CaseMark vs SmartDepo: how they compare in 2026

Deposition summaries come in analysis, index, page and line, and narrative formats, and CaseMark says a 200 page transcript comes back in under two minutes. Medical chronologies list each provider by date with diagnoses, ICD codes, medications and vitals. A firm can send examples of its own chronology format and get it back as a one click template. Workspace adds chat across a matter's files, Deep Research, custom agents, persistent memory across conversations and matters, and Overtime Mode, which keeps researching and drafting after the first prompt. Tabular Analysis turns hundreds of documents into one table with a CSV or Excel export. In Source, models draft exhibit indexes, propose clip ranges from a plain language description of the testimony and answer questions across up to 50 transcripts. Insight Pass sits in front of every summary. It reads the selected sources, asks three or four questions about audience, side, purpose and detail, and hands a plan to the drafting models. Quick Actions run one click summarize, research, timeline, organize and find tasks, and Organize proposes a file structure and naming for a matter. Workspace usage is metered in money against a monthly allowance, and larger tasks consume more of it.

The models are what the buyer pays for. The product is an AI deposition summary produced in minutes from a transcript, which the vendor says rests on patent pending technology. The newer platform layer is entirely model work: chat across every deposition in a case, a contradiction finder, theme extraction and automated memos. Human quality review sits on top of model output as a check, not as the production method. Remove the models and what remains is the manual page and line summarizing the product exists to replace.

Deposition summaries cite page and line and come as Word files or hyperlinked PDFs that open at the testimony. Every medical chronology entry cites its source page. Answers in Workspace's Explore view carry Bates citations, and Deep Research returns a synthesis with linked citations and a source list the user can review. After any summary, Interrogate lets a user ask follow up questions across the whole deposition or record set, with each answer linked to the supporting page. For research beyond the customer's files, case.dev's citation service matches each cited case against CourtListener's database of about 10 million opinions. It returns verified, not found or multiple matches, with the case name, court and decision date. No accuracy figure is published for any output. The terms warn that output may not reflect people, places or facts accurately and must be reviewed before anyone relies on it.

Grounding is real and documented. Summaries carry hyperlinked page and line citations to the source testimony, the vendor publishes a comparison of its precise citations against competitors' broad topic ranges, and every summary is said to be reviewed by legal professionals before delivery. Those are design and process controls, not a claim alone. Against them sits a conflict between marketing and agreement, and the agreement governs. The site advertises 100 percent guaranteed accurate page line citations and patent pending technology that can guarantee 100 percent accuracy. The governing terms at the same domain say the Services may contain errors, disclaim any warranty on the quality, accuracy, currency or completeness of the platform or its results, and make the customer solely responsible for checking work product before acting on it. A guarantee the agreement disclaims is not a measured accuracy figure, and no test set is described. The failure modes the agreement names are audio quality, background noise, cross talk and speaker accent, which belong to transcription rather than summarizing.

In Source, the exhibit index starts as a draft that the court reporter edits, matches to matter files and approves. Clip ranges proposed from a plain language request come back with the matched testimony, a confidence value and warnings, and a clip is cut only once approved. The reporter keeps sole authority over the certified transcript, and Source prepares what surrounds it. Summaries can be aimed before drafting through Insight Pass, and every output links back to its sources. CaseMark describes a chronology as an organized starting point whose dates, statements and conclusions still need confirming against the underlying records. At the platform layer, case.dev tracks each unit of agent work as a work item that a person approves or blocks with a stated reason. Its privilege detection service returns a review recommendation, calling for attorney review, on ambiguous documents. Two modes run with no person in the loop. Overtime Mode keeps researching, drafting and revising after the first prompt, and the Operator handles recurring tasks it has learned through email, Microsoft Teams and text messages. Neither has a stated limit on what it may do unattended.

