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