Cloud Court vs Opus 2: how they compare in 2026

Gibson ingests deposition and trial transcripts in common formats and extracts topics and keywords from them. It pulls every question and answer pair on a topic across any number of depositions, and can narrow the set to adverse witnesses, aligned witnesses or a witness type such as fact, expert or corporate. Reports and dashboards then drill down to the specific passages behind each result. A single run can cover one current hearing or more than 100 past transcripts. Typical questions are how witnesses testified on a topic, which answers conflict with their past testimony, which questions taking counsel asked before and how often defending counsel objected. The same pass collects objective measures of each deposition, such as objections by type, answer length and the questions each attorney asked. Depositions can be compared against benchmarks, and recurring witnesses, experts and opposing counsel are profiled across matters. Users tag testimony and build their own taxonomies, and reports can filter on those tags. Gibson also helps pick the most effective expert, damages or 30(b)(6) witness and flags what a witness should expect under questioning. According to the privacy notice, the AI products handle natural language processing, text analysis, document generation and insights. Cloud Court's CEO writes that the company holds both generative and non generative AI and has favored non generative methods for testimony.

The models drive several capabilities a buyer would miss, on a platform that ran without them for most of its life. Opus 2 Ingenuity is presented as an agentic framework covering document summaries and analysis, extraction of people, organizations, events and legal topics, questions scoped to a matter or selected documents, saved prompts, drafting and checking work product, speech recognition for legal transcripts, and live hearing analysis that compares testimony with the bundle to surface inconsistencies, which depends most on the machine. Underneath sit eighteen years of case management, shared workspace, annotation, chronologies, electronic bundles, evidence presentation and hearing infrastructure, none of which needs a model. The vendor places the AI on top of that platform, describing the platform as the source of the matter intelligence the AI uses.

Gibson's output is drawn from the transcripts themselves. Topic results are the question and answer pairs found in the record, and every report drills down to the content instances behind it, so a lawyer reads the testimony rather than a paraphrase. Testimony on a topic can be exported across witnesses. Views run from a global picture to a single passage, and testimony can be compared across witnesses, files and other indices. In a February 2024 post, CEO Michael Okerlund explains the preference for non generative AI with an example of ChatGPT placing quotation marks around words the Federal Rules of Evidence do not contain. The post concludes that lawyers should prefer ignorance to error. No accuracy measure for topic extraction or for generated reports is published.

Quality is asserted repeatedly and never measured. The vendor says better data relationships give more accurate insights, AI features add only relevant and helpful information, and the design stops errors from harming a case. Answers are said to be based on the selected documents and surrounding matter data, with the system locked to a single matter. Checked the AI, home, security and arbitral institutions pages: no accuracy figure, test set, benchmark, evaluation, error rate or hallucination disclosure. Nothing says whether an answer or summary cites its source document, or whether a reader can open the source from the output. This matters most in hearings, where the system flags inconsistencies between live testimony and the bundle and counsel may act within minutes. Citator checks do not apply to a platform working on a matter's own evidence.

Gibson produces reports, dashboards and drill downs that litigators read and act on. It does not file, draft for filing or act in a matter by itself. Its pages frame the product as artificial intelligence working with human intelligence, with Gibson taking on tedious work while lawyers handle higher level thinking. During a deposition, the team can work in the platform with remote colleagues and look up its witness kit as testimony unfolds. Customers can use the standard reports and visualizations or have Cloud Court's team customize their views. That team of ten includes a litigation project manager and a data migration analyst. The privacy notice lists AI document generation among the functions of its AI products. No review step is described for the documents Gibson generates.

A clear limit on autonomy is published, with a worked example. The Control principle says lawyers must control the process, using their own knowledge and judgment, before any data is saved permanently, so AI output stays a suggestion until a person commits it. The chronology feature shows this: the vendor says auto generating a chronology fills a timeline with irrelevant placeholders a team must remove, so instead the AI surfaces events for the lawyer to assemble, deciding relevance themselves. Entity extraction works the same way, showing people, events and organizations with summaries so the user can drop irrelevant ones and duplicates before anything is added. Checked the AI, home and security pages: no threshold at which a feature declines to answer, no confidence signal, no route to report or fix a wrong output, and nothing on what happens after an error reaches a work product.

