deposition – Page 2

January 14, 2014 By Dawn Houghton

4 Things a Freelance Court Reporter Should Never Say in a Deposition

What a Court Reporter Should Never Say in Deposition Part of being a professional freelance court reporter is knowing what to say and what not to say when you are working with attorneys. As the owner of a busy court reporting firm, I have the occasion to coach new reporters on situations that may arise and how to handle them. I wanted to share a few of these situations where it was not obvious to the new reporter as to what a professional response should be.

When Asked for an Expedited Transcript:

1) “Sorry, I won’t be able to get your transcript to you over the weekend because it’s my birthday and I’m going out drinking.”

Yes, this really happened.

I know attorneys sometimes will spring an order for an expedited transcript on reporters at the last minute. Sometimes the attorney knows in advance that they will require a rushed transcript, but there are times when the testimony itself actually prompts an expedite order which was not anticipated beforehand.

The proper way to handle this situation is to let the attorney know you will do your best to meet their expectations. If you have already made plans for a celebration, make use of a scopist and/or a proofreader in order to get the rush transcript done, or enlist a fellow reporter at the firm you work with to help you. There is no reason reporters need to do their transcripts all by themselves when there are professionals available to help with the process. If the expense of enlisting help is troubling you, it is unwise to have the mentality of “I’m going to keep all the money from the transcript myself” when you are not able to finish the transcript in the requested time frame. It’s okay to have a life outside of being a reporter but we have to be smart about how we structure our time.

When You Have Plans After the Deposition:

2) “Can you finish up the deposition by 4:30 because I have dinner plans?”

The proper time to bring up this issue is with your office scheduler when you are being scheduled for the job, not when you are already in the deposition. In the freelance field, depositions are not always a predictable length. The attorneys many times don’t know how long a deposition will take.

If you have prior commitments, make your office aware of them beforehand so they can most appropriately schedule reporters for the day’s proceedings to the best of their ability.

When You Are Asked Your Opinion About The Case:

3) “You have a really good case,” or conversely, “You have a really bad case.”

I know attorneys like to ask court reporters what they think about their case, but it is not a good idea to voice your opinions about the matter. I know from experience that I can hear a deposition from one side and get one impression, then hear the deposition from the other side and get a different impression. It is hard to even have an opinion when we don’t have the whole picture in the first place.

It is more appropriate to let your attorney know that you are required to stay a neutral party, therefore, you will not be offering your opinion.

If You’ve Discussed the Case with Your Office:

4) “I told our office staff about your case, and they said…”

It is not considered professional behavior to talk with office staff about the deposition or witnesses or attorneys during breaks from the deposition.

As professional reporters, we are bound by confidentiality, and this is not professional conduct. You should not discuss the case with others.

The appropriate responses to these situations may be obvious to experienced reporters, but it is not always clear to new reporters what is expected of them. Training and mentoring can help eliminate these types of unfortunate situations.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in “Court Reporting – A Profession, Not Just A Job”.

January 7, 2014 By Dawn Houghton

This Court Reporting Life…The Mysteriously Missing Court Reporter

As the owner of a court reporting firm, I am always trying to anticipate things that may go wrong when sending court reporters to depositions. But sometimes things come up we don’t expect. We always want to make the appropriate arrangements and avoid any mishaps that might occur, but sometimes it just isn’t possible to avoid some situations.

One day we got a frantic call from our client stating that our court reporter had not arrived for the deposition. They were ready to begin but had no court reporter. This is something no owner wants to hear. We pride ourselves on showing up for every deposition, not just on time, but early. We try to never, ever show up late. We also have several steps in our scheduling process to ensure that no deposition has slipped through cracks in our system. It is hectic to scramble to find a reporter to get to a deposition that has already been scheduled to begin, and we definitely don’t want that issue ever to occur.

So to find out we had a room full of attorneys without a court reporter was very bad news and our office went into action immediately to discover what happened.

This particular deposition was scheduled to take place at a local hotel conference room. I placed a call to my reporter to assure myself she was at the deposition location. She indicated she was. This made no sense at all. How could she be at the deposition, yet the scheduling attorney was calling asking why they didn’t have a court reporter?

