Dodonai vs SmartDepo: how they compare in 2026

Every purchasable function is a model output. Deposition summarisation, medical chronology construction, OCR of scanned records including handwriting and tables, extract and draft agents, and semantic search that finds evidence by meaning rather than keyword are the whole of the platform, and the pricing page charges by pages processed with multipliers by process type, which is charging directly for inference. Remove the models and there is a document store with a search box. The company describes itself in its own FAQ as an AI-powered document processing platform built for legal professionals. Checked 4 September 2026.

The models are the mechanism the buyer pays for. What is sold is an AI deposition summary produced in minutes from a transcript, described by the vendor as resting on patent-pending technology, and 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 the model output as a check rather than as the production method, which is the distinction that keeps this at the top of the band. Remove the models and what remains is the manual page-line summarisation the product exists to replace. Checked 4 September 2026.

Grounding is real, documented and unusually concrete for this product class. Deposition summaries are described as page-and-line cited, meaning each summary point carries a pointer back to the transcript location it came from, and the transcript product adds automated Blue Book citations and an assistant that works over the full text. That is a retrieval mechanism a reader can understand and a reviewer can check against the source. Failure modes are acknowledged in the agreement rather than only in marketing: section 3(d) states that given the probabilistic nature of machine learning the Services may produce incorrect Output that does not accurately reflect real people, places or facts, and advises evaluating accuracy including by human review. What is missing is measurement. No accuracy figure is published, no test set is described, and the home page FAQ item asking how Dodonai ensures the accuracy of AI-generated summaries did not render in this pass and is not credited.

Grounding is real and documented: summaries carry hyperlinked page-line citations to the source dialogue, the vendor publishes a side-by-side comparison of its own precise citations against competitors' broad topic ranges, and every summary is stated to be reviewed by legal professionals before delivery. Those are architectural and procedural controls rather than a claim alone. What sits against them is the strongest marketing-versus-agreement conflict on this record, and the agreement governs. The site advertises 100 per cent guaranteed accurate page-line citations and patent-pending technology that can guarantee 100 per cent accuracy. The governing terms at the same domain state that the Services may contain errors, disclaim any warranty as to the quality, accuracy, currency or completeness of the platform or any results obtained through it, and make the customer solely responsible for verifying the accuracy and completeness of all work product before acting on it. A guarantee that the agreement expressly disclaims is not a measured accuracy figure, no test set is described, and the failure modes the agreement does name are audio quality, background noise, cross-talk and speaker accent, which belong to transcription rather than to summarisation.

Oversight is asserted without a described mechanism in the platform itself. Section 3(d) of the terms advises that the customer should evaluate the accuracy of any Output as appropriate, including by using human review, which is guidance rather than a control. The one firm commitment located sits outside the product: the AI Managed Services arm is described as operating with an attorney in the loop on every output, which is a services promise rather than a platform behaviour. Every action is stated to be logged, which is an audit surface rather than a review gate. Nothing published describes what the system does unattended against what a person approves, no threshold is stated, and no route back to human judgement is set out for the self-serve platform. Searched the home page, the terms and data processing addendum, and the pricing page on 4 September 2026.

A real review surface is committed and the control structure around it is not published. The vendor states that every summary is reviewed by legal professionals before it reaches the customer and lists humans in the loop as one of three trust pillars, which is a documented gate on every output rather than an aspiration. Section 6 of the governing terms adds a second checkpoint by making the customer solely responsible for verifying accuracy and completeness before taking or omitting any action. What is missing is everything around those two points: no threshold is published at which the system defers, nothing describes what the reviewing professionals check or against what standard, no reviewer qualification is stated, and nothing addresses what happens when an error reaches a filed brief.

An unattributed testimonial stands in for deployment evidence. One quotation is published, from a first name and a job description, Ben, Commercial Litigator, saying that on the first day of use Dodonai summarised all the deposition transcripts from a case in seconds, saving hours of time and hundreds of client dollars. No organisation is named anywhere, there is no logo strip, no case study, and no customer count. The claim of hundreds of client dollars saved is a result quoted with no basis, no matter size and no date. Comparison pages exist for deposition and chronology software but are the vendor's own category content rather than deployment evidence. Searched the home page, the pricing page and the terms on 4 September 2026.