Five deployments are described without naming the customer. A firm in multidistrict litigation analyzed more than 300 historical deposition transcripts, and an insurer reviewed hundreds of examinations under oath after a disaster and recovered millions on fraudulent claims. A federal agency used Gibson against repeat plaintiffs and reports smaller settlements and more dismissals. Antitrust litigators analyzed more than 140 depositions taken by aligned counsel, and one organization built a knowledge base of depositions and trials spanning decades. Quotes come from a litigation associate and a partner at unnamed large firms. The associate says Gibson spares days of reading through hundreds of files and 20,000 pages of testimony. The EDRM added Cloud Court to its Trusted Partner Network in July 2023. Elevate named it in June 2024 among the companies it partners with to serve its customers, and Hire Counsel appears among its partners. At Cloud Court's January 2025 conference, which drew 100 registrants, Bill Childs, formerly of 3M and Solventum, described how tools like Cloud Court's had helped his team with testimony. None of these customers is named, and no result carries a figure beyond these counts.

Deployment evidence is deep, named and current, with no measured outcome. Five customer quotes give name, title and firm: a contentious legal technology portfolio manager at Linklaters, the chief knowledge and innovation officer at Dorsey & Whitney, the director of practice technology at Vorys, a litigation partner at Pillsbury and a paralegal at Shepherd and Wedderburn, plus two chambers clerks. About nineteen firm logos appear, including Baker Botts, Dentons, Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, Holland & Knight, Mishcon de Reya, O'Melveny, Troutman Pepper Locke and Wilson Sonsini. The institutional deployments can be checked independently: SIAC Gateway, run by the Singapore arbitral institution SIAC, is said to run on Opus 2, the Dubai institution DIAC is a named partner, and the transcript and hearing services supported the Manchester Arena Inquiry, Grenfell Tower Inquiry phase 2 and the Hillsborough Inquiry. The vendor reports use by 98 percent of Am Law 50 firms and 92 percent of the Financial Times top 25 most innovative firms. Those figures show reach, not results; no quote carries a number or date, and no case study with a method was found.

Safeguarding customer data is the stated focus of Cloud Court's security program, with controls for confidentiality, availability and security mapped to the SOC 2 criteria. The privacy notice says personal information handled by its AI products follows that notice and Cloud Court's agreements with third parties. The terms of service, which cover the website and purchases made through it, treat contributions posted to the site as non confidential and license them to Cloud Court for any purpose. No customer agreement for Gibson is published.

One precise commitment covers the question that matters most, and nothing else. The Secure principle says client data will never be shared outside the client's instance or between two or more cases inside it, an explicit undertaking across matters and tenants, reinforced by queries locked to a single matter or selected documents and by firewalls, encrypted volumes, logical identifiers and ownership tags. The arbitral institutions material acknowledges that arbitration is confidential. No customer agreement is published, so none of this is contractual: the footer carries a privacy policy, cookie policy, modern slavery statement, supplier code and code of business conduct, but no terms of service, master agreement or data processing addendum. Nothing addresses training on client material, no retention position exists for documents, prompts or output, and privilege and work product are not addressed in writing, though the platform holds working papers from highly sensitive disputes and public inquiries. The privacy policy was not opened and may say more.

Gibson is sold to litigators, in house legal teams, government agencies and insurers. Its pages pose strategic questions it helps answer, from which expert to put up to whether to settle or fight. The company was founded by litigators and in house counsel, and its CEO is a former litigator and general counsel. Neither the terms nor the product pages say anything about legal advice.

Nothing published addresses the advice line, and no document on the site would carry it. The footer, read in full, lists a privacy policy, cookie policy, modern slavery and human trafficking statement, supplier code of conduct and code of business conduct, with no terms of service, disclaimer or professional responsibility statement. Nothing says output is not legal advice, nothing addresses responsibility when a drafted document or flagged inconsistency proves wrong, and no bar or regulator is named, including ABA Formal Opinion 512 and, for a London vendor selling to English firms and chambers, any Solicitors Regulation Authority or Bar Council guidance. What is published is a supervision stance rather than a disclaimer: the vendor says it is not trying to replace a lawyer's intelligence, the AI enhances human ingenuity, and lawyers must apply their own judgment before anything is saved. That describes how the work is done, not who answers for it.

The stated position is a design choice. For testimony, Cloud Court favors non generative AI over generative tools, because a wrong answer stated with confidence costs a lawyer more than a gap. Its pages describe AI as having advantages and limitations and set Gibson up to work alongside lawyers rather than replace them. The security program includes a documented risk management policy, continual risk assessments and a formal risk register, with the detail held in the SOC 2 report. Since January 2025 it has run three CLE events on legal AI, the latest in May 2026, and its blog announced in April 2024 that the EDRM had formed a Testimony Evidence Reference Model project. No testing method or result for Gibson's extraction or reports is published.

