Most tools in this category sell you a summary. A summary tells you what happened; it does not tell you what you missed. Four things separate software that changes outcomes from software that makes documents. We make one of each kind of tool on this page — the free one and the live one — so read this as the labeled version.
A summary compresses the record you already paid to create. What changes outcomes is the opposite operation: the handful of moments worth a second look — the fifty-word answer that never touches the yes/no question, the narrative run that ate the clock without advancing the record, the follow-up nobody asked. When you evaluate any tool in this category, ask to see the flags, not the summary. The summary is for people who were not in the room; the flags are for you.
A flag you cannot verify in five seconds is a flag you cannot use — not in the next question, not in a motion, not in a mediation brief. Every flag should open its exact place in the record. This is also your quality check on the vendor: if the tool cannot point, it is guessing.
A tool that flags everything flags nothing; the first week of noise is the last week anyone opens it. Ask every vendor for their false-positive rate on clean, direct answers. Ours, on the free grader’s published evaluation, is zero — it flags 96.4% of the moments an examiner would want surfaced and stays silent on clean answers. That abstention is a design choice, not a limitation.
Transcripts are work product. A privacy policy is a promise; architecture is a fact. Our free grader runs entirely in your browser — the transcript never leaves your machine, so there is nothing to trust and nothing to breach. For any tool that processes transcripts on a server, the questions are short: where does the data go, who can read it, and does it train any model.
The Deposition Grader is the after-the-fact half: paste or drop a transcript (.txt, .pdf, .docx), optionally list your outline topics, and get the flagged page — non-answers, long narratives, evasions, hedge stacks, and what your outline actually covered. Free, in your browser, nothing uploaded. Run it on your last transcript before you trust it with your next one — or watch it grade Richard Sackler, Bill Gates, and two sitting Big Tech CEOs first.
Review after the fact has a ceiling: the witness has left the chair. Demur does the same reading during the examination — coverage tracked against your outline as testimony lands, potentially-evasive flags with the source attached, unexpected topics captured before they disappear into the record. One medical-malpractice attorney has now run 17 straight depositions with it.
Software that reads a deposition transcript (or follows the examination live) and surfaces what matters: non-answers, long narrative runs, evasions, outline coverage, and the place in the record for each. The useful kind flags moments; the less useful kind only writes summaries.
Non-answers, long narrative runs, evasive formulations (“I don’t recall,” “I’m not sure,” “I can’t speak to that”), and whether your outline objectives actually got examined — each flag with its page in the record, and a published false-positive rate near zero on clean answers.
The strongest privacy claim is architecture, not policy. The free Deposition Grader runs entirely in your browser — the transcript never leaves your machine. For server-side tools, ask where the data goes, who can read it, and whether it trains any model.
“Live deposition assistance is something we've been talking about for a long time. I think it would be something litigators would find really, really compelling. Something Harvey doesn't do.”
— Litigation counsel, Am Law 50 firm, on the record“We realize this is where things are going… it would be good to make use of these tools rather than be left behind.”
— Thomas Quinn, Miami plaintiff firm owner, on training and quality control across associatesDemur is a team of litigators and AI researchers. The product was developed in stealth across real depositions, not demos — which is why everything on this page reads like an examination and not like a feature list.
The founding-firm proof event: send the raw audio, your real pre-deposition outline, and a binder capped at 10 documents from a closed, redacted deposition. We play it through the live product at deposition speed. You grade what surfaced.