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 and are tied to firms rather than floating free: Wolfgang Mueller of Mueller Law, Delaney J. Miller of Windsor Troy Law, Matthew Struble of Struble Cohen who identifies himself as board certified in both civil trial and appeals, and a reviewer at Conant. The quotations contain operational detail a reader can weigh, including a stated processing time of about 30 minutes for a transcript and a note that only minimal adjustments were needed on review. What is absent is measurement: no figure for time or cost saved is attached to any named firm, nothing is dated, and a customers page exists that was not opened in this pass.

The privilege limb is met more explicitly here than almost anywhere in this pull, and other limbs are what hold the grade. Section 3(e) states that both parties acknowledge Content may include confidential and privileged information, that Dodonai will use all reasonable efforts to keep it confidential, and then goes further than any peer: all parties agree that both the Input and the Output constitutes attorney work product and that Dodonai shares a common interest with its users. Segregation is documented as isolated per-client workspaces with case data siloed, role-based access so team members see only what they need, and every action logged. The position on model providers is stated in section 3(c): Dodonai only works with LLM Partners that disclaim use of the Content for developing or improving their own services and covenant to delete customer data after a reasonable time, given as 30 days for OpenAI. What holds this at B is the rest. Training by Dodonai itself is permitted on opt-in rather than prohibited. No retention period for Dodonai's own storage is published anywhere, only deletion on termination or reasonable request. And only one LLM partner is named, with the phrase including OpenAI leaving the others unidentified.

Confidentiality is addressed in general commercial terms and nothing addresses client confidences as such. Section 9 of the governing agreement is a conventional mutual confidentiality provision: customer content is the customer's confidential information, the recipient must use reasonable care, and disclosure is limited to personnel and subcontractors under equivalent obligations. That is readable in advance, which keeps this off the floor. Everything the A band asks for beyond it is missing. Privilege and work product are never mentioned, on a product whose entire input is deposition testimony. Nothing addresses segregation between customers or matters. No retention period is stated and section 2.2 instead reserves to the vendor the right to set the maximum period it will retain customer content. Training is permitted rather than prohibited under section 4.2. One provision cuts against the product's own market: section 2.3 bars submitting protected health information or sensitive personal data unless expressly authorised in an Order, which is a live constraint for medical malpractice and personal injury depositions.

Nothing published addresses the advice line, and the grade rests on documents that were read rather than on an untested gap. The full terms and the data processing addendum were retrieved on 4 September 2026 and contain no statement that the Services are not legal advice, no competence or supervision language, no reference to any rule of professional conduct, and no jurisdiction limit. The nearest provisions point the other way: section 3(e) characterises Input and Output as attorney work product and asserts a common interest with users, which presupposes a legal context without addressing the vendor's position in it. The audience includes people who are not lawyers, with published material for paralegals, court reporters, independent medical examination companies and IME doctors, and section 1 sets the minimum age at 13 with parental permission under 18, which is unusual language for a product processing privileged case files. Section 3(d) advises human review of Output but frames it as an accuracy precaution rather than a professional responsibility one.

Nothing published addresses the advice line, and this rests on a document read in full rather than on an untested gap. The governing terms of service were retrieved on 4 September 2026 and contain no statement that the 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, which is framed as an accuracy precaution rather than a professional responsibility one. The marketing describes the product as built by attorneys for attorneys and founded by a practising civil rights attorney, and the output is explicitly intended for copying into motions and briefs and for submission to the courts, which raises the professional responsibility question rather than answering it. The one adjacent provision is the site's own claim that every summary is reviewed by legal professionals, which is a quality control statement and not a position on advice.

A position on the limits of the AI is published without any mechanism behind it. Section 3(d) of the terms acknowledges the probabilistic nature of machine learning and the possibility of incorrect Output, and section 3(b) explains that output may not be unique across users. That is a principle rather than a governance regime: nobody inside Dodonai is named as accountable for model behaviour, no pre-release evaluation is described, no testing results are published, and there is nothing at all on bias or uneven output, which matters on a product that builds medical chronologies and summarises testimony. A Safety and Trust page exists under the AI Managed Services section and was not opened in this pass; it is named here as an unread surface rather than credited, since crediting a page by its title is not evidence of its contents.

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. Searched the home page, the pricing page, the terms of service and the site navigation on 4 September 2026.