Five well written principles are published, but not a governance framework. Empower, Enhance, Control, Secure and Trust each get a paragraph explaining design choices and rejected alternatives: why the vendor does not auto generate chronologies, why it keeps existing legal workflows, and what the AI may not write into a case without a lawyer's action. Two carry real commitments, on human control before anything is saved and on data never crossing an instance or case boundary. Searched the AI, home, security and arbitral institutions pages and found no accountable owner for model behavior, no testing regime for the AI before release, no published results, no model documentation, and no standard or certification for AI as distinct from information security. STRIDE threat modeling and CREST accredited penetration testing cover software security, not model behavior. Nothing addresses bias or uneven output, though the hearing feature analyzes live testimony, and how it performs across accents, languages and interpreted evidence in international arbitration goes unasked.

Product systems and data run in Microsoft's United States data centers, never in Cloud Court's offices. Employees reach production only through Microsoft Entra with device validation and multifactor authentication, day to day access is limited to engineering, and standing administrative access is restricted. Code is reviewed, tested and scanned before release, and new code passes through a separate QA environment segmented from production. Staff in the United States pass background checks, acknowledge the information security policy and take security and phishing training each year. A vendor management program reviews third party providers, and company laptops run full disk encryption and endpoint detection. The privacy notice keeps personal information no longer than 12 months after an account ends, and the terms describe routine backups. Security incidents are reviewed by the security team and handled with affected customers as each case requires. No subprocessor list or notice deadline is published.

Strong on how the system is built, and silent on what happens to the data inside it. Published: AES-256 encryption at rest, TLS 1.2 in transit, including between internal components, email encrypted end to end, logical data separation through firewalls, encrypted volumes, logical identifiers and ownership tags, client defined password policy, several multifactor options, single sign on through the client's provider, and full client control over users. Development practice is well documented: STRIDE threat modeling with a risk owner per threat, regular CREST accredited external penetration tests, automated and manual code review including third party dependencies, continuous integration, and formal change management with risk and impact assessment. Searched the security and AI pages and the footer and found no retention period, deletion or return commitment, export provision, subprocessor list, named cloud provider, or incident response or breach notification practice. The privacy policy was not opened and may say more.

Terms of service last updated 27 March 2025 govern the website and purchases made through it. They provide the site as is, disclaim all warranties, and exclude direct, indirect and consequential damages. Liability is capped at the lesser of fees paid in the six months before a claim or $10,000. Users indemnify Cloud Court against third party claims arising from contributions, use of the site or breach of the terms, and the terms disclaim liability for lost or corrupted user data. Minnesota law governs, and most disputes go through at least 30 days of informal negotiation before binding arbitration. Nothing in them addresses liability for wrong output.

Nothing is published on who bears the loss when the system is wrong, because no customer agreement is published. The footer legal inventory, read in full, is a privacy policy, a cookie policy, a modern slavery and human trafficking statement, a supplier code of conduct and a code of business conduct in PDF. There is no terms of service, no master services agreement, no subscription terms, no service level agreement and no data processing addendum. Nothing therefore states a liability cap, an indemnity in either direction, a warranty on the software or on generated output, an insurance position, a limitation period, a governing law or a forum. The security page refers in passing to Opus 2 Services and Agreements meeting global legal and regulatory requirements, and names six regimes they are said to satisfy, which confirms agreements exist without publishing any of them. A buyer cannot read the allocation of risk in advance at any level.

Gibson takes deposition and trial transcripts in common formats, uploaded by the customer. Its dashboards and reports are configurable, and aligned parties can work in the same interface. Court reporting agencies are invited to partner on a direct pipeline from their transcripts into the platform, which Cloud Court says its clients have asked for. Its patent portfolio covers automated deposition transcription, remote proceeding capture, speaker identification and evidence linkage. No connection to another system is described.

Integration is mentioned by category, never by name. The AI page says core documents flow from ediscovery and document management systems into one workspace, naming neither. The security page describes linking to a client's own single sign on provider, a useful identity integration but not a practice system one. Checked the AI, home, security and arbitral institutions pages and the full navigation: no document management system such as iManage or NetDocuments is named, and nothing covers matter management, ebilling, court filing, Word or Outlook. No API, developer documentation or integration list was found. The vendor runs hearing infrastructure and has partnered with the IDRC hearing venue in London on a dedicated suite, which integrates with a venue rather than a system. The platform page was not opened and may name connectors.

Gibson is offered as software as a service through purpose built web applications. Its product infrastructure resides in Microsoft's data centers in the United States. Cloud Court relies on Microsoft's audited controls for physical and infrastructure security and points customers to Microsoft's Service Trust portal for those reports. Code moves through a separate QA environment before production, and the hosted service is updated continuously, with major changes announced in the app. Gibson runs only as this hosted service.