My next step was to call the hotel staff to see if they could shed any light on the situation while at the same time my reporter was tracking down the staff at the hotel about the situation. We found out that the hotel had mistakenly set up two conference rooms for this one deposition. Some of the parties were taken to one room upon arrival and some of the participants were led to a second room. My court reporter was able to locate the other participants and all parties convened in one room. The deposition started later than scheduled but otherwise happened as planned.

So even though we try to anticipate every mishap that can happen, there are still situations that surprise us. Who could have predicted there would be two rooms for one deposition? Now we know what to do if the situation arises again.

If you found this article interesting, you might also like “The Court Reporting Profession is Alive and Well.”

December 17, 2013 By Dawn Houghton

Ways Your Court Reporter Can Help Your Law Firm Go Paperless

Many law firms are beginning to do their part to save the environment by implementing recycling programs and other strategies. Even the smallest changes can mean big results. For law firms, reducing the amount of paper used during the course of business is a large area in which they can decrease their carbon footprint. There are several ways your court reporter can help you reduce your paper use.

Order a Copy Transcript

When you order a transcript, the ordering party will traditionally receive an original transcript that is sealed in a paper envelope and a copy of the transcript for your use. The sealed transcript is necessary at the time of trial when you need to file the original transcript with the court. However, many lawsuits settle before making it to trial. One way to save paper is to have the copy printed for your use when you order the transcript, but you can ask that the original not be printed and sent until you request it at the time of trial. You can imagine how much paper this would save if everyone used this practice.

Electronic Transcripts

You may also consider receiving your copy of the transcript in electronic format instead of hard copy. Ordering electronic transcripts to be emailed to you again allows you to hold off on printing the transcript unless and until the time you actually need the testimony in paper form. You may also decide to only print out a partial transcript or a condensed transcript from your electronic copy in your office. Transcripts that are emailed to you can be saved to your firms’ client folders and can also be accessed at any time.

Electronic Exhibits

Not only can you order electronic transcripts, but you can order electronic exhibits as well. Your court reporter can take the exhibits and have them scanned into digital form to include with your transcript. At O’Brien and Bails Court Reporting, we are able to digitally link your electronic exhibit to the pages in the transcript where the exhibit is mentioned. This makes it easy for you to refer to the exhibit while you are reading the transcript. Ask your court reporter if this is a service they can provide.

Paperless Saves

Conserving on paper by requesting electronic transcripts not only saves the environment, but using less paper can also save you money in a couple different ways.

Saving Space

You will save on space at your firm or storage facility by having less paper to keep in active files and closed files. This can also save you money because you will need to purchase less storage space for files.

Saving Money

Ordering electronic transcripts saves you money in postage. Your court reporter will incur less in postage expenses because less paper will be sent through the mail. It is likely that your court reporter will pass that savings on to you.

Green Discounts

Using these green strategies means your court reporter will be using less resources to produce your transcripts. Some court reporting firms pass that savings on to you in the form of a green discount. For instance, at O’Brien and Bails Reporting, we offer a 5% discount if you order transcripts in these forms that use less paper. We want to help you in your efforts to reduce your carbon footprint. Not all court reporters offer this green discount, so be sure to ask the next time you hire a court reporter.

Reducing your carbon footprint can be accomplished in a lot of different ways. Reducing the amount of paper your firm consumes is a good idea for you and for the environment. Try out these creative ways in which your court reporter can help your law firm in its effort to go paperless.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like to sign up for our free guide, “How Much Should I Expect to Pay For Court Reporting Services?”

October 6, 2013 By Dawn Houghton

Do I Need An Internship Before Working As A Court Reporter?

Sitting in with a court reporter or interning with an agency is required by most court reporting programs as a requirement of graduation. Although many agencies do not offer an internship program, they do allow students to sit in with reporters and observe what a typical job may be. Sitting in with a reporter provides valuable experience. It can serve as motivation to pass out of school faster, provide extra practice time, help show what the profession entails and what a real-life job may be like. Learning procedure in class and practicing to a teacher’s dictation is not the same as experiencing it first-hand.

Benefits of an Internship

Sitting in court or depositions with a court reporter provides extra practice time and can motivate students to pass out of school faster. Working reporters may even share tips on how to write efficiently and accurately. Some fortunate students meet reporters who are willing to take them under their wing in a non-official or official mentor capacity. Oftentimes, reporters will share their own experience with school and offer helpful advice in how to succeed in school and beyond. These connections you make with reporters can serve as potential contacts in helping you find work after graduation. It always helps to be friendly and ask questions.

