The deposition summary that used to take a whole afternoon.

Here's how deposition summaries used to work, for a lot of us. You'd sit down with the transcript — sometimes two hundred, three hundred pages — and read the whole thing, cover to cover, page by page. Then you'd pick up a dictaphone and talk into it for a while, trying to compress hours of testimony into something a secretary could type up: the key admissions, the contradictions, the moments that mattered. Then someone else would sit with your recording, trying to make sense of you thinking out loud, and type it into something resembling a summary. It was a whole-afternoon task, sometimes a whole-day task, and it happened every time a deposition landed on your desk.

What changed

Now a paralegal uploads the transcript — as a PDF, directly, no copy-pasting two hundred pages of text — and in under a minute has a structured summary: the key admissions on the issues that matter, contradictions flagged against other evidence in the file, and a short list of the strongest openings for cross-examination. Every claim is tied back to a page and line number in the source transcript, the same way a careful paralegal would cite it by hand.

That alone would be a good tool. What makes it something a firm can actually trust is what happens next.

The part that makes it safe

The summary isn't the end of the process — it's a first draft. It's watermarked as a draft until an attorney reviews it, and every summary comes with an explicit sign-off panel: what needs to be verified, what the AI is confident about and what it isn't, and a clear note that nothing here is legal advice. The paralegal can forward it directly to the assigned attorney for review, right in the same workspace, and it isn't marked final — isn't exportable — until that attorney has signed off.

That loop is the entire point. The AI does the exhausting first pass: reading everything, organizing it, surfacing the parts that matter. The attorney still makes the actual judgment calls. Nothing changes about who's responsible for the work product — what changes is how much of the grinding, mechanical part of getting there is left for a human to do by hand.

Why this is the one we built first

Because it's the clearest version of the whole idea behind Paralegal Power-Up: a paralegal doing genuinely more, with real AI capability behind them, inside guardrails a risk-averse firm can actually trust. It's not a shortcut around the attorney's judgment. It's what lets that judgment show up faster, on a cleaner draft, without an afternoon lost to a task that a computer can now do in the time it takes to make coffee.