Depositions.com made video deposition editing possible on a mobile device from the cloud.
Objective:
Depositions.com, a purpose-built mobile app, was born out of the desire to create a tool that offered greater productivity and flexibility by allowing attorneys and legal assistants to stream, clip, and share video and exhibits from the cloud 24/7.
Court reporting services traditionally utilize a videographer, who provides law firms with a hard copy of recorded depositions and transcripts. When a lawyer needs a clip of that testimony for trial, the videographer must edit the video and provide the necessary hard copy. This process is time-consuming, expensive, and always requires a third party, leaving the lawyer with no autonomy or flexibility when preparing for trial.
Depositions.com believed a cloud-based mobile app and website could solve these pain points for their law firm clients.
Key requirements of the app were ease of use, an intuitive OS- and Opus-style clipping tool, security, and the ability to use the tools without Wi-Fi. The development team included the ability to store related files and exhibits, such as documents and photographs, and made sure transcripts would sync with videos.
Target Audience:
The target audience for the Depositions.com mobile app and website was primarily law firms (with insurance firms as a secondary market). The campaign focused specifically on associate attorneys, paralegals, and office managers.
Associate attorneys tend to be in their late 20s to 30s, extremely busy, somewhat more tech-savvy and brand-conscious than older lawyers and earn over $50,000 a year.
Paralegals range in age from their 20s to their 40s. They are the decision-makers when it comes to which vendors to bring into the office. They earn about $45,000 a year.
Office managers are constantly looking for new technologies and new ways to improve the team's efficiency, although they know onboarding tends to be a challenge. The office manager is often 40 or older and earns about $48,000 to $70,000 a year.
Creative Strategy:
While researching the project, Depositions.com's development team learned that its target market tends to be technophobic (particularly more senior legal professionals), so it designed an interface that was familiar — reminiscent of conventions from YouTube and social media.
To prove that Depositions.com app would not pose an onboarding challenge for the office manager, the organization produced an explainer video that could be easily shared online and which walked the viewer through the app's tools, showing how easily video editing, favoriting, playback, and sharing could be accomplished with just one finger.
Context:
Depositions.com launched in 2020 and became the first app of its kind. As an entirely new product, it needed branding from the ground up.
Overall Campaign Execution:
Paid media was not part of Depositions.com's marketing plan because of the nature of the product. Instead, every prospect had the opportunity to demo the app for free. Depositions.com took a direct-to-consumer sales approach boosted by a free trial for its market of law firms, including enterprise-level firms, which would respond better to more in-depth information. The organization also developed an informative website and explainer video that could be used in person-to-person interactions.
Mobile Execution:
This entire campaign focused on the mobile user — from the interface design to the individual sales experience, from a mobile-formatted overview video to a mobile-first informational website.
While Depositions.com does offer a web interface, the true game-changing nature of the app was that video deposition editing was now possible on a mobile device from the cloud. An enormous amount of development effort went into making sure the interface was easy (and easy for users to understand) on mobile.
Depositions.com solved a real challenge in the legal industry by providing a set of video capabilities and cloud access that attorneys and staff simply didn't have before. Video is an asset at trial, and juries respond well to it. However, before Depositions.com, the steps, cost, and effort it took to have a third-party editor clip video for trial was becoming too unwieldy for law firms.
In the first six months after launch, more than 50 firms signed up for Depositions.com, amounting to 350 individual users. More than 400 legal matters and over 1,000 video depositions were uploaded into the cloud during that period.
