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.
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