Sunbelt Blog

Benefits of Real Time Court Reporting

Court reporting has gone high tech with real time court reporting technologies. Gone are the days of waiting for stenotype machine printouts or voice recordings to be transcribed to text and distributed. In their place, live, real-time transcripts appear on computer monitors and televisions in courtrooms, depositions, and other legal venues.

How Real Time Court Reporting Works
Here's how real time court reporting works: The court reporter uses a stenotype machine to document the activities just as they have done for dozens of years. However, these new generation machines are electronic, linked to computer systems, and work in conjunction with computer aided transcription technology. The result: real time captioning. As soon as the court reporter keys in the shorthand key combinations, the software translates the inputs and displays text on the computer screens of legal participants - all in real time, and wherever in the world the participant happens to be.

Benefits of Real Time Court Reporting
Real time court reporting brings with it numerous benefits. For one, there's no waiting for transcripts. In fact, as the legal proceeding is taking place, lawyers can make annotations as necessary. Since the information is captured and stored electronically, note-taking during legal proceedings can be scaled back dramatically. In addition, attorneys can quickly search for keywords and jump back to previous discussions.  With just the touch of a key, the attorney can highlight specific passages or mark telling testimony for later review.

In addition, the attorney can quickly impeach live testimony because the live transcript is literally at his fingertips. For example, during a deposition, a remote attorney can communicate with local attorneys, challenging a key point or asking for clarification. This can avoid additional time, expenses, and hassles of secondary depositions.

If sound quality in the room is poor, if a participant mumbles, or if a participant has a heavy accent, the onscreen transcription aids others in understanding what was just said.

With this technology in place, professionals related to a case can easily be kept informed. For example, an attorney can copy and paste sections of the transcript into an email or fax and then send the pasted text to a colleague for review, additional research, or for informational purposes. Imagine being able to send a portion of a witness's testimony or deposition to a research assistant while the testimony is taking place! With real time court reporting, this is possible.

In addition, you can quickly research an entire database of transcripts, assemble on-screen reports from all of the case's transcripts, and summarize the entire case. Best of all, you don't even need to be in the courtroom to download live text.

For videotaped proceedings, a court reporter's real time reporting output can be recorded simultaneously with the video. While the completed videotape looks much like a closed captioned program, there's another benefit to synchronizing the real time transcription to the video: searchability. We all know how difficult it is to fast-forward or rewind a video to find a specific point where the witness is discussing a given topic. However, by searching the text record for keywords, you'll be able to find the exact point in time where the desired topic was discussed. From there, you can simply navigate the video to that exact time period using the synchronized timecode. The text transcripts are also useful for editing portions of the video. By using the text document, you can easily create a list of start and stop points for the video on paper before handing everything over to your video editor.   

Several options are available for real time court reporting including:

• Receiving a text version of the proceeding on a computer disc. With this option, the lawyers do not use a computer during the proceedings.

• Viewing the live transcript via a direct computer link to the court reporter's computer. With this option, the lawyers view the testimony as it occurs.

• Litigation support link. With this option, the lawyers link to the court reporter's computer and are able to view the current testimony as well as take notes or mark issues.    

Real time court reporting has come of age. It's here and being used to good effect. How are you using this exciting technology? We'd love to hear your thoughts.