13 · Second Chair
Read the record while the witness is still talking.
A deposition is the one hour of a matter where the record moves faster than anyone can check it. Second Chair reads each answer against the matter's own record and puts at most one thing on the lens: what to look at, and the exhibit and Bates number to say out loud.
watching 41. One cue at a time, and the losers are deferred.
The question in the room
“It is the eleventh hour, he just said he never saw that email, and I know we have something. Where is it?”
How it works
The mechanism, not the promise.
Before the witness sits down
A rehearsal that cannot become testimony
An attorney runs a mock cross of their own witness through the live pipeline, where a wrong call costs a conversation, not a case. The session is fenced: no transcript row, no end-of-session rollup, no consent machinery, and every alert stamped so exports filter it.
A detector earns the glass, and can lose it again
A new detector runs in shadow: alerts are computed and stored so precision can be measured, never pushed to the wearer. Promotion is by tier: 0.9 over twenty-five reviewed alerts to interrupt, 0.75 over eighteen, 0.6 over twelve, re-derived from evidence under ninety days old.
The device, the code, and a session that is pulled rather than pushed
ShippedA deposition credential is 256 random bits, unshowable in a room holding opposing counsel and a reporter. So the app shows eight characters, the attorney reads them across the table, the phone exchanges them once. Acceptance re-proves licence, firm, ownership, access and the ethical wall.
In the perishable window
Three tiers, and one glance whose losers are deferred
ShippedInterrupt flashes and buzzes, reserved for perishable, irreversible harm. Surface dwells six seconds; queue is an ambient count. A contradiction raised after the topic closed is demoted. Contenders for the one glance score tier by confidence, perishability first; losers defer, ties break on id.
The cue has to land before the witness opens their mouth
A form objection not made is waived under Rule 32(d)(3)(B), so defence detectors fire on the pending question, not the answer. The ingest route holds no memory between turns, so a per-session store keeps what hangs in the air and clears when the session ends.
The pinpoint that turns a flash into an impeachment
A lawyer cannot impeach from a feeling: they need the exhibit number to say aloud and the Bates number. An exhibit is asserted where exactly one marked row points at it. A stamped Bates surfaces only where it exists; the page is prose, never arithmetic.
Knowing which email the witness meant
A deposition answer is deictic: that email carries no content, and those words sent to retrieval return whichever is most similar. Documents reduce offline to cards, a rolling context tracks the exhibit in play, most references resolve on recency. Nothing resolves to a nearest match.
The element you have not nailed down yet
The claim tree writes each unsupported contested element as a task row, so the live path matches that list against the examiner's pending question. It fires on our own question and claims nothing about the witness. A hit needs distinctive overlap, and it never interrupts.
When the room is a courtroom
The excluded topic, in two directions
A granted motion in limine is a list of topics barred in front of the jury, and only granted and granted in part bind. The tier turns on whose mouth moves: our side approaching one interrupts, opposing counsel approaching one surfaces a prompt to object.
A foundation prompt that goes quiet at the right moment
The tripwire needs a move-to-admit phrase and a named exhibit still at proposed or marked. Once that exhibit is offered or admitted it says nothing. An unmatched exhibit label produces silence, because it cannot claim a foundation missing for something it never saw.
Their theory, with our answer's cite attached
The Red Brief holds, per element, the strongest case the other side can build from our own production, with a record cite for every thrust. A question landing on one names the element and carries the rebuttal pinpoint, once per position per session.
What it will not put on the glass
Plain ASCII, because the firmware drops what it cannot draw
The render surface is 576 by 288 per eye, monochrome, wrapping at forty characters and five lines, with an honest one-glance budget of two hundred characters. The glasses drop glyphs their baked-in font lacks, so severity rides in ASCII and accents fold to base letters.
Silence that states what it means
Once a lawyer trusts the lens, an absent alert reads as an assurance this system may not support. Silence has many causes: degraded retrieval, an unresolved reference, a detector in shadow, a reporter off the record. A quiet line says which, worded as our effort.
The ground word, and never the argument
Rule 30(c)(2) requires an objection stated concisely and nonargumentatively, and a speaking objection is sanctionable. So the detectors emit a bare ground word, compound or leading or speculation or hearsay, and the reasoning rides in a separate field the renderer reads as null by construction.
What survives the room
Everything it withheld goes in front of a person
The runtime stores what it refuses to show, leaving rows saying the system detected this and told nobody, which in a sanctions fight does not read as restraint. Every withheld item is surfaced afterward and dispositioned, a rejection counting as much as a confirmation.
A moment you marked is a proposal, and the fact learned at two o'clock
Speech over a speakerphone is the least verified input here, so a marked moment writes a proposal and applying it runs the existing confirm gate, the verbatim utterance beside any rewrite. It reaches the knowledge graph that day rather than weeks later with the transcript.
Refusals
What it will not do, and why.
- Speak when it is not confident.