Substantive published policy covering most of the ground. Access control is specific: AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.2 or higher in transit with documents described as encrypted from the moment they leave the browser, isolated per-client workspaces, role-based access, and every action logged. Section 5(a) of the data processing addendum enumerates the security measures required across personnel, facilities, hardware and software, storage and networks, access controls, monitoring and logging, vulnerability and breach detection, incident response and encryption. Incident practice is committed at section 5(c), requiring notification of any personal data breach by Dodonai, its LLM Partners or other third parties acting on its behalf without undue delay, with assistance in investigation under section 3(a). Deletion is addressed at section 8, on termination or upon reasonable request. Two elements are missing: no retention period is published for Dodonai's own storage during the term, and no subprocessor list is published, with LLM Partners identified only as including OpenAI.

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 was located. 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.

Liability is addressed only through a standard limitation clause that disclaims the exposure the product creates. Section 7(b) puts the Services on an as-is basis and disclaims all warranties express, implied or statutory, expressly including that the Services will be accurate or error free or that Content will be secure or not lost or altered, so no warranty is given that a buyer could invoke. Section 7(a) runs in one direction only: the customer indemnifies Dodonai, and no indemnity is given to the customer for anything, including third-party intellectual property claims. Section 7(c) caps aggregate liability at the greater of twelve months of fees or one hundred dollars, and excludes all indirect and consequential damages including loss of data. No insurance position was located. What keeps this off the floor is that the allocation is published and readable before signing rather than absent, and that the cap carries a stated floor; on the question this axis asks, the published answer is that the customer bears the loss entirely.

A real published position, carried almost entirely by one clause most vendors omit. Section 10 commits the vendor to maintain insurance at stated minimum limits for the term, including commercial general liability at one million dollars per occurrence and, decisively for this axis, professional errors and omissions cover for the Service including network security and data protection liability at not less than two million dollars per claim and four million in the aggregate. That is the insurance limb this band's top rung asks for and no other record in this pull publishes it. Against that, the rest is thin. The indemnity at section 7 runs only from customer to vendor; there is no indemnity to the customer for anything, including third-party infringement. Section 8 caps liability at fees paid in the preceding twelve months for the services subject to the claim. Section 6 disclaims all warranties and accuracy expressly, and while it carves out a warranty said to be at section 6.2, no such subsection appears in the published document, so the one promised warranty cannot be read. No insurance certificate or carrier is named.

No integration into practice systems was located. No document management system, case management platform, email client, word processor or e-signature product is named anywhere on the surfaces read, and no integrations page or developer documentation exists in the navigation or footer. The only connectivity evidence is indirect: section 2(c)(iv) of the terms refers to extraction of data through the API as permitted, which establishes that an API exists without describing what it connects to, and the enterprise pricing tier lists custom integrations as an unspecified inclusion. Two surfaces that might bear on this were not read and are named so the limit is visible: the home page FAQ item asking how Dodonai integrates with an existing workflow did not render, and the Law Firm Case Management and Document Management pages under Industries were not opened. Checked 4 September 2026.

No integration into practice systems was located. No document management system, case management platform, transcript repository, word processor or e-signature product is named anywhere on the surfaces read, and there is no integrations page or developer documentation in the navigation or footer. The only connectivity evidence is indirect, in section 1.2 of the agreement, which refers to APIs made available to facilitate use of the services without describing what they connect to. The workflow the product describes is manual: upload a transcript, receive documents, copy and paste citations into briefs. A Court Reporting Solutions page exists in the Products menu and was not opened in this pass; it is named here so the limit is visible rather than presented as settled. Checked 4 September 2026.

The tenancy limb is published and the residency limb is entirely absent, which is the documented gap on this axis. Isolated per-client workspaces are stated, with case data siloed, role-based access limiting what team members see, and every action logged, which tells a buyer how customers are separated from one another. Nothing states where data is stored or processed: no region, no country, no hosting provider and no processing location appears on any surface read, and the terms note only that the Services may be used in geographies currently supported by Dodonai without saying which those are. Publishing tenancy alone clears the band below, where neither limb is stated, and this record sits in the space the operator has logged as fitting neither adjacent band cleanly.

Nothing is published about where the software runs or where transcripts sit. No region, country, hosting provider or data centre 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. Searched the home page, the pricing page, the product overview, the terms of service and the footer on 4 September 2026.

