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Revolutionizing Legal Practice with Dylan Ruga of Steno · Justice Team Podcast

• 0:02
  Bob: Welcome to this episode of the Justice Team podcast
• 0:05
  on the Justice Team Network.
• 0:06
  And today we have on a visionary entrepreneurial trial lawyer, Dylan Ruga.
• 0:11
  What's up, man?
• 0:11
  Glad to be here.
• 0:12
  So I've known Dylan for years and we talk outside of our owning law firms,
• 0:16
  being trial lawyers, but as business owners and entrepreneurs, Dylan
• 0:19
  also co founded a technology company called Steno, which we're going to
• 0:24
  talk about how it's revolutionized how lawyers practice, how they do
• 0:28
  things with depositions and how they actually keep their bottom line lower.
• 0:33
  Um, Dylan's going to talk to us about his law firm Stalwart,
• 0:35
  which is here in Los Angeles area.
• 0:38
  And they're doing amazing things, getting big verdict after big verdict
• 0:41
  and kind of, You know, Dylan's background, how, how we got here.
• 0:44
  Um, so Dylan, people don't, you started out on the defense.
• 0:48
  Dylan: I did.
• 0:49
  Yeah.
• 0:49
  On the dark side.
• 0:50
  Bob: Dark
• 0:50
  Dylan: side.
• 0:52
  Yeah.
• 0:53
  Yeah.
• 0:53
  Yeah.
• 0:53
  So, uh, at a law school, um, you know, I really started my career
• 0:57
  just kind of chasing the prestige.
• 0:58
  I, you know, I did law review at law school.
• 1:01
  I went to the best law school I can go to, did law review.
• 1:04
  What bad advice.
• 1:05
  I know, I know.
• 1:06
  And then I worked for a, uh, federal district court judge.
• 1:09
  I clerked for a and then I went to the Steptoe and Johnson.
• 1:12
  Steptoe and Johnson, yeah.
• 1:14
  Yeah.
• 1:14
  Chasing the prestige.
• 1:15
  Um, but, um, you know, the, the name of the game at those big firms is just
• 1:19
  Bill Hours and just put your nose down and, and Bill Hours, which, which I
• 1:23
  did and made partner and did all that kind of, um, play the game for a while.
• 1:27
  But then once I made partner, I just didn't.
• 1:29
  I looked around and I wasn't very satisfied.
• 1:31
  I wanted to try cases and be more entrepreneurial.
• 1:33
  And that's just not the environment to do it.
• 1:34
  What
• 1:35
  Bob: type of law were you practicing when you were on the dark side?
• 1:38
  Dylan: Uh, complex civil litigation, although I started to, um, uh,
• 1:42
  really established a specialty in, uh, legal malpractice.
• 1:45
  So I was, Defending, um, lawyers at big firms that were getting sued for
• 1:49
  malpractice and, and carved out a little niche in that area for myself.
• 1:52
  Bob: Any of our friends that you can mention?
• 1:54
  I
• 1:54
  Dylan: won't name any names.
• 1:55
  I don't think you can.
• 1:56
  Bob: No, but one of the other things is, you know, you now, you also
• 1:59
  specialize in legal malpractice.
• 2:00
  I know every time I get a referral, I just Push it to you on attorney share say
• 2:04
  Dylan's the guy I'm not gonna touch this.
• 2:06
  This is your wheelhouse I think you're also are you certified in it?
• 2:09
  I am by the state bar.
• 2:10
  Yeah.
• 2:10
  Wow.
• 2:11
  What's the process like to get
• 2:12
  Dylan: certified?
• 2:12
  That's not that bad.
• 2:13
  It's basically like a mini bar exam.
• 2:15
  You got to go and sit for it sounds terrible Yeah, but if you practice in the
• 2:19
  area, it's not that hard Yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 2:21
  Bob: way and stalwart does also personal injury, very well known for doing nursing
• 2:25
  home abuse cases, medical malpractice.
• 2:27
  Dylan: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:28
  Um, about, um, four years ago, I partnered up with Sean O'Neill, um, who had a
• 2:34
  great, um, kind of elder abuse practice.
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  Uh, and from there we brought on, um, Steve Heimberg and, uh, Steve
• 2:40
  Heimberg is kind of a stalwart.
• 2:42
  Uh, in the medical malpractice space and, um, Steve and Sean have
• 2:47
  built out a pretty robust, uh, medical malpractice, uh, practice at
• 2:50
  Stalwart now and has been cranking.
