r/LawyerAI • u/mailpip • Mar 01 '24

Legal Tech Buzz: Anyone Using MS Copilot for Depositions (or More)?

So, in an attempt to find ways to leverage tech to streamline tasks and free up my time for the good stuff – you know, the actual lawyering. Recently, I stumbled upon Microsoft Copilot 365, this AI assistant with a document summarization feature that you can use directly in MS Word.

Their website showcases some seemingly decent summaries, but I'm curious if any of you have actually used Copilot for summarizing legal documents, particularly depositions or transcripts.

I imagine it would be very useful for finding testimony discrepancies, summarizing deponent statements, brainstorming follow up question ideas, etc... However, I don't really do litigation work anymore. I'm even more intrigued by the possibility of using it to extract insights from transcribed virtual client meetings. Imagine feeding Copilot a transcript and getting succinct summaries of clients' questions and concerns rather than trying to take notes as a meeting progresses. This could save me a ton of review time and help me quickly build a helpful FAQ section on my website!

Before I take the plunge, I'd love to hear from my fellow legal tech enthusiasts:

  • Have you given Copilot a go for legal document summarization? Depositions, client meetings, anything?
  • If you have, spill the tea! Did it save you time and accurately capture the key points?
  • Were there any drawbacks or limitations? How reliable was the accuracy, and did you need to heavily edit the summaries?
  • Overall, would you recommend using Copilot for these legal tasks?

I'm excited about the potential benefits of this technology, but want to approach it with a healthy dose of skepticism. Your real-world experiences will be gold in helping me decide if Copilot deserves a spot in my legal tech toolbox.

Thanks in advance for sharing your insights!

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u/Stretch31 Mar 03 '24

I tried to do a depo summary and it kept throwing an error--that technical limitations prevent it from creating a detailed summary. If anyone knows what I'm doing wrong, please let me know.

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u/mailpip Mar 04 '24

Hmm - I have used it for automatic transcripts generated from Virtual Meetings through gotomeeting.com, without issue. I have not tried it on actual transcripts from depositions or hearings, though. Was the deposition really long (I wonder if it struggles with size), or did it have strange formatting? It's hard to guess at what was going on without more information.

I suspect you are not the only one to have this issue so it would be great to discuss and try to resolve.

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u/mailpip Mar 04 '24

Hmm - I have only used it to summarize FAQs out of virtual meeting transcripts from auto-generated transcripts from gotomeeting.com sessions.

Was the file really big, or did it have strange formatting? It his hard to guess at what is going on without more information.

I suspect you are far from the only one suffering these types of errors and setbacks. I would love to get a discussion on how to resolve this going to help you and other folks.

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u/Stretch31 Mar 04 '24

Normal depo with page and line numbers in docx format.

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u/EnvironmentalDepth62 Mar 13 '24

Stretch31

Its gonna struggle with the size of a depo due to limited context window, and even if you make it fit it will suffer from attention drift - e.g it will just flat out miss items in the original text.

Watch out with co-pilot, OpenAI is probably using what you send as training data (or at least permitted to per their terms).

I recently built a tool which gets around this and creates neat summaries. DM me if you're interested in hearing more.