A teleprompter for lawyers — the approved wording, said exactly

Client explainer videos exist because the same questions keep arriving: what happens at a first hearing, how long conveyancing actually takes, what “without prejudice” means on the letter they just received. A video answers the question once, at scale, before the first meeting. A conveyancing team fields the same six questions every completion season; an employment team hears the same tribunal worries every autumn — the arithmetic of answering them one client at a time is what pushes firms to record. But legal content spoken aloud is still drafted content. The qualifiers earn their keep — “generally”, “in most cases”, “this depends on your circumstances” are not filler; they are the difference between information and advice. Ad-lib around them and you have published something a regulator, or an opponent, can quote back at you.

Then there is the disclaimer. It has to be said, complete, in every video: this is general information, not legal advice; watching it creates no retainer. Improvised disclaimers erode — a little shorter each take, until the operative sentence is gone and nobody noticed. And your regulator’s publicity rules apply to a video exactly as they apply to the website it sits on: wording that was checked is safe, wording invented on take five is not.

Reading visibly costs something too, and for a lawyer it costs the exact thing the video is meant to build. Clients instruct the person who seems in command of the material. Eyes flicking to a monitor beside the camera read as unsure — and a fluffed limitation period is not a charming blooper, because everything you say on camera, you say publicly, as a qualified professional.

The script is the easy part; drafting is the job. What happens next is the problem. Some memorise, which converts billable hours into rehearsal — at partner rates, a morning spent learning a script is the most expensive production budget in the building. Some read from a document propped beside the camera, visibly. Some talk from bullet points and have a trainee check the recording against the approved draft afterwards — which is how a firm discovers on Friday that the second sentence of the disclaimer vanished on Tuesday.

The common fallback is volume: record six takes, pick the least wrong, and give an evening to the edit. It works once. It does not work every month, which is why most firms’ explainer series stops at video two and the rest of the answers stay in a PDF nobody opens.

The script library holds the draft your supervising partner actually signed off — paste it in, and the words on screen are the words that were vetted. Word count and estimated read time are on the script before you record, so “this is a two-minute video” is a fact you check on paper, not a discovery you make on take four.

The prompter scrolls to your delivery, not to a timer. Pause after the point that needs to land — the way you would across a desk — and it waits. Skip ahead, and it catches up. The speech recognition doing this runs on the device, so a draft that touches a client matter is never sent anywhere to make the scrolling work.

The delivery summary reads like a checklist for exactly this job. Pace, in words per minute: lawyers read fast, and what feels measured is often 190 — the number tells you before a client does. Script coverage: how much of the approved text this take actually contains, disclaimer included, checked in a glance rather than by watching yourself back with the draft in your other hand. All of it measured on the device, from the take itself.

And because most legal explainers are watched in silence — at desks, in open-plan offices, in a LinkedIn feed on a train — the captions matter as much as the audio. They are built from the script, so “estoppel” and the name of the statute survive intact instead of becoming an auto-caption’s guess, and they export as a separate .srt for the platforms that want one. One honest note: exports on the free tier carry a small Talk2Camera mark; a firm putting its name on the video will want the paid plan.

An employment solicitor is recording “what happens at a tribunal preliminary hearing”. The draft went to the supervising partner on Monday and came back with two amendments; the amended version is the script in the library. Tuesday lunchtime, meeting room, phone on a small tripod: she reads it to the lens, pausing after the sentence about deadlines because that is the one clients get wrong. The summary on the first take says 188 words per minute — courtroom pace, not video pace — and full coverage. She records it once more, slower, and keeps the second.

The video goes on the firm’s site and on LinkedIn with the .srt attached, and the disclaimer is in it, word for word, because it was in the script. When a client asks the question on a call that week, she sends the link — and knows exactly what the video says, because it says the draft. The next explainer in the series — what a schedule of loss needs to contain — is already drafted and sitting in the library for the same slot next Tuesday.