Do Legal Video Costs Help or Hurt Deposition Job Profits?

Published in early 2003 and revived from our archives in 2013, the survey results in this article
reveal the qualities that leading law firms consider important in a legal video service provider.
 

At trial time, have you ever had to cope with videotaped depositions that suffer from poor audio quality or bad looking video?

In your nightmares, do you see yourself at a deposition site screaming, "Where is the !@&% videographer?"

Or possibly your dreams take a more classic form – you slide the tape into your VCR, ready to present to the jury, and the tape is blank!

If you have encountered any of the above scenarios, you are not alone according to a recent survey conducted on a wide cross-section of the worldwide legal community by Accurate Vision, Inc.

Completed in May 2003, a survey of over 125 randomly selected law firms revealed that a surprising number of lawyers and legal secretaries are being frustrated by the same unfortunate scenarios with startling regularity.

For example, when asked if they had any consistent complaint about video-taped depositions that were recorded for their firm over the past year, 32% of all survey respondents replied in the affirmative, with 68% of the affirmative answers being specifically related to complaints about the quality of the audio and/or video.

And if that statistic about quality isn't bad enough, when questioned further about the specific problems they encountered with tape quality, 24% of the above respondents all had the same exact complaint – the video tapes they received were blank! No audio, and no video. Just blank tapes!

With poor audio and/or video quality being the most common complaint by far, unreliability was cited as the second most common complaint in response to the question, "Have you had a recurring complaint about video-taped depositions that were recorded for you over the past year?"

With 17% of all respondents surveyed stating that they had experienced unreliable service on multiple occasions, their individual answers tabulate as follows:

Lack of professionalism was third in the list of recurring complaints about video taped depositions, and cost was fourth.

So what exactly do these law firms need and want from the people who service their video needs?

When asked what qualities they valued most in a legal video service, 56% of the surveyed law firms unanimously agreed that reliability was what they wanted most, with their individual preferences being:

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In addition to surveying law firms that we have never provided service to such as those you have read about in this article, Accurate Vision routinely surveys our active customer base of more than 5,000 lawyers, legal secretaries and court reporters throughout the world. The results of such surveys assist us in ensuring that we consistently deliver the highest levels of customer care and audio-video quality in our trade.

We therefore welcome comments and suggestions from customers and non-customers alike.

Director of Public Surveys
Accurate Vision, Inc.