A real review step is committed, and the controls around it are not published. The vendor says legal professionals review every summary before it reaches the customer and lists humans in the loop as one of three trust pillars, a documented gate on every output. Section 6 of the governing terms adds a second check by making the customer solely responsible for verifying accuracy and completeness before acting. Nothing around those two points is published. There is no threshold at which the system defers, no description of what reviewers check or against what standard, no stated reviewer qualification, and nothing on what happens when an error reaches a filed brief.

Ogletree Deakins, Nelson Mullins and Pathway are named as users of CaseMark's platform, and CaseMark counts more than 7,000 attorneys among its users. Fortz Legal Support, a Michigan court reporting and litigation support firm, ran one deposition through several summary vendors alongside peer agencies before choosing CaseMark. After one summary for a client, that client's partner asked for summaries of every remaining deposition in the case, and Fortz now sells summaries as a service. A September 2026 post reproduces one month's usage report from an unnamed mid sized insurance defense firm, for 12 August to 11 September. It shows 38 practitioners working 98 litigation matters, 155 deliverables, 1.25 million pages loaded and 841 attorney hours saved, for a flat $3,500 a month. CaseMark values those hours at about $106,000 on the firm's blended rates and calls that an assumed value. A medical malpractice insurer is described as saving $5 for each $1 spent across 300 panel firms in 36 states. The solutions pages quote results such as 90 percent less document review time for small firms and $11,500 in average savings per case for insurers, without a basis. In the Chock Barhoum LLP story, two weeks of document review shrank to minutes. The partner it features, Sarah Tuthill-Kveton, is also CaseMark's Chief Legal Officer.

Real deployment evidence with substance, short of measurement. Eleven customer firms appear as logos, including Mueller Law, Mann and Potter, Explico, Windsor Troy Law, the Hernandez Legal Group, Rencher Law Group, Amini and Conant, Struble Cohen Trial Lawyers, Broussard Knoll and Conforto Law Group. Four testimonials carry names tied to firms: Wolfgang Mueller of Mueller Law, Delaney J. Miller of Windsor Troy Law, Matthew Struble of Struble Cohen, board certified in civil trial and appeals, and a reviewer at Conant. The quotes include operational detail, such as about 30 minutes to process a transcript and only minimal changes needed on review. No time or cost saving is tied to a named firm, nothing is dated, and a customers page was not opened and may say more.

Training on customer data is ruled out in the terms, and the security page says documents, transcripts and work product remain the customer's. Under the terms, the customer keeps ownership of uploaded data and any interest in the output. Inside a firm, each matter is shared with read or write permission, and a Document Manager seat covers file work without chat or billing access. Custom agents are scoped to the organization, a matter or one person. CaseMark describes the platform as tenant isolated with no commingling of customer data, and Enterprise adds dedicated compute and isolated inference pools. Model providers sign BAAs with CaseMark, and the case.dev gateway serves Anthropic's models from a zero data retention workspace. CaseMark says the architecture itself protects privilege, through tenant isolation, encryption and audit trails. No published policy covers privilege or work product in what the models see or produce.

Confidentiality is covered in general commercial terms, and nothing addresses client confidences as such. Section 9 of the governing agreement is a conventional mutual confidentiality clause: customer content is the customer's confidential information, the recipient must use reasonable care, and disclosure is limited to staff and subcontractors under equal obligations. That can be read in advance. Privilege and work product are never mentioned, on a product whose entire input is deposition testimony. Nothing addresses separation between customers or matters. No retention period is stated; section 2.2 instead reserves to the vendor the right to set how long it keeps customer content. Section 4.2 permits training rather than barring it. Section 2.3 bars submitting protected health information or sensitive personal data unless an Order expressly allows it, a live constraint for medical malpractice and personal injury depositions.