• 2:52
  Bob: Yeah, I actually, I have Sean at the top of my waterfall for those
• 2:55
  because, I mean, we've had, because again, like, I'm a big fan of like,
• 2:59
  we can reinvent the wheel, learn it in my firm, but we do not do nursing
• 3:02
  home abuse or medical malpractice.
• 3:04
  So I will partner with Stalwart on every one of these cases and we've gotten some
• 3:07
  substantially sized checks in the mail.
• 3:09
  from the great work that you guys have done.
• 3:11
  So thank you for, uh, not knowingly sponsored my
• 3:14
  drinking habit in the podcast.
• 3:16
  Dylan: Well, thank you.
• 3:16
  Yeah, medical malpractice and yeah, nursing home stuff.
• 3:18
  It is, um, it seems like it's relatively easy.
• 3:21
  You know, you, you get a call from somebody.
• 3:23
  It's like, oh, like I went to a doctor for one thing and I left paralyzed.
• 3:27
  And it's like, well, obviously there's medical malpractice, but
• 3:30
  proving up that case and all the medicine involved and, and deposing
• 3:33
  doctors and hiring the experts.
• 3:34
  It's, it's pretty complex.
• 3:36
  Bob: Yeah.
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  And I, Steve Heimberg literally wrote the book on some of these things.
• 3:39
  He did.
• 3:40
  Dylan: Yeah.
• 3:40
  Bob: Yeah.
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  And I think that's the challenge.
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  And I talk to Sean all the time, because he's literally in every
• 3:44
  one of the Justice HQ spaces.
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  I could see him.
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  He's down there right now with some of our other friends.
• 3:48
  On the phone.
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  On the phone.
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  Pacing on the phone.
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  I could see him like drilling people down in depositions and humiliating them.
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  But it's all, one thing that I've learned through him is all the shell games
• 3:58
  that a lot of these nursing homes play.
• 4:00
  But he knows the people that actually own them, the new shell that they create.
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  And how to make that noise,
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  Dylan: you know, they do that, uh, hide all their assets.
• 4:07
  And, and, uh, it's a pretty dirty industry.
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  And, and so, uh, the great thing about Sean is he kind of rolls up his sleeves
• 4:12
  and, and starts to peel back the layers of the onion, whereas a lot of, um, attorneys
• 4:17
  don't, and then, and then they may get a big award, but it's uncollectible.
• 4:21
  Bob: Yeah.
• 4:21
  And I think your firm's done a very good job of like finding a recruited,
• 4:24
  recruiting really talented lawyers.
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  And like Sean was at a firm where.
• 4:28
  He was literally doing most everything, but he wasn't a partner there.
• 4:32
  And
• 4:32
  Dylan: yeah, I think actually thinking back, I think you were
• 4:34
  the guy that introduced me to Sean.
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  So thank you, man.
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  Forgot about that.
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  I
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  Bob: was like, this is a special guy.
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  And like, this is more where your firm is going, but no, I mean, this is where the
• 4:42
  beauty of community is and where it is.
• 4:44
  But that's that's tearing the page a little bit here because I want to
• 4:46
  talk to you about technology because the thing that I've been very excited
• 4:49
  about is when you launch Steno.
• 4:52
  Um, and in its infancy, we were one of the first partner vendors
• 4:55
  of Justice HQ, and I know our firm uses you on almost everything.
• 4:59
  Um, and if you're out there watching, Steno is a platform.
• 5:03
  It's a technology company that uses court reporting services.
• 5:06
  It does deposition summaries through artificial intelligence, which we
• 5:08
  use constantly because you could actually query a bunch of all the
• 5:11
  depositions within the system.
• 5:13
  Within their system, you can add other ones.
• 5:14
  And we'll, we're going to talk more about that, but the, for the platform
• 5:17
  is so seamless that it's what I'm taking a lot of expert depositions.
• 5:21
  Then that's primarily what I do.
• 5:22
  What I, our firm with my role, cause I love doing those things, by the way, I'll
• 5:25
  pinch hit for anybody wants to buy me a bottle of boss hog from whistle pig.
• 5:28
  I will take your expert deposition in.
• 5:30
  Spine injury cases.
• 5:31
  So anyway, solved.
• 5:33
  No, but I think, but the platform is so easy to use where I can easily
• 5:37
  upload all of the, the exhibits I want to use, mark them, annotate them.
• 5:41
  And it's very easy for the witness to be able to do it too.
• 5:45
  Dylan: Yeah.
• 5:45
  Thanks.
• 5:45
  So you're talking about, um, so for those that don't know, Steno is a, uh,
• 5:48
  court reporting company that, um, I started with a couple of co founders
• 5:51
  in 2018 really to solve a problem that I was experiencing at my firm.
