As the real-time transcription trend becomes the norm in the court reporting profession, more and more clients are using it. Help us help you get the most out of our real-time legal transcription services. We have provided a few tips for you to aid you in using it. It is not for everyone, and does not help with every case. Real-time reporting requires special equipment on the part of the court stenographer and the client. The most common use is for attorneys in depositions, but real-time is also used for conventions, court hearings and as an aid for the hearing-impaired.
Advance Notice
Let us at know in advance if you need real-time court reporting services. We will most likely have someone available, but due to the rising demand of these highly skilled professionals, it always helps to know in advance for any type of scheduling. Our real-time court reporters need a little extra time to set up and often do “homework” the night before.
Word List
Supplying a word list in advance will make your real-time translation cleaner and make the court reporter happy. Things like people’s names, locations, product names and industry buzzwords should be on the potential vocabulary list. This may be provided via email or in writing. The sooner, the better. These words can be inputted into the real-time reporter’s dictionary. They may not have words in there specific to your topic of discussion. For example, a building construction case may refer to a specific type of soil or concrete that most people have never heard of. This would be appropriate to put on the list.
Be Prepared
Take the time to load the software and bring cables for your laptop. If you do not have a laptop, we may be able to provide one for you with advance notice. Livenote requires the purchase of tokens. Do you have tokens? It will not work without them. We can help you with arrangements for it if needed.
Do I Need Real-time?
Not everyone uses real-time transcription. Sometimes all that is needed is a quick-turnaround for a transcript or a rough electronic copy of the proceedings later that day or the next. While we will happily provide these services for you, it is not considered real-time transcription. These are called expedited transcripts and rough ASCIIs, respectively.
2 Comments
I haven’t heard the suggestion of providing a word list to the reporter before a real-time session but I really do like that idea; also, I appreciate your statements about when you actually do need a real-time reporter.
I agree wholeheartedly that you should always come prepared when planning on a real-time deposition; however, most of the reporters I work with bring their own cables when doing real-time work and I know a couple that cart around 4 extra laptops just to loan to the attorneys.
It’s a great way to get clean writing right out of the box. If you just send the reporter an Etranscript, they can go ahead and get the party’s names in their dictionary and use the word index to get any other words or proper names that are unique to the case.
We carry laptops for our attorneys too, but if you have your own laptop loaded with Livenote or Summation software, you can take your annotated transcript with you when you leave and work on it until you get the final. Once you get your final transcript from the reporter, you can run a sync process in Livenote and all of your notes and annotations will be transferred to the final.