- The tier decision returns nothing at all below a kind's confidence bar, and nothing is the common and correct outcome. A false contradiction that sends an examiner down a dead end in front of a witness costs far more than a missed cue, so the thresholds are set for precision and the default is to show nothing. Detectors fire independently, so without the arbiter the winner of a beat would be whichever code path wrote first.
- Count lines and call the result a page and line.
- A room microphone pipeline has no idea where the reporter's page breaks fall, so twenty-five lines to a page would produce a confident locator that a lawyer then reads aloud and puts on the record. Page and line are preserved only from a stenographic feed that actually carries them, and the room-mic path returns neither, unconditionally. A marked moment's rewrite is held to the same rule: an owner survives only if those words were spoken, a time phrase is copied rather than converted into a date, and a rewrite that smuggles in a weekday nobody said is thrown out in favour of the raw words.
- Print a citation it had to cut.
- A Bates number shortened from the tail is not a degraded cite, it is a different one, and it reads as real. So a cite too long for the line drops leading label segments while the pinpoint is at the end, and what survives has to still read as a locator. When nothing acceptable fits, the lens prints cite: confirm, which is the same answer it gives for an anchor it could not verify at all.
- Keep warning after the exhibit has been offered.
- The foundation tripwire exists for the beat before the predicate is laid. Once the exhibit reaches offered or admitted the prompt is spent, and a detector that speaks on every question is one a lawyer learns to ignore, which costs the alerts that were right.
- Put a symbol on the glass the firmware cannot draw.
- The device drops an unsupported glyph without saying so, which would strip exactly the severity signal the alert exists to carry. A mockup would look correct and the room would get nothing. Content drawn from real matters is folded rather than hoped over, curly quotes to straight and the section symbol to a word, so a witness's name does not arrive with holes in it.
- Read a memory failure as a contradiction.
- I do not recall parses as a negation and would otherwise flip polarity against every affirmative statement in the record, firing on the single most common answer in a deposition. Weakening the guard would manufacture false impeachments, so the counter-move is to count the non-answers instead: a rate needs a floor of twelve answers before it means anything, and forty non-answers is itself a record worth making.
- Record an alert as seen because some screen received it.
- A desk tab attached in another room while the examiner's lens is off the venue wifi used to mark the alert shown and forfeit the reconnect replay, so the record asserted an impeachment had been on the glass when it was on a laptop down the hall. Every write to every surface is logged separately, and a replay is logged as a replay, because a cue delivered after the topic closed is a different fact.
- Treat something said on the record as an instruction.
- A command spoken while the deposition is on the record goes into the record; the reporter hears it and it lands in the transcript as testimony. The same flag that gates capture partitions the microphone. On the record, an utterance is testimony and is never parsed as a command. Off the record, it is a command and is never written into the transcript.
- Capture a room nobody consented to record.
- A session cannot go live without a recorded consent attestation naming a person and a time, because capturing a deposition is a wiretap-statute question in all-party-consent states rather than a product preference. Turn ingest is refused unless the session is live and on the record, so off-record colloquy and attorney-client conferences are not captured at all. The pairing code that starts a session lives ten minutes, is rate limited, and is burned by the write that consumes it.
- Promote a rehearsal into the case record.
- A mock cross did not happen. Folding it into the transcript spine would inject invented testimony into retrieval, the graph and the designation surfaces, and from there into a client surface or a production. The writeback fails closed on anything that is not a real on-the-record session, and the ordered turn log that does roll up at session end is bound to the transcript spine, held as work product, invisible to the client portal, and folds in only final on-record turns.
One record
Nothing here stands on its own.
What feeds it
- The matter brain and the knowledge graph
- Discovery and the evidence ledger
- Exhibits marked on the record
- Granted motions in limine
- The Red Brief
- The claim tree's unproven elements
What it feeds
- The deposition transcript spine
- Designations and the trial notebook
- The knowledge graph
- The daily board and the follow-up list
- The post-deposition review queue
Limits
What this does not establish.
- The hardware is the firm's own. Glasses are not supplied with the product, and nothing is captured live without a paired device in the room.
- The Even G2 path is shipped and the MentraOS path is in beta. Both render the same lens over the same event lane; the second runtime is labelled beta because the hardware decision is the owner's.
- Speech to text currently runs through a hosted transcription vendor. Moving it to a single-tenant engine is an owner decision that has not been taken, and a firm unwilling to send privileged testimony to a hosted model should attach a stenographic feed instead.
- Only a licensed stenographic feed carries a real page and line. From a room microphone an alert cites an exhibit and a Bates number, or it says the record cite has to be confirmed.
- A detector reaches the lens only through a precision measured on this firm's own reviewed alerts, so a firm's first sessions run with most detectors in shadow. That is the ladder working, not a fault.
- Silence is a recorded decision about what the system could see. It is not a statement that the record holds nothing.
Check the work before you believe it.
Run a sample manifest in your own browser, or read where publication refuses for want of evidence.