• 5:55
  So, um, I started my firm in 2016 and was doing everything on contingency.
• 6:00
  And as we all know, um, it's expensive to bankroll, uh, all these cases.
• 6:05
  And so in a matter of couple of years, I ran out of money at my firm
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  and, um, I took out the P and L and, and looked at my largest expense.
• 6:13
  And for most cases it was court reporting.
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  So That caused me to start looking around for a court reporting agency
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  that would agree to defer its payments until my case is settled
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  to solve that cash flow problem.
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  Um, and there weren't any that was willing to do it for me.
• 6:26
  And that's kind of where Steno started.
• 6:28
  So, um, Steno, um, started as a court reporting agency
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  that just a first payment.
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  And, um, from the very beginning, we understood that, um, leveraging
• 6:38
  technology was going to be important.
• 6:40
  So in the pandemic, um, when everything went remote.
• 6:43
  Um, everybody started taking depositions on zoom and we thought like, there's
• 6:47
  got to be a better way than doing this just through zoom, because zoom
• 6:50
  is great for meetings, but there's really no way to manage exhibits
• 6:54
  kind of seamlessly within zoom.
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  So we built, um, an app that you can install in zoom called zoom,
• 6:59
  uh, uh, steno connect for zoom.
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  And basically this is, um, for trial lawyers who want to take
• 7:05
  remote depositions more seamlessly.
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  So as you were saying, you can kind of drag and drop your exhibits
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  into the zoom platform and.
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  They're all confidential until you mark them and then you can annotate them and
• 7:14
  do whatever you want all within Zoom.
• 7:16
  Bob: And I think it's good because like when I use it, I will load up maybe the
• 7:20
  10 exhibits I may or may not use, right?
• 7:23
  And I already have them usually marked for trial because I like to match that up.
• 7:26
  That's, I try to be in that zone when I get there.
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  But that's what I love is I don't have to use them, but they're already there.
• 7:33
  Right.
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  And once they're there, they're automatically attached.
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  It just takes the pain way out of it.
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  So it allows me, I could take four or five expert depositions a day.
• 7:40
  Okay.
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  And everything's already loaded up and ready to go.
• 7:42
  Dylan: Yeah, yeah, we thought, we thought about like how could we best
• 7:45
  replicate kind of what the experience was before everything went remote.
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  And the way it used to be is we would walk into a conference room with like
• 7:51
  a banker's box full of documents.
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  And, you know, and so we created this kind of digital version of
• 7:55
  the banker's box where you can drag and drop whatever you want.
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  And maybe you'll use them, maybe you won't, but they'll be there for
• 8:01
  you in case you want to Yeah, and I
• 8:02
  Bob: like taking depositions on multiple screens.
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  We'll all have Steno Connect up on upper left.
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  Upper right.
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  I'll have the document that I'm ready to go that I'm like, want to
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  be able to purview or then push over.
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  And then at the bottom is like my actual outline of the stuff I want to go over.
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  So I usually run three screens when I do it.
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  So when I'm.
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  I'm actually never actually looking at the department probably freaks them out.
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  Cause I'm like looking at another screen or looking down, but never at them.
• 8:24
  Dylan: I'm gonna have to check out your setup.
• 8:25
  That sounds pretty cool.
• 8:26
  Bob: It's actually in my whiskey room in my house.
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  I have two monitors and I plug in a surface pro and I have three.
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  It all
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  Dylan: comes back to whiskey.
• 8:33
  Bob: Oh, it does.
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  And it's, it's also very disarming.
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  People you log in and like, are you at a bar?
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  It's like some neurologist at UCLA is like, what is your problem?
• 8:40
  And then they start bringing up whiskey and then it's very disarming.
• 8:43
  And all of a sudden you're getting concessions.
• 8:45
  But again on technology and I like we talked a lot about this I've used
• 8:48
  steno as a technology company and when you rolled out transcript genius I
• 8:52
  mean, we got out of calls like dude, you got to show me this and we've been
• 8:55
  playing around and it's it's beautiful You're still in the beta though, right?
• 8:58
  Dylan: Yeah, although we are going to officially launch it on October 24th.
• 9:02
  So just coming up.
• 9:03
  Bob: Yeah Yeah, it's about to be generally available to everybody.
• 9:05
  Well, yeah, so we're gonna have to push up this episode for because 1024 is
• 9:08
  next week Yeah, it's coming up dude.
• 9:10
  That's all so if you're watching or listening, it was probably come up by now,
• 9:13
  but Deposition transcript is an actual free service if you use Steno, free, it's
• 9:17
  not like these other services, but you can go to your case and it has all the
• 9:21
  depositions you've taken for that case, you can ask it questions like I was doing
• 9:24
  one generally across the population of all of your depositions, show me this expert,
• 9:29
  did this expert ever comment on XYZ?
