40 Hours of Deposition Video. Contradictions Found in 20 Minutes.

Complex commercial litigation is a document problem before it's a legal problem. In a recent case I worked on — a multi-party breach of contract dispute — I was handed a discovery set that included over 3,000 documents, 40 hours of deposition recordings, and internal communications going back four years. The opposing counsel had more associates than I had hours.

My team used to run these reviews the traditional way: divide the documents into batches, assign reviewers, create a tagging protocol, and spend weeks building a picture of what we had. It's expensive. It's slow. And no matter how careful you are, things fall through.

The contradiction problem

The most valuable thing in a litigation document review isn't finding what supports your argument — it's finding where the other side contradicts itself. A deponent who says one thing on the stand and another in an email from three years ago. A CFO whose testimony about when he learned about the problem doesn't match the internal message thread.

That kind of inconsistency is gold. It's also buried. When you're reviewing 3,000 documents across multiple custodians and 40 hours of recorded testimony, the chance of manually connecting those dots is low — especially under time pressure.

What the system surfaced

I uploaded the deposition transcripts and the key document set. Within about twenty minutes, the system had processed the transcripts, tagged the key statements by speaker and topic, scored each item by importance, and flagged three significant contradictions between deposition testimony and contemporaneous documents.

One of those contradictions became central to our cross-examination strategy. The witness had testified in deposition that he had no knowledge of the defect until Q3 of the relevant year. The system linked that statement directly to an internal email from Q1 — addressed to him — that explicitly described the defect in writing. That connection was in the documents. My team would have found it eventually. The system found it in the first pass.

How I actually use it

I don't use it as a replacement for document review. I use it as a first pass that tells me where to focus. The importance scores help me prioritize which documents my team should read closely versus skim. The contradiction flags go straight to trial prep. The case summary gives me a current picture of where the case stands as new evidence comes in.

In a case this complex, having a system that updates the overall picture every time new evidence is added — and only changes the summary when something significant has shifted — is the difference between feeling in control of the case and feeling buried by it.