The Evolution of the Digital Courtroom

Law Technology Now

In this episode of Law Technology Now, host Bob Ambrogi talks with Opus 2 International, Inc. CEO Graham Smith-Bernal about his career and the evolution of the electronic courtroom. Graham recalls his early interest in becoming a court stenographer and how at the age of 23 he had the opportunity to establish his company Smith Bernal International. At that time he noticed that the legal industry was driven heavily by precedent and tradition and that he could use technology to establish his company as a service differentiator. Graham was also aware that a lot of lawyers are technophobic, so any software he developed had to be easy to use and with the advent of real time transcription he came up with the idea for LiveNote. He shares that there was a lot of pushback and reticence in the early days, but by exercising the ease of use, increase in efficiency, and leveraging end user feature requests the product became mature as a piece of tech. Graham states that success in any business is about timing and your process and the increase in processing speeds and maturity of the stenography systems availability at the time put his company slightly ahead of the technological curve. He discusses the success of LiveNote and explains how he developed the Opus 2 magnum platform. He closes the interview with an analysis of electronic courtroom evolution and the trends he is currently seeing in tech assisted litigation.

Graham Smith-Bernal started his career as a court reporter in the UK, and founded Smith Bernal International, where he created the LiveNote software. Smith Bernal International went on to become the world's largest international court reporting company and LiveNote became the most widely used litigation support software prior to Smith-Bernal selling LiveNote to Thomson Reuters in 2006. He then founded Opus 2, where he is currently CEO, to continue his work in this area.