Austin Lawyer recently sat down with Karl Seelbach, founding partner at Doyle & Seelbach, PLLC. Seelbach is also the co-founder of Skribe.ai, a testimony capture tool. We wanted to learn more about Seelbach: how he got into the law profession, what led him to opening his own firm, and how he manages his time as both an attorney and entrepreneur.
AL: What was your road to opening your own firm?
KS: My path was a pretty straight line. I was at South Texas for law school in Houston, and the first summer I spent the entire summer working at a really great plaintiff personal injury firm, Williams Bailey, which later became Williams Kherkher. And that was a lot of fun. They sent me on some wild goose chases helping investigate some of their asbestos cases. After the first year of law school, I was fortunate that I studied pretty hard and I made good grades. I ended up one of the top two or three students in the class, and that helped me with on-campus recruiting, to get interviews with some of the larger firms, which is ultimately how I got connected with Winstead’s Houston office. They hired me for my second summer of law school. So my path from there was very straight. I started at Winstead in the Houston office in 2006. I worked there for two years before transferring to Austin. I would always jokingly tell people that it was a promotion without a raise in pay. I enjoyed my time in the Houston office, but there’s just something about the Austin environment that was more appealing to me. I worked at Winstead in Austin from Christmas of 2008, made partner, and left in 2015 when I launched my own firm that May.
AL: What kind of work did you do at Winstead?
KS: I did a mixture. When I first started, the firm was reorganizing some of their practice groups. As a first-year attorney, one of the partners told me, “You have to pick a practice group.” Well, how do I know which one to pick? I knew I wanted to do some type of litigation, but should I pick commercial litigation or construction litigation? I also like appellate work, should I join the appellate people? I ultimately joined the commercial litigation section, but still had the opportunity to do some appellate work with a couple of the judges who were working at Winstead at the time. [Former Texas Supreme Court] Chief Justice John Hill was at Winstead at the time, [former Eleventh District Court of Appeals Chief Justice] Bud Arnot was there at the time, [former Texas Supreme Court Associate Justice Craig T.] Enoch was there when I transferred to the Austin office, and I learned a lot. Most of my work before I moved to Austin was in commercial litigation, finance and banking litigation, and a little bit of construction litigation. When I moved to Austin, I had the opportunity to do some personal injury defense work, and that’s where I really found my niche. I found that is what I enjoy doing the most: taking depositions; doing site inspections; trying to figure out what happened, not by sifting through rooms of documents, but by actually getting out there.
AL: So in 2015, you branched out and started Doyle & Seelbach. Do you only do personal injury work, or are there other areas you practice now?
KS: We do other areas, as well. About 70 to 80 percent of our practice is personal injury defense, and the other 20 to 30 percent is real estate litigation, commercial litigation, and one of our partners has a specialized practice involving the Randolph Sheppard Act. We also do some collections work for some commercial real estate clients of ours, helping them pursue past-due rents, breach-of-lease disputes. I’m interested in diversifying. We left Winstead with one client. It did not go as planned. It was a very good career and life lesson on what not to do when you leave a law firm. I told myself, “I’m never doing that to myself again. I’m going to make sure that I’m diversified, that I’ve got a lot of clients and different practice areas.” We’ve got over 30 clients now, institutional clients that send us repeat business across several practice areas. It helps me sleep at night.
AL: When did the idea for Skribe.ai first come to you?
KS: So I’m a tech guy. I tend to be an early adopter. When I first joined Winstead, I was trying to convince my secretary, who was probably in her 50s or 60s (and I was 24), that we needed to digitize the files in the practice management system the firm had. She was resistant at first, but we compromised. I said, “Let’s do it for the next new case we get. I promise, it’ll be great.” She didn’t believe me then, but eventually she did. She realized it was super convenient to have everything paperless.
My first software venture was eDepo, an iPad app. Back then, I was always busy taking depositions, and I thought it would be cool if, after the deposition, all of it got delivered to me in an app with the video transcribed and I could create video clips and search the transcripts. That idea led me to putting my money where my mouth was and launching eDepo, which had ups and downs, successes and failures. I learned a lot before I ultimately closed it to focus on launching the law firm with Trek [Doyle].
But I still had this passion for technology and this idea that there was a better way to capture testimony using software. In today’s world, we don’t need a human to write or type everything that’s said; we can record it and transcribe it with software. If it needs to be cleaned up, we can have a professional transcriptionist do that after the fact. By doing it that way, we can speed up the entire process and reduce the cost.
My cofounder, Tom Irby, owned a court reporting agency that he sold to Veritext years ago. He saw the same problem from a different angle. I’m seeing the problem from the attorney’s side: Why does it take so long and why is it so expensive? Tom realized there was a shortage of stenographers. So we have more litigation, more depositions and hearings with less supply of stenographers.
