Legal Transcription Services vs. Court Reporting

Today, many businesses in different fields are using legal transcription services. It is important to note that legal transcription services are often confused with court reporting. In this article we will try to explain the difference in these two types of documenting the court proceedings.

In any case, we are talking about two similar tasks. Legal transcription services and court reporting are both used to transcribe legal and court processes. Transcribers and reporters must be very professional and write very accurate transcriptions in both cases. This is why they go through demanding trainings, which are a bit more challenging if you are becoming a court reporter.

Court reporters must be adequately educated about various aspects of court proceedings and legal terminology, and their program must be authorized by the National Court Reporters Association. On top of that they must pass various test, most of them differ from state to state. As the name of the profession already indicates, court reporters work in a courtroom. Indeed, they spend a lot of time there, and they mostly transcribe using old-school stenographs, which is still useful enough to make it possible for them to write real time spoken word transcripts.

On the other hand, legal transcriptionists aren’t required to work in such formal environments with lots of rules and regulations. Mostly, they work with already recorded audio or video files. They are often employed as transcription assistants on hearings, interviews, depositions, legal meetings. They also provide transcriptions of 911 calls, write dictations and help in many other ways when it comes to dealing with various legal documents. 

Which service suits your needs best?

To put it very simple: if a judge is present in the legal situation which you want/need to transcribe you will need an appointed court reporter. As we stated before, the court reporters do real time transcriptions through the use of their stenographers. 

Today most of these legal proceedings are recorded and they can also be transcribed later. This is a great thing for the lawyers since they have the opportunity to listen to the recording and notice little mistakes which might show themselves as important for them to win the case. When it comes to legal proceedings, a very accurate recording, stenograph or transcription is of utmost importance to prepare relevant arguments that could later on turn the tide of the proceedings into defendants’ favor, or, on the other hand, if the team of the plaintiff had more info and attention to detail, that will benefit them also.

So, if you want to transcribe an audio or video recording a transcription service provider is a very good choice. You need to make sure to find a transcription service provider that has a proven track record of precision, reliability, and almost fanatical devotion to providing transcription as fast as possible. This is only possible if the provider of transcription service employs a team of skilled professionals, with years and years of experience of transcribing numerous complicated legal recordings. The team also has to be well equipped with good devices and programs to reproduce the recording, and they have to be able to recognize subtle nuances of the so-called legalese speech. One provider comes to mind, and it has a very memorable name – Gglot. Yes, that is us, and we are here to provide you fast and reliable transcription services that can impact your court proceedings profoundly. Communication is crucial here, and it has to be based on impeccable transcripts that leave no place for error. We are here to help you go through the proceeding with the best possible documentations, flawless transcripts that you can then share with the members of your legal time, and spend more time exchanging ideas, brainstorming and planning your next move.

Turnaround time for legal transcriptions

When we are talking about legal transcription services, we must highlight that when transcribing audio or video recordings, the most important option in the program or a button on a recording device is the Pause button, because it gives you possibility to pause the recording, to rewind it and to listen to it again and correct potential mistakes. After a lot of pausing, rewinding and forwarding, a lot of coffee and stretching breaks to relax the nerves, the end result is a transcription that, when done by a professional, prides itself with high accuracy and reliability. You can guess by yourself what would be the main disadvantage of this type of manual transcription of legal recordings, it can be quite time consuming and it takes a lot of mental effort and focus. These resources could all be put to better use by exploring something more pertinent to the legal intricacies of the case itself. In most cases, the person that has undertaken the arduous task of transcribing legal recordings will need to put in around four hours of work to transcribe one hour of audio or video content. This of course can vary, depending on the experience, education and training of the transcriber, but also on the quality of the tape. Even though transcriptionist don’t have to be formally educated like court reporters, they still should know they way around legal terminology. This will make their job much easier and they will be less prone to error if they have the capability to infer from context, based on their understanding of legal procedures, if something makes legal sense or not.   

Conclusion legal transcription and court reporting

Court reporters are real time transcribers and they are usually needed in proceedings in which judges are present. They are a mandatory part of a court procedure, and their role is to provide real time transcript of everything that transpires in the courtroom during a certain proceeding. It is important to have such a transcript in the heat of the moment, because then each side can refer to transcript made by a court reporter, and double check what was said previously. A good defendant or a plaintiff usually has great memory, and when some inconsistency is noticed in someone’s story, that can be immediately checked in the real time transcription made by the court reporter. In some other cases, outside the room with a judge, especially if you are working with audio or video recordings, legal transcription services might be a better choice for you.

If you want to get your legal transcription fast, you need to find a professional transcription service which collaborate with trained, experienced legal transcribers. Also, make sure that your transcription service provider is able to give you an accurate result even if the speakers in the recordings use slang or speak in a dialect or have strong accents.
Gglot is a legal transcription service provider which works with many professional and reliable transcribers. Our transcriptions are accurate, turnaround time is fast and our prices are fair. Visit our user-friendly homepage for more information.

We know how legal proceedings can be stressful, and it is our mission to make your life easier in those trying times by providing you with the best possible transcription of any audio or video recording pertinent to your legal case. We are here for you, we will save you a lot of your precious time and enable you fast and efficient communication between the members of your team, based on exchange of easy-to-read, well formatted and precise transcripts, that will be delivered to you in a blink of an eye.

Another important factor in all this is the usefulness of transcription in archiving. If you have all your legal recordings transcribed, it will be much easier to organize and archive them for future reference. This is essential when it comes to very complicated legal cases, involving a lot of sessions, appeals, countersuits and all manner of legal complications that naturally arise when the case is not clear cut, but instead is a battle of words, details, precision, argumentation backed by facts, and of course, references that stem from a well-organized archiving system of transcripts. There is no need to haphazardly lose your temper and hope if you are involved in one of those endless proceedings, the most important thing is to have faith in your organizational skills, enough patience to carefully listen to recordings, or even better yet, go through transcripts, and step by step build your case. Rereading your old transcripts can give you a fresh perspective on the current situation, you might find how you can improve some aspects of your argumentation, and some new ideas might pop up spontaneously if you dedicate enough attention to retracing your steps and finding new legal paths. To conclude, we hope we shed some light on the distinction between court reporting and legal transcription services. We tried to explain the numerous benefits of having a good legal transcription in complicated proceedings, and we gave you a good recommendation for a legal transcription provider that is called Gglot. Yes, that is us, and we stand by our promises. We got your back when it comes to absolutely any kind of legal recordings and we will provide you with an extremely precise transcription that might turn the tide of the legal proceeding your way.