of Deposition Services Can I Outsource?
A lot of time and effort go into a deposition before, during, and after the actual deposition. A thorough outsourced depo service can help during all three phases of the process. You can use deposition services for:
- Deposition transcription
- Deposition summaries for a complete breakdown of your deposition transcript
- Document review in prep for deposition
- Legal brief drafting based on deposition transcription
- Paralegal tasks like case research in preparation for deposition
Why Do Businesses Choose to Outsource?
Businesses choose to outsource to save time and money. There are other reasons, of course, but they almost always ladder back to these two core benefits. According to the Thomson Reuters Financial Insight’s 2023 Staffing Ratio Survey, two-thirds of participating firms said they had outsourced at least one role in 2022, and collectively saved 19% more than if they’d hired in-house.
This saving could be why firms reported a 6.3% increase in their outsourcing spend per lawyer in 2022. The stat also indicates that this trend isn’t going anywhere.
Legal Business Process Outsourcing, or legal BPO, isn’t limited to deposition outsourcing, however. The tasks or positions that a firm chooses to outsource can vary greatly, with results varying just as much.
"I am always looking for an advantage that will help my team obtain the best results for our clients,” said Delaney J. Miller, attorney at Windsor Troy, about SmartDepo. “Using AI technology that helps with efficiency and productivity makes sense. Smart Depo allows us to eliminate one of the time-consuming, yet important, tasks that we do as litigation attorneys. The turnaround time is great and the technology is constantly improving."
Get Started Outsourcing Deposition Services
For an overarching view of how to begin outsourcing your deposition services, we talked to Tina Willis, an attorney at Injury Attorney Florida.
“I would recommend offshore outsourcing for those who have the time and willingness to try and fail with numerous candidates before finding good ones, for whatever tasks,” she said. “It helps a lot if you have enough experience with any given task, to know what specific steps will be involved, the time required, and what good and bad final work products will look like. Then start by giving the person a smaller job to prove themselves.”
If you’re still on the fence about outsourcing or you’re having trouble getting started, here are a few tips for finding and using a deposition service:
- Identify your needs. This can be a long and involved process, but essentially you need to evaluate areas where your own staff are spending too much time/can’t find the time to complete when it comes to deposition-related tasks. Think about deposition summaries, trial prep, transcription, etc. After identifying where you need help, you can find a service that fills those gaps.
- Vet your potential services. Look for credentials and expertise, security measures, features, and offerings.
- Check credentials and expertise. To ensure that the service you employ is competent with technical or sensitive information, look for a service that has a track record with complicated topics, like insurance or medical depositions. Check reviews and client testimonials, too.
- Review features and customization abilities. A service like SmartDepo offers a page/line summary that includes an abstract, plenty of hyperlinked information, source dialogue, user-friendly navigation, line citations, and more.
- Vet security. Look for security measures like OpenAI Zero Data Retention, user-controlled data, SOC 2 Type II compliant servers, PCI compliance, and HIPAA compliance.
- Designate someone to manage your outsourcing. Assign someone (or a team) to be the clear contact point for outgoing and incoming transmissions with the outsourcing team. This will keep the process running smoothly, with clear expectations on each side.
Rev + SmartDepo = A Legal Powerhouse Duo
With industry-leading transcription accuracy and our new ranking as the #1 AI Legal Assistant on G2, Rev is proven to know a thing or two about making the jobs of attorneys easier. So it just made good sense for us to partner with SmartDepo to transform how legal teams prepare for cases.
With SmartDepo’s AI-powered deposition summaries and Rev’s comprehensive suite of services, such as human and AI transcription, AI assistants and notetakers, and the best accuracy and security in the biz, we’re now your firm’s one-stop shop for productivity.
Find What Wins Your Case With Rev
Rev offers everything a law firm needs to streamline workflows, increase productivity, and make attorneys’ lives easier. Let us handle the busywork so you can focus on the work that matters.
