The Old Way: 40 Hours of Attorney Time Before You Even Walk Into the Room
If you have been through litigation in New York, you know that deposition preparation is one of the most time-intensive parts of the process. Three years ago, preparing for a single deposition in our practice meant forty hours of attorney time. Reading every email. Every contract. Every prior deposition transcript. Building a chronological timeline. Writing detailed outlines. Running mock question-and-answer sessions. By the time we walked into the room, we had invested a week of senior attorney hours — and the client had paid for every one of them.
That is how deposition prep has worked in New York litigation for decades. It is thorough. It is also enormously expensive, and a significant portion of that time is spent on mechanical work — organizing, searching, cross-referencing — rather than the strategic thinking that actually wins depositions.
How AI Changed Our Deposition Preparation Process
At Travis & DeBlase PLLC, we rebuilt our deposition preparation process around AI tools designed specifically for litigation practice. The difference is not incremental. It is structural.
Here is what happens now. Our AI system pulls all communications from the parties’ discovery databases and creates a chronological narrative with key decision points flagged automatically. It identifies the moments where the story changes — where commitments were made, where timelines shifted, where the facts get uncomfortable for one side or the other. What used to take a paralegal two full days now takes minutes.
The system then runs the client through approximately two hundred predicted questions based on similar depositions in the same practice area. These are not generic questions pulled from a template. They are pattern-matched against actual depositions in comparable New York cases, weighted by what opposing counsel in this jurisdiction tends to focus on.
Finally, the AI highlights the three areas where testimony is most likely to create exposure and the five areas where we have strength. That risk assessment gives us a strategic map before we have spent a single hour on manual review.
Four Hours of Human Work — And Better Preparation
With the AI-generated brief in hand, I spend about two hours reading the analysis and doing a recorded practice deposition with our junior associate using the AI-predicted questions. We take another hour adjusting strategy based on what we learn in that session. A final hour goes to refining the outline and identifying any remaining gaps.
Total investment: four hours of attorney time.
Here is what matters most about that number: it is not just faster. The preparation is better. I am not spending thirty-five hours on low-value recall work — hunting through documents, building timelines from scratch, guessing at what the other side might ask. I am spending four hours on the work that actually matters: figuring out what story we are telling, what we are protecting, what we are willing to concede, and where the landmines are.
What This Means for New York Litigation Clients
For businesses involved in litigation in New York — whether it is a commercial dispute in Manhattan, a construction matter in the Bronx, or a contract case anywhere in the five boroughs — the practical impact is significant. Deposition prep that used to cost tens of thousands of dollars in attorney fees now costs a fraction of that amount. And the quality of preparation has improved because the senior attorney is spending time on strategy rather than document management.
This is not a marginal improvement. It changes the economics of litigation. Cases that might not have been worth pursuing because of the cost of preparation become viable. Clients who would have been priced out of thorough deposition prep now get the same level of preparation that large firms provide — sometimes better, because we are not spreading the work across a team of junior associates who each see only a piece of the picture.
The AI Did Not Prep the Deposition. I Did.
I want to be clear about something: the AI did not prepare the deposition. I did. The AI handled the mechanical work — the sorting, the searching, the pattern-matching, the question prediction. That turned out to be exactly the work that was preventing me from actually thinking about the case.
This is the real promise of AI in New York litigation practice. Not replacing the attorney. Freeing the attorney to do the work that requires human judgment — reading the room, anticipating opposing counsel’s strategy, making real-time decisions about what to pursue and what to leave alone.
The firms that understand this distinction are going to deliver better results for their clients at lower cost. The firms that do not are going to keep billing forty hours for work that should take four.
Talk to Us About AI-Enhanced Litigation in New York
If you are involved in litigation in New York and want to understand how AI-enhanced practice can reduce your costs while improving your preparation, Travis & DeBlase PLLC can help. We are a Manhattan-based law firm that has built our litigation practice around AI tools that deliver real results — not marketing buzzwords. Contact us to schedule a consultation.