A No Legal Advice clause in the terms says CaseMark does not practice law, that text from its AI tools is for information only, and that no attorney client relationship forms. Users must be 18 or older and may not present output as written by a person. The service is offered only to people in the United States, and personal data covered by the GDPR may not be uploaded without CaseMark's consent. The products are sold to lawyers, paralegals and litigation support staff rather than to the public. Medical chronologies are described as built for legal team review and not as a substitute for medical or legal judgment. No published material sets out how the product supports a lawyer's supervision of the work it produces.

Nothing published addresses the advice line, and this rests on a document read in full. The governing terms of service, retrieved, contain no statement that output is not legal advice, no competence or supervision language, no reference to any rule of professional conduct, and no jurisdiction limit. Section 6 requires the customer to verify accuracy before acting, framed as an accuracy precaution rather than a professional one. The marketing says the product was built by attorneys for attorneys and founded by a practicing civil rights attorney. Its output is meant to be copied into motions and briefs and submitted to courts, which raises the professional responsibility question rather than answering it. The site's claim that legal professionals review every summary is a quality control statement, not a position on advice.

A September 2026 post by CEO Scott Kveton sets out what CaseMark weighs when it chooses a model provider. The factors are retention, the reach of a BAA, training terms a provider can change, and dependence on one vendor. In July 2026 CaseMark signed the Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter. Its CEO argued that a model a vendor hosts itself cannot be withdrawn, repriced or quietly retuned under a customer. The agent layer is open to inspection. Linc, CaseMark's terminal agent, is MIT licensed and built on the open source pi agent framework. Its legal skills follow an open standard published through agentskills.legal, and custom skills a firm commissions are portable to other platforms. No results from testing its summaries or models are published.

No governance position is published for a system whose output is copied into court filings. There is no responsible AI statement, no governance framework, no named owner, no description of pre-release testing, no evaluation results and nothing whatever on bias. The nearest published material is section 4.2 of the agreement, which describes where the models sit and who may see them, stating that Rev's speech recognition and other AI models are proprietary, maintained locally and not shared with any third party; that is a data handling statement rather than a governance regime.

Customer data is kept for 30 days or for the length of the agreement, then destroyed through a process CaseMark says follows ISO standards. Users can delete a file and its chat themselves, and deletion on request is also offered. Access follows least privilege, with user roles, SAML single sign on and multifactor authentication required on every account. Every user action and system event is logged. Data is encrypted with 256 bit AES at rest and TLS 1.2 in transit. External penetration tests run every year, vulnerability assessments every quarter and dependency updates daily. Staff pass background checks and annual security training. CaseMark publishes more than 130 security controls with their status, among them disaster recovery plans tested each year and cybersecurity insurance. A public status page reports uptime and outages, and payments run through Stripe. No commitment on breach notice to customers is published.

The governing agreement covers the product without addressing what happens to transcripts after processing. Retention is acknowledged and then left open: section 2.2 reserves to the vendor the right to establish general practices and limits including the maximum period it will retain customer content, and no period is published anywhere. No deletion commitment is stated. Security is addressed only at the level of section 9.3, which promises measures in accordance with industry standards and applicable law, with no controls named. No incident or breach notification practice is published. Subcontractors are acknowledged in section 1.3, including individual freelancers who perform human-based services, with none named. A data processing addendum and a business associate agreement are incorporated by reference at the parent's domain and were not opened. Section 2.3 places the backup obligation on the customer and excludes vendor liability for loss of data.

The terms of service, last updated 1 October 2026, cap CaseMark's total liability at $100, and more than one claim does not raise the cap. Lost profits, lost data and indirect damages are excluded. The service is provided as is, with warranties of accuracy and noninfringement disclaimed, and any warranty the law requires lasts 90 days. CaseMark's suppliers carry no liability under the same clause. The indemnity runs from the customer to CaseMark, covering use of the service, uploaded data and breaches of law or of the terms. No indemnity runs the other way, and wrong output carries no remedy. Enterprise customers sign a separate agreement on top of these terms, and that agreement is not published.

