I’ve been tasked with evaluating Sembly for potential use in our legal department. The usual suspects are praising its AI summaries and action item extraction, but before we commit to another SaaS subscription, I have some skeptical questions.
Given the sensitivity and volume of legal discussions (contract negotiations, compliance meetings, internal counsel), I’m less interested in flashy features and more in concrete performance and security.
* **Accuracy & Hallucinations:** In a legal context, a mis-summarized clause or an invented "action item" could be catastrophic. Has anyone done a rigorous, manual audit of its transcripts against sensitive, complex material? What was the error rate?
* **Integration Realities:** The marketing page promises seamless integration with Teams and Zoom. In our Fortune 500 environment, that means navigating our infosec team, conditional access policies, and proxy servers. Is the API actually robust, or does it break when you scale beyond a few dozen concurrent meetings?
* **Cost vs. Manual Process:** They claim it saves lawyer hours. I want to see the math. If a junior attorney spends 30 minutes summarizing an hour-long meeting, and Sembly costs $X per host per month, how many meetings per user per month are needed to break even, factoring in the time needed for a senior attorney to *review and correct* the AI output?
The default advice is "just run a pilot." But a pilot that doesn't stress-test the system is useless. I'm proposing we design a pilot that mimics peak load (Q4 board meeting season) and uses intentionally complex, jargon-heavy legacy case discussions.
What specific metrics should we be collecting during this pilot? I'm thinking:
- Latency from meeting end to transcript availability.
- Proportion of statements requiring manual correction for legal precision.
- API uptime during our internal peak hours.
If you've rolled this out at scale in a similar regulated environment, I'd prefer your horror stories over the sales deck.
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