Residency is offered explicitly, and processing location is not addressed. The security page says the vendor hosts each client's solution and data in the location that best fits its needs, which is a customer choice, supported by separate EMEA, North America and Asia Pacific operations and a list of data protection regimes the services meet: GDPR, UK GDPR, Canadian PIPEDA, the California Consumer Privacy Act, the Singapore Personal Data Protection Act and the Australian Privacy Act. Data is described as self contained through firewalls, encrypted volumes, logical identifiers and ownership tags, which is logical rather than physical separation. No list of regions or data centers is published, no cloud provider is named, and nothing separates where data is stored from where processing or model inference happens, which matters to a customer choosing a jurisdiction to keep material inside it.

A SOC 2 Type I examination was completed as of 16 October 2023, and a SOC 2 Type II report followed in April 2024. Cloud Court commits to a SOC 2 Type II audit every year covering security, availability and confidentiality, and offers the report on request from its security page. The report, with its auditor and period, is released on request.

Current, named certification is published with nothing to verify it. The security page, last modified 19 Aug 2026, names ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and Cyber Essentials Plus, with regular CREST accredited external penetration testing, STRIDE threat modeling with risk owners, and automated and manual code review. It cites the 2022 revision of ISO 27001 rather than the superseded 2013 version. No certification body, certificate number, scope, validity period or issue date is given, there is no route to obtain the certificate or a report, no trust portal, and no SOC 2 of any type, which US buyers look for first. The arbitral institutions page states ISO 27001:2013 while the security page states 2022, so the site gives two versions of the same certification, one out of date.

Both generative and non generative AI are in use, with non generative methods favored for testimony. Patent filings with an earliest priority date of 28 April 2017 describe probabilistic language modeling, matter specific language models and machine learning that ranks legal documents. The privacy notice says AI processing runs under agreements with third parties. No model or third party provider is named.

The vendor names its AI and never says what runs it. Opus 2 Ingenuity is described as an agentic framework working on matter data, covering summaries, entity extraction, questions, prompt building, drafting and real time speech recognition. Searched the AI, home, security and arbitral institutions pages: no model or provider is named, no first party versus third party distinction is drawn, no version appears, inference location is not stated beyond the general offer to host in a chosen geography, and there is no commitment to notify customers of model or configuration changes. The one related commitment is that client data never leaves the client's instance, which says where data does not go without saying what processes it. For AI that reads live testimony in a courtroom, the model is what a tribunal would most likely ask about.

Each product page ends in a consultation request. The terms of service accept card payment, describe recurring subscription charges billed through an online account, make purchases non refundable and let a customer cancel at the end of the paid term. Payments are in United States currency, and prices may change at any time. Resellers, referral partners, software alliances and legal service providers are invited to sell alongside the company. No price is published for Gibson.

No pricing is published at any level, including the unit of charge. The full navigation and footer across all three regional sites, read, have no pricing or plans page. No rate, unit, tier, volume band, term or charge for implementation, hearing services or transcription appears, which matters because the offering mixes software with services such as court reporters, transcripts and hearing room setup, each usually priced differently. Every call to action is to watch a demo or make contact. The only cost related claim is that connected data and workflows make AI use more efficient, so customers spend less.

Four buyer groups are named. Law firms use Gibson in large volume and business critical cases, class and mass tort matters, antitrust, serial litigation against the same parties and deposition training. Corporate legal departments use it for pattern litigation, serial plaintiffs and oversight of outside counsel. Government agencies build testimony knowledge bases on repeat plaintiffs and experts, and insurers analyze examinations under oath and track attorney, firm and witness performance. Gibson handles depositions, trial transcripts and other hearings, and court reporting agencies are invited to partner. The work is aimed at matters with many depositions or a long history of testimony. Cloud Court places it in new attorney onboarding, motion and brief drafting, settlement and mediation, witness preparation and trial outlines. By its own definition, testimony intelligence work follows or overlaps eDiscovery and comes before deposition designations. No jurisdiction is named and no limit on matter type or size is stated.

Coverage is documented by role and by solution, and no boundary is stated. Role pages cover partners and lead counsel, legal innovation teams, associates, and paralegals and litigation support, each with its own benefits. Solutions cover Cases, Hearings, Transcripts, Arbitral Institutions, and Chambers sold as LEX, identifying law firms, barristers' chambers and arbitral institutions as buyers. Practice focus is commercial disputes, international arbitration, public inquiries and inquests, with named inquiry work and arbitral institution deployments, and the chambers product reaches criminal clerking. Reach spans three regional operations and six data protection regimes. The vendor says it serves the litigation and arbitration lifecycle in any jurisdiction worldwide, and nothing names a practice area, matter type, jurisdiction or scale it does not serve.