Are Transcripts Suffering Because of Real Time?

As some of you know, I've been a court reporter for 13 years now. Granted, I haven't been practicing in a couple of years, but I have kept my license up. I feel or I'm hoping that it's going to be like riding a bicycle - though you might not have ridden one in a while, you can get on one and ride with the best of them.

Anyway, as some of you also know, I've been involved in a lawsuit against my former employer. I was five months pregnant at the time I was fired. I was fired due to my pregnancy. We wound up settling the lawsuit at mediation.

That being said, my husband and I had to give our depositions in that case. I'm not writing this to slam the court reporter who took our depositions. But I feel like I have to write something about this issue.

The court reporter who took our depositions was writing real time. For all you non court reporters, that means she had her steno machine hooked up to a laptop computer, and everything that was being said, she would type on her steno machine and the testimony would pop up on her laptop screen in English where anyone could read it. There were no attorney's hooked up to her laptop, which means the court reporter was the only one viewing the testimony as the deposition went along.

My problem is this...well, actually I have two problems (maybe more as I go along, but for right now just two that I can think of.) The first problem I had was I have never in my life heard of a court reporter interrupting the testimony as many times as she did. Granted, I was so worried about the court reporter and her getting a clean record, that I think I made it worse. As she said before the depo started, Court reporters make the worst witnesses. That might be true. Anyway, she asked us to not speak over each other a minimum of seven or eight times. It got to the point where the last time she threw up her hands, rolled her eyes, sighed and looked at me saying, You know better than that.

One other gripe I have along those same lines: None of that is in the actual written transcript. I cannot remember one time in the transcript where it says: THE REPORTER: Could you please stop talking over each other? In fact, there is not one THE REPORTER: anywhere in the transcript and like I said earlier she interrupted us more than seven or eight times during the depo.

In my opinion, transcripts are supposed to be word for word. Everything that is said on the record is in the transcript. Court reporters aren't supposed to pick and choose what goes in the record and what doesn't. And if the court reporter gets disgusted and throws her hands in the air and scolds you and her hands obviously aren't on her machine writing what she's saying, then that's one of the many reasons why you have tape backup. You still put every word in the transcript.

Secondly, and here's where the real time part comes in, when I tried to read through the original transcript, I could hardly read it because of the lack of punctuation. There were no --'s at the end of interrupted sentences. There were only a few ...'s at the end of incomplete thoughts, if any.

Following the advice of my attorney, I did not sign my transcript nor return it. We wound up settling the case before the transcript was due back to the reporter. I did, however, read through it. I have a list of changes and/or corrections about three or four pages long.

Since I have been out of practice for a while, is this a new trend as far as transcripts are concerned? I would never, ever put out a transcript like that. I took pride in my work...maybe too much pride. I don't know. But I tried to proofread transcripts like a regular, non court reporter would be reading it - meaning if you could read, you could understand all the testimony just as if you were sitting in the room when the deposition was taken.

To me, it seems like everyone thinks that faster is better. Let me tell you, that's not true. Turning out 10 unreadable transcripts in one week is not better than turning out 5 readable ones...I don't care how much money you make off of them.