Once everything moved online during COVID and the vast majority of depositions were taking place over Zoom, we decided it was time to launch this modern alternative to traditional court reporting and testimony capture.
AL: What are some of the stigmas associated with testimony transcription software that you’ve experienced when pitching to potential clients?
KS: I wouldn’t call it stigma so much as lack of awareness. There’s two pieces to it: One is that a lot of attorneys just don’t know that non-stenographic depositions are allowed by the federal rules, the Texas rules, and most state rules. They don’t know because they’ve never had a reason to look and never realized there was an alternative. The other is, when it comes to other dictation software that you’ve used, like Siri, you get frustrated at the quality, the misheard or mis-transcribed words. The quality of the transcription of Skribe and other testimony capture tools is so good and probably within two to five years is going to surpass human accuracy. Yes, they’ve been saying that for years, but that was before we had the benefit of these large language models. We’re able to replicate the entire court reporting process using software: It records the testimony and uses automated speech recognition (ACR) to turn those sounds into words. Before we had these large language models, where this kind of software would fall off in quality is in contextualizing the words the ACR created. It would translate the sounds phonetically, instead of in the context of what was being talked about, which would lead to mistakes like “there,” “their,” and “they’re”; “too,” “to,” and “two.” Now, using these large language models, the software can contextualize the words, and that has just sent the quality of the transcription through the roof.
And the transcript is synced with the video recording, so if there’s ever a question about what was said, you can just click to that part of the recording. You get a non-stenographic deposition whether you do it yourself, use some other non-stenographic party, or use Skribe. With Skribe, you get the result within an hour or two. You can jump right back in, see the video, create clips, share those clips. It really does speed things up. We also deliver professionally proofread transcripts that look just like the court reporter’s transcripts within three to five business days at no extra charge.
Really, testimony capture is low-hanging fruit for modern AI software.
AL: Talk about the history of admissibility of non-stenographic depositions in federal and Texas courts.
KS: The federal rules were changed in 1993 to allow for non-stenographic depositions, meaning depositions were not required to be recorded only by stenographers. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 30(b)(3) says, “…testimony may be recorded by audio, audiovisual, or stenographic means. The noticing party bears the recording costs. Any party may arrange to transcribe a deposition.” In Texas, Rules of Civil Procedure 199(b) and (c) allow for non-stenographic depositions by telephone or remote electronic means. And Rule 203.6 says, “A non-stenographic recording of an oral deposition, or a written transcription of all or part of such a recording, may be used to the same extent as a deposition taken by stenographic means.” Nowhere in the rules does it say the transcript has to be typed or come from a court reporter. In the comments to the 1993 federal amendment, there’s a section that explains the rules require that a transcript of a non-stenographic deposition be provided to other parties in advance of a trial for verification, “an obvious concern since counsel often utilize their own personnel to prepare transcripts from audio or video tapes.1” So the federal rules, when they were being amended in 1993, envisioned transcripts being prepared by an attorney’s own staff, which was OK so long as the other side had an opportunity to review it before trial. Which makes sense because, if you have a non-stenographic deposition, that means the video is the official record and the transcript is just a reference of your video record. Skribe also provides a notary to swear in witnesses, and the notary is also there to provide light technical support. We also have redundancies, backup recordings for both the audio and video.
We’re not anti-stenography or anti-court reporting. We just have heard from lawyers in all areas of practice, particularly family law and personal injury, that the fees have gotten so outrageous that they can’t afford to take depositions. And those kinds of costs trickle down to the client.
The American Bar Association had some resolutions that they passed about a year or two ago. One is Resolution 112, and it talks about how attorneys should be having conversations with their clients about not only using AI, but they should have conversations with their clients if they choose not to use AI and whether you, as an attorney, could have substantially reduced the amount of time and legal fees associated with performing a particular task. And I think we’re going to be reaching the point, the next year or two, that clients and courts in general are going to start questioning attorney fees if they’re too out of whack. If you could have accomplished the task in two hours using this tool, how can you say 20 hours is reasonable because you chose not to use a more efficient path?
AL: How do you manage your time as both a full-time attorney with your own firm and also as an entrepreneur with Skribe?
KS: I am not the CEO of Skribe; my co-founder, Tom Irby, is. I’m more the spokesman. I help with some of the strategic planning and fundraising, pitching, and media presentations. But the vast majority of my time goes to my law firm.
AL: What advice would you give to other lawyers who may have their own law firms or are also interested in starting their own businesses, whether within or outside the law?
KS: I would say you don’t want to have any regrets, so take the swing. And don’t be afraid to ask for help. You’d be surprised how many entrepreneurs are willing to help if you just ask.
ENDNOTES
1 Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26, Notes of Advisory Committee on Rules—1993 Amendment, Paragraph (3), Subparagraph (B).
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