• 9:32
  And deposition transcript actually found it.
• 9:33
  And it was in a trial that I had done years ago.
• 9:36
  And then you can query from there, right?
• 9:37
  You could say, what did they say about their earning history?
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  Then I asked it to give me a summary of that trial.
• 9:43
  Because I remember, I mean, I did it.
• 9:44
  I knew it intimately.
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  And it spit it out.
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  I was like, this is really good.
• 9:46
  Yeah, yeah, that's, uh,
• 9:48
  Dylan: it's funny.
• 9:48
  Like, people, we get that reaction a lot, you know?
• 9:50
  Like, um, a lot of other companies are starting to use a quote unquote
• 9:54
  AI to generate, um, Um, deposition summaries, which like I've never
• 9:58
  found to be all that helpful.
• 9:59
  Right.
• 9:59
  Like basically reducing a hundred page transcript to a 10 page summary.
• 10:04
  Yeah, I guess it saves you a little bit of time, but really the power
• 10:06
  of leveraging AI is to interrogate your transcript and ask it to surface
• 10:11
  the information you care about.
• 10:12
  Bob: And then on yours, it actually has a verification process where you
• 10:15
  can go back and see where it's citing the source to make sure it's accurate.
• 10:17
  Dylan: Everything's hyperlinked because, um, you know, one of the
• 10:20
  things that people are most concerned about is, you know, um, hallucinating.
• 10:23
  Yep.
• 10:24
  And so you want to make sure that you can verify everything.
• 10:26
  Um, we use transcript gene, this a lot of my firm and, and one
• 10:29
  of the ways that we use it is.
• 10:31
  When we get, um, hit with motions for summary judgment from the defense,
• 10:34
  they'll say, well, you, you know, you don't have evidence of X and then
• 10:38
  you can plug in transcript genius.
• 10:40
  You can say, show me all evidence we have to refute, uh, this statement and it'll,
• 10:45
  it'll go through all your transcripts and find all the evidence that you have.
• 10:47
  And it's very quick way to oppose motions for summary judgment.
• 10:50
  Bob: Wow.
• 10:50
  I mean, it's such a time saver.
• 10:52
  It used to take us forever to do this.
• 10:53
  Yeah.
• 10:54
  From reading paper depositions to even electronic ones.
• 10:56
  Um, but yeah, there's people do their summaries the way that they like them.
• 11:00
  You can actually learn and it could, it could do it how
• 11:03
  you generally like to do it.
• 11:04
  But I think the, the hyperlink thing is critical.
• 11:06
  If I, if I see a product and it doesn't have a hyperlink feature,
• 11:08
  like I'm not going to just trust.
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  Dylan: You can't, you can't trust AI yet.
• 11:12
  I mean, maybe down the road things will get better, but you're always going
• 11:15
  to have to, it's always the first step and you always have to verify, you
• 11:18
  know, especially when you're submitting
• 11:18
  Bob: things to the court or making judgment calls.
• 11:20
  You know, and the one thing that the transcript genius will do is for
• 11:23
  free, you can download depositions.
• 11:26
  Other depositions of other cases that were not done with Steno or, and that's
• 11:30
  you can, I mean, and then you have your whole database to be able to do stuff
• 11:33
  Dylan: with.
• 11:33
  Yeah.
• 11:33
  Yeah.
• 11:33
  So you can ingest whatever transcripts you have, even if it's not with Steno right
• 11:37
  now, um, it needs to be in a dot TXT file.
• 11:40
  That's just because it makes it easier for us to ingest it, but
• 11:43
  eventually we'll be able to ingest in any format, including PDF.
• 11:47
  The thing with PDFs is.
• 11:48
  It's a little bit tricky because you got to OCR at first and then
• 11:50
  the OCR process isn't perfect.
• 11:52
  And,
• 11:52
  Bob: um, well, I mean, most of all, my PDFs are already OCR.
• 11:55
  Yeah.
• 11:56
  People aren't doing that.
• 11:57
  Dylan: Uh, yeah, they are.
• 11:57
  But I'm just saying that, like, sometimes when you OCR something,
• 12:00
  it'll like, Instead of like doing it perfectly, it'll, it'll come back
• 12:04
  a little bit warped, you know, like just the OCR process isn't perfect.
• 12:08
  So if you have your, if you have your deposition transcripts
• 12:10
  and TXT file, then it's,
• 12:12
  Bob: so what do you think the future of, of Steno is?