Hands-On Experience

As any reporter or student interning can tell you, a teacher’s dictation can be one-dimensional. If there is only one person doing the voice of two or three different people, practicing colloquy can be unrealistic. This is not the teacher’s fault. They are just simply one person. Experiencing colloquy while sitting in will help acclimate a student to a professional setting where you may have multiple attorneys, sometimes speaking over one another. It’s good to see how the reporter handles those types of situations and to also imagine what you may do. In times like those, you may want to stop the attorneys and ask them to take turns speaking since you can only take down one person at a time. It’s always good to prepare yourself for unfamiliar situations that school hasn’t prepared you for.

Not only does interning prepare you with colloquy, but it also helps prepare you with filling out job sheets, reading and understanding captions, writing under pressure, and transcribing and editing transcripts. Many students struggle with these aspects of reporting since schools usually focus more on attaining speed. Transcribing can be one of the most beneficial things a student can do. Becoming familiar with how your CAT system works, such as hot keys, include files, etc., will significantly cut down on transcription time upon starting work. An internship can offer you the experience you need to become a successful reporter.

Finding Internship Opportunities

When looking for an internship opportunity, there are a few things to keep in mind. Finding a good agency to intern with is crucial. Although any experience is good experience, you should also think of interning as a form of networking and finding potential employers. Spend your time interning with reputable and established agencies for whom you would like to work. Once you have found a few that you would like to intern with and potentially work for, call the agencies, explain that you are a court reporting student, and ask if you could sit in with one of their reporters. Most agencies will say yes. Others will ask you to call back another day when they have work for you to sit in on. Either way, be persistent.

Interning is probably one of the best things a student can do for themselves while at school. It gives you hands-on, real-life experience that schools simply can’t offer. A student who pushes back interning or doesn’t intern enough is severely disadvantaging themselves when they enter into the workforce. It is better to invest the hours now to learn the foundations of working in the real world than to work in the real world and be unprepared.

If you found this article interesting, you might also like “Freelance Court Reporting versus Official Court Reporting.”

July 15, 2013 By Dawn Houghton

Fair Pricing of Legal Transcripts by Court Reporters

Is it okay for me to get a free copy of a transcript from opposing counsel?

From time to time we hear of an attorney who has asked opposing counsel for a copy of a deposition transcript so that they don’t need to order one from the court reporter. To some, this may seem a simple and practical way of receiving a free transcript. As court reporters, there are some things we would like you to know about our pricing and why that practice undermines our standards in pricing.

The fact is that standard pricing practices for transcripts have always taken into consideration that a legal transcript is something that is usually required by both sides of a lawsuit in order for each side to do their job properly. If attorneys began passing around free copies of transcripts, court reporters would only be partially paid for the work they perform. We would need to change our pricing in order to be fully compensated. We would need to charge the full amount of transcription to the side who is ordering the original. This would almost double the cost of a transcript for the ordering party.

There could be undesirable ramifications to changing our pricing structure. For example, if the cost of an original was high, and the cost of a copy was free, it might reduce the number of witnesses you are willing to depose in a lawsuit and potentially change the way in which you conduct your case.

If there are multiple parties, is it okay to make free copies of transcripts for the other parties?

Again, the fact that there are sometimes multiple parties has also been figured into the pricing structure we use. Yes, sometimes we are able to sell extra copies of a transcript in the case of multiple parties. But there are also many times when only the original is ordered, and no one is ordering the copy. In those cases, we are making considerably less than we should on a transcript and the work that went into producing it. So the extra orders we receive occasionally from multiple parties help make up for those times when only one side orders a transcript.

If parties were to regularly only order one copy and share it, we would be forced to change our pricing structure. It would be necessary for us to charge the ordering attorney more to make up for the copy that the other party didn’t purchase. We prefer not to do that because it wouldn’t be fair to the ordering party to put all the weight on their shoulders.

As court reporters, our job is to be fair and impartial and we take that responsibility seriously. We are very careful how we structure our pricing to ensure that all parties in a lawsuit are treated fairly and equitably.

To learn more about court reporting pricing and costs, download our guide, “How Much Should I Expect to Pay for Court Reporting Services.”