A real published position, carried mostly by an insurance clause. Section 10 commits the vendor to keep insurance at stated minimums for the term: commercial general liability of one million dollars per occurrence and professional errors and omissions cover for the Service, including network security and data protection liability, of at least two million dollars per claim and four million in aggregate. The rest is thin. The indemnity in section 7 runs only from customer to vendor, with nothing to the customer, including for third party infringement. Section 8 caps liability at fees paid in the previous twelve months for the services behind the claim. Section 6 disclaims all warranties, including accuracy. It carves out a warranty said to be at section 6.2, but no such subsection appears in the published document, so the one promised warranty cannot be read. No insurance certificate or carrier is named.

Inside Workspace, files arrive by upload and leave by download or by saving back to the matter. CaseMark's own comparison with Harvey lists practice management connectors as coming soon in the product. The case.dev platform underneath publishes connectors in depth. Clio Manage is generally available. It imports matter documents, communications and tasks into a vault and exports work product to a CaseMark Output folder in Clio. Two way sync keeps documents from each side separate and halts on conflicting edits instead of overwriting either. Google Drive needs enablement and Box is in preview, and change detection, rate budgets and reconnection are set out for each provider. Developers reach the platform through an API with SDKs for TypeScript, Python and Go, a command line tool, signed webhooks and an MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Source exports the litigation support formats that trial software reads, including MDB, PTX, LEF and SBF.

No integration into practice systems is published. No document management system, case management platform, transcript repository, word processor or electronic signature product is named on the pages read, and there is no integrations page or developer documentation in the navigation or footer. The only connectivity evidence is indirect: section 1.2 of the agreement mentions APIs made available to use the services without saying what they connect to. The workflow described is manual: upload a transcript, receive documents, copy and paste citations into briefs. A Court Reporting Solutions page in the Products menu was not opened and may say more.

Customer data sits in AWS and Azure in the United States. The trust center adds that it can be stored in other countries when a customer needs that. CaseMark hosts its open weight models in the United States. Isolation rises by tier. The standard service isolates each tenant, and Enterprise adds dedicated compute and isolated inference pools. Sovereign Legal AI on case.dev offers CaseMark Core on a dedicated GPU cluster, dedicated instances of frontier models, or a managed deployment inside the customer's own AWS, Azure or Google Cloud account. The processing location for closed models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google is not stated. When OpenAI is down, the gateway routes requests to Azure or Bedrock.

Nothing is published about where the software runs or where transcripts sit. No region, country, hosting provider or data center is named on any surface, and no tenancy model is described: nothing states whether the platform is single or multi-tenant or how one customer's transcripts are separated from another's. The agreement is silent on both, referring only to Rev's servers in the context of storage allocation limits at section 2.2. There are no deployment options, no private or dedicated tier, and no residency commitment of any kind.

A SOC 2 Type II report and HIPAA compliance are stated. The trust center, built on Vanta, lists the 2026 SOC 2 Type 2 report and a statement of HIPAA compliance as documents released through a request form. The same center shows more than 130 controls across infrastructure, organizational, product and internal security, each with its status. The report itself, with its auditor and period, sits behind that request form.

No independent security attestation is published. No SOC 2, ISO, HIPAA certification or any other framework is claimed anywhere on the site, there is no trust center or security page, no auditor is named, and no report is offered at any access tier. The site carries no security badges at all, so there is nothing unsupported on display either, which is why this sits at the floor rather than in the badges-without-scope band. The agreement offers only section 9.3, promising security measures in accordance with industry standards and applicable law without naming a standard. A published customer testimonial refers to extensive discussion with the team on security before purchase, which indicates that security assurance here is a sales conversation rather than a published artifact.

