As Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the legal sector evolves, so does the fear among legal workers. Many legal professionals fear that AI will make such a change in the legal sector that human effort will no longer be required.

But, the truth is that many of the misunderstandings regarding AI come from peoples’ limited experience with AI technologies. Instead of fearing AI technologies, we should make use of them since they can be beneficial in many fields, especially in the legal sector.

What if I tell you that you can use AI to focus on analyzing and interpreting legal content instead of organizing it?

Yes, it’s true. You could finally leave the administration work behind and spend your days as you imagined you would when you signed up for law school: helping people and do justice.

Let’s see what Dr. Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio, a behavioral scientist and senior research fellow for Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession thinks about AI in the legal sector:

 “The way to look at it, I think, is that AI, machine learning and deep learning will be a way of complimenting people’s decision-making, allowing us to make the most interesting work our priority. We will be able to answer very complicated questions — key strategic questions — and having more fun doing it. Because the tedious work, which until very recently was still done by having 100 lawyers gathered in a back room to do document review, is now (at least, in much of the legal industry) being done by programs in order to provide lawyers with the best outcome or decision. Therefore, AI can free up lawyers to focus on the more analytical and strategic thinking aspect of tasks − because, despite AI’s ability to locate, distill and organize any quantity of data for the needed information, the interpretation of the information still needs to be done by a human being.”

Dr. Paola makes some great points. Especially when it comes to using AI-powered transcription services for securely transcribing case-related multimedia content. Let’s see why.

Why Do You Need AI-Based Transcription Services?

Much of the data in the world is not in a text form but in a form of spoken words on video and audio recordings or even live events. This data is as relevant as any other form of case data.

As a legal professional, you are probably aware that the content captured in such formats is very difficult and sometimes even impossible to use. The access, the searchability, the organization… they all require effort and time that no legal worker has the privilege to waste. This makes voice transcription services an important part of Legal Case Management.

For years, legal professionals have been relying on transcription services that convert multimedia content into text. But, involving a third party in a process that is delicate by itself may not be the best idea. Especially not today, where technology evolves every day and provides a new solution for each problem we face.

For that reason, our team at Armedia decided to rely on AWS transcription services and help you, as a legal professional, to derive value from all your multimedia case records.

Let’s look at why AWS Transcribe can be the best choice when it comes to transcription services.

Why Is AWS Transcribe The Best Transcription Service Choice?

Building a service that converts human speech to text with the same accuracy as human transcribers is no walk in the park.

Recognizing natural speech is still a challenge for machines. But, despite all of these challenges, AWS managed to develop their Transcribe Service which is capable of producing transcripts that are almost 100% accurate and ready-to-use, without many additional edits.

There are several very good reasons that come to mind, of why AWS Transcribe is such a game-changer:

1. With AWS Transcribe you won’t have to worry about the security of case records, which is not the case with human-powered transcription. Because only you and the machine will be able to have an insight into the multimedia content and its transcribed format.
2. AWS Transcribe is fast and very simple to use. You just upload the multimedia file and within a few seconds, you get a ready-to-use transcription.
3. AWS Transcribe can recognize multiple speakers. This feature is very important since it attributes each piece of texts to the appropriate speaker in the hearing.
4. AWS Transcribe provides timestamps for each transcribed word. This significantly increases the searchability of a case record.
5. AWS Transcribe can add appropriate punctuation to the text as it goes. This contributes to producing intelligible output that can be used without a lot of extra edits.
6. This platform will provide a Confidence Score so you can quickly find the places where AWS Transcribe isn’t exactly sure what the people on the recording are talking about.
7. AWS Transcribe allows you to add a list of custom vocabulary with words you think the platform wouldn’t recognize. These are usually legal vocabulary or non-English names that are not in a common use.

I’m pretty sure you can find yourself benefiting from at least a handful of these features that AWS Transcribe has.

Armedia Legal Module

For legal professionals that want to leave administrative work behind and focus on interpretation, our Legal Module for ArkCase is the right choice. Armedia Legal Module allows you to finally use multimedia content as you would use any other form of case records without spending hours manually sifting through recorded materials, and without worrying about data breach issues. All you have to do is just upload the audio and video files related to the specific case, and you’ll get a properly formatted, searchable transcription.

With the integration of AWS Transcribe, the Legal Module allows you to:

• Transcribe a multimedia content,
• Add timestamps,
• Easily search for specific words and phrases in the video file,
• With one simple click, jump to the exact moment where that keyword is mentioned in the video.

The Armedia Legal Case Management Module enables legal professionals like you to easily organize, access, search through, and manage any case related record regardless of its form.

This Module is built in a way to respond to all of your legal case management needs and save time, efforts, and resources while increasing the security, quality, and value of case videos.

Final Thoughts

Managing case videos and audio recordings is not as easy as managing a Word document. It requires much more time and effort to get the maximum value out of any multimedia file in a legal case.

Transcribing court videos and audio through traditional manual transcription services is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task. This leads to a delay in receiving the text output and excessive labor cost.

For that reason, we relied on Amazon’s AI-powered Transcribe service and integrated AWS Transcribe as the best possible solution for quickly, reliably and securely converting multimedia into a text as well as drastically reducing the cost.

As a platform, we opted for ArkCase. It’s perhaps the only flexible and well-supported open source case management system that companies can use to build specialized solutions. With ArkCase, we’re bringing in serious software technologies provided by Alfresco, Ephesoft, Snowbound, and of course AWS.

With this technology stack, legal workers can let AI do the heavy lifting of transcribing videos.

If you want to find out more about our Legal Module and integration with AWS Transcribe, feel free to contact us.