• 12:15
  Cause you guys, it seems like every year or two, you guys
• 12:17
  come out with a new feature.
• 12:18
  That's badass.
• 12:19
  Dylan: Well, we always try to stay ahead of the curve.
• 12:21
  So, uh, what the future is, um, you know, it's interesting.
• 12:24
  I'm not sure yet where, what's going to be next.
• 12:26
  Um, I think that there's a lot of questions around digital reporting,
• 12:30
  um, which is not yet a thing in California, but it is a thing in other
• 12:33
  states, Florida, New York, uh, Chicago does a lot of, uh, digital reporting.
• 12:39
  Um, and you know, digital reporting is, um, basically using a speech to text,
• 12:44
  uh, kind of model instead of having a traditional stenographer there.
• 12:48
  But you still need humans on the backend to clean that up.
• 12:51
  So what happens is, um, you have basically, um, someone hit
• 12:55
  record on an audio recorder.
• 12:56
  Then you use technology to turn that into a transcript, but then you need
• 12:59
  still a human to listen to the audio.
• 13:02
  And then read the transcript and then, and then correct any, um,
• 13:05
  you know, well, I've seen some
• 13:06
  Bob: of this where it's almost like these, these, these platforms
• 13:10
  are like 99 percent accurate.
• 13:12
  It's crazy.
• 13:13
  The, the accuracy I've seen on some of these.
• 13:15
  Dylan: Yeah.
• 13:16
  Um, and 99 percent accurate is, is good enough for a lot of things.
• 13:20
  Like if you're watching your favorite television show and you have closed
• 13:22
  captioning and stuff like, Um, 99 percent accurate is good enough there.
• 13:26
  Um, for transcripts, you want things to be, many times I've
• 13:30
  Bob: taken a deposition or been in a trial, and the transcript was dead wrong?
• 13:34
  Yeah.
• 13:34
  Like, that's why I get all my video taped, which we do with the Sten02, because I
• 13:37
  remember, like, that's not what was said.
• 13:39
  And I'll go back and I'll look.
• 13:40
  At one big moment in trial, we're like, This person said, I remember this, this
• 13:44
  person saying that I was going X amount miles per hour, but the transcript says
• 13:48
  something different and the defense went all in on like this being the,
• 13:51
  this, and I knew on video it was right.
• 13:53
  So I remember playing that video after that, that guy up on the stand and
• 13:56
  they played the video and I heard the juror say, the transcript is wrong.
• 14:00
  It was like a big impeachment moment for a lot of things.
• 14:02
  And
• 14:03
  Dylan: yeah, yeah, you know, um, court reporters are human too.
• 14:06
  And, and to be a court reporter, I think, uh, that you need to, uh,
• 14:10
  Basically, um, be able to do it at a certain speed and a certain accuracy,
• 14:13
  but the accuracy is not a hundred percent in order to be a court reporter.
• 14:16
  And there's going to be some inaccuracies in the transcripts.
• 14:19
  But one of the things Steno does.
• 14:20
  Um, as we have a quality kind of control process where we will, um, review court
• 14:26
  reporter's work and, and if we spot, uh, inaccuracies, we'll go back to the court
• 14:29
  reporter and ask them to clean it up.
• 14:30
  Bob: Yeah.
• 14:31
  Well, well, Dylan, thanks for coming on this episode of the Justice Team podcast.
• 14:34
  And I'm a big fan.
• 14:34
  If you listen to a lot of stuff that I do, if somebody's building technology in
• 14:37
  the legal tech space, I like when lawyers are building it because you're solving
• 14:41
  pain points that you have at your firm.
• 14:44
  Love it.
• 14:44
  And that's why I'm a big fan of Steno, big fan of Dylan Ruga.
• 14:48
  Thanks for coming on, brother.
• 14:49
  Big fan of yours as well.
• 14:50
  How do we find you, by the way?
• 14:51
  Dylan: Uh, dylan at steno.
• 14:53
  com or dylan at stalwartlaw.
• 14:55
  com.
• 14:55
  Either one, either one works.
• 14:56
  Bob: Perfect.
• 14:57
  Were you, were you a fan of Dylan on 9210?
• 15:00
  Dylan: You know, that was actually the first time people
• 15:03
  started recognizing my name.
• 15:04
  Before that, before that, I'd be like, hi, I'm Dylan.
• 15:06
  They'd be like, what's your first name?
• 15:07
  I'd be like, bro, come
• 15:09
  Bob: on.
• 15:09
  I love it.
• 15:10
  Well, find us at www.
• 15:13
  justiceteamnetwork.
• 15:13
  com.
• 15:13
  Thanks for listening.