The case.dev gateway offers CaseMark's own Core Large, Core Titanium, Core Mini and Embed V1 models. It also offers OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5, and Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro and Gemini 3.8 Flash. Workspace lets a user pick from more than 100 models, with a cost multiplier shown for each. By its CEO's account, about two thirds of CaseMark's inference runs on open weight models, and its embedding service runs a self hosted open weight model. Anthropic's models are off by default in Workspace and are switched on for firms that ask. Insight Pass uses a reasoning model to plan each report and lighter models to draft it. No commitment covers telling customers when a model or provider changes.

The supply chain is partly disclosed, in two fragments on different pages. The home page carries an icon labeled OpenAI Zero Data Retention among its three trust pillars. It names a third party model provider and the retention terms agreed with it, though no text explains the scope or which features it covers. Section 4.2 of the agreement describes the other half: the vendor's own speech recognition and generative models, stated to be proprietary, kept locally and not shared with any third party. So both a named external provider and proprietary internal models are in use. No specific model or version is named, no location is given, no subprocessor or model provider list is published, and no commitment to notify customers of model or provider changes is published.

Summaries are sold one at a time with no subscription, at $25 for a legal summary. A medical chronology costs $25 plus $0.01 a page, capped at $100 for one record set of up to 25,000 pages. Transcription costs $5 an hour with a $5 minimum. Workspace starts with a free trial for one user with $5 of usage and no card. Pro is $100 per user a month with $100 of included usage, billed monthly with no annual term. Work beyond the allowance draws on prepaid on demand usage at a 30 percent premium, capped by a team spend limit. Document Manager seats are $20 a month, and a BAA plan starts at $200 per user a month with two custom workflows per firm. Teams, for two to ten users, and Enterprise are quoted. So is Source, which is priced on the certified packages, workflow runs and clips a firm produces. The case.dev developer platform passes model costs through at provider rates and opens with $10 of free usage.

A buyer can price the product completely without speaking to anyone. Two purchase routes are published side by side. The platform subscription is 99 dollars per user per month and reduces summaries to a flat 25 dollars each at any volume, with the included capabilities itemized as AI deposition chat, automated memos, contradiction finder, and theme extraction and clips. Standalone summaries are published as a volume table with five bands: 85 dollars for one to nine, 75 for ten to nineteen, 65 for twenty to thirty, 55 for thirty-one to forty, and 50 for forty-one and above. An interactive estimator on the page computes a monthly total against the pay-per-summary alternative and shows the saving. A seven-day free trial is offered with no credit card required and cancellation at any time, and signup is self-serve. The unit is unambiguous throughout, being one summary per deposition transcript. What is not published is any figure for implementation, since none is required.

Workspace is sold to solo and small firms, mid sized firms and Am Law scale teams, with in house teams named among its intended buyers. Source serves court reporting and litigation support firms. The solutions pages cover litigation, personal injury, corporate, regulatory and compliance, real estate and family law, plus insurance carriers on the defense side. The workflow library follows that spread, with 663 litigation, 279 transactional, 182 regulatory, 139 corporate and one family law workflow. Record types include depositions, medical records, pleadings, contracts, recordings, and trial, hearing, arbitration and mediation transcripts. Service is limited to the United States, and the Clio connector supports only Clio's United States region. CaseMark's own comparison names bulk review at Vault scale and the breadth of research sources as areas where Harvey is stronger. CaseMark runs monthly Workspace training, with a recorded session aimed at insurance defense. Government buyers are not addressed.

Coverage is asserted at the level of a whole profession without practice detail or boundaries. The buyer is described as attorneys and litigators generally, with the marketing framed as built by attorneys for attorneys, and a second segment is addressed through a Court Reporting Solutions page for court reporting agencies, which was not opened. No practice area is named anywhere as supported: the named customer firms span trial and personal injury practices but the vendor itself claims no area of specialization, no matter type and no transcript type. Firm size is not addressed, in-house and government use are not mentioned, and nothing states where the product stops. The product is narrow by nature, covering deposition transcripts only, but that scope is implied by the offering rather than stated as a limit.