Certification is stated and repeated as a product claim rather than shown as a decorative badge, appearing in the hero, in a dedicated security section and in the platform description: SOC-2 certified and HIPAA fully compliant, with a Business Associate Agreement available on request. A route to evidence exists contractually, since section 1(i) of the data processing addendum commits Dodonai to cooperate with customer assessments and audits where required by law, or alternatively to make available a summary of third-party audit results or certification reports. It stops short of the top on every accessible-evidence limb. The claim is written as SOC-2 without specifying Type I or Type II, which is a material difference and is not resolved anywhere; no certifying body or auditor is named; no scope, observation period or report date is published; there is no trust portal; and penetration testing is not mentioned. On the third-party verifiability test a buyer cannot check the claim against an auditor's register without contacting Dodonai.

No independent security attestation was located. No SOC 2, ISO, HIPAA certification or any other framework is claimed anywhere on the site, there is no trust centre 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. Checked home page, pricing page, terms of service and site footer on 4 September 2026.

The supply chain is partly disclosed, with one provider named and change notification committed in unusual detail. Section 2(c) requires customers to adhere to the terms and policies of any LLM Partners used for data processing, including OpenAI, and links OpenAI's policy pages; section 3(c) states that Dodonai only works with LLM Partners that disclaim use of Content to develop or improve their own services and that covenant to delete customer data after a reasonable time, given as 30 days in OpenAI's case. Change notification is stronger than most records carry: section 1(g) of the data processing addendum commits to notifying customers of additional LLM Partners, gives a fifteen-day window to object on reasonable grounds relating to data protection, sets out four cure options including declining to use the partner or offering an alternative, and gives a termination right with a refund of prepaid fees if the objection is not resolved within thirty days. What is absent is the rest of the picture: no model is named, the phrase including OpenAI leaves the other partners unidentified, no subprocessor list is published, and where inference runs is not stated.

The supply chain is partly disclosed, in two fragments that sit on different surfaces. The home page carries an icon labelled OpenAI Zero Data Retention among its three trust pillars, which names a third-party model provider and states the retention posture agreed with it, though no supporting text explains scope or which features it covers. Section 4.2 of the agreement describes the other half of the architecture: the vendor's own speech recognition and generative models, stated to be proprietary, maintained locally and not shared with or disclosed to any third party. So a reader can establish that both a named external provider and proprietary internal models are in use. What is absent is the rest: no specific model or version is named, no location is given for any of it, no subprocessor or model provider list is published, and no commitment to notify customers when a model or provider changes was located.

A buyer can learn the whole cost structure without speaking to anyone. Four tiers are published with rates: 25 dollars a month billed annually at 300 for 4,800 credits a year, 50 a month billed annually at 600 for 24,000 credits, 83 a month billed annually at 1,000 for 120,000 credits, and a custom enterprise tier. The unit is defined rather than gestured at, with one page stated as approximately 400 tokens of text, and a table gives the effective cost per page at each volume by process type with the multiplier shown: standard summaries at 1x running from 6.3 cents to 0.8 cents, custom summaries at 2x, advanced analysis at 3x, and OCR and transcription free at every tier. Every feature is stated to be included in every plan with no per-seat fees and no feature gates, and the nine included capabilities are itemised. What the enterprise tier adds is named as custom integrations, SLA guarantees and dedicated onboarding. A seven-day, hundred-page free trial is published with self-serve signup, and section 4(c) of the terms commits to fourteen days notice before a price increase takes effect.

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 itemised 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.

Coverage is described with real substance across three dimensions and the boundary is left open. Six practice areas each carry their own page: personal injury, medical malpractice, mass tort, product liability, workers' compensation and disability benefits. Eight use cases each carry their own page, including medical record review, IME reports, demand letters, expert witness preparation and contract review extraction. Six industries are addressed separately, extending beyond law firms to court reporters, IME companies, IME doctors and medical record retrieval businesses, which is an unusually precise statement of who else buys this. What is missing is the edge: no firm size or segment is stated, in-house and government use are not addressed, and nothing says which matter types or document types the product does not handle. The practice area set is plaintiff-side almost throughout, which is a coverage fact rather than a limit the vendor states.

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 specialisation, 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.