By Christine St. Pierre, Contributing Editor

COURTS TODAY, New York. - June/July 2008 - Records of court proceedings and depositions have come a long way. Once done by hand, the procedure evolved to shorthand and then stenography machines. While some courthouses still use stenography machines or court reporters that repeat words into a steno mask, many have moved to audio and visual recording systems. The challenge with this technology comes inherent questions of accuracy, ease of use, security and system failures. With advances in technology in the 1990s, software was developed that could record depositions or court proceedings on a desktop computer. These products allowed notes to be added to recordings, including time stamps, correct spellings and other important facts. "Technology took a giant leap forward at this time," notes Neal R. Gross, president and founder of Neal R. Gross & Company, a provider of professional court reporting services and transcription to private and public sector clients.

What's Available Today?
Yet however advanced the technology became, several criteria stands out as a requirement for courts. "Quality of the recording, ease of use and integration with the rest of the courtroom's systems is vital," says Nicholas J. Porter, Ph.D., AudioSoft Ltd.'s VP of sales and marketing for North America. With approximately 50,000 of the company's recording systems in use worldwide, it supplies dedicated courtroom recording, playback and transcription solutions that fully integrate with workflow management, scheduling and third-party case management systems. Its Court Reporting solution includes AudioPC-CR, a solution for computer-based digital recording and playback of courtroom proceedings, which can be scaled from notebook-based solutions for mobile courts to high volume courts, local hearings and lengthy jury trials. It provides audio and CCTV recording for storage, playback and transcription. For transcription, the AudioWord tool speeds up transcription by allowing audio transcribers with conventional foot pedals to control playback of recorded data within Microsoft Word, or the Medirva product provides workflow management of transcription resources and automated speaker-independent transcription with optional contextual search. The AudioSoft Player helps to verify who was speaking by replaying all recorded content including speech with lip synchronized video together with the court reporter's annotations.



Videographers for Esquire Deposition Services capture a witness's
deposition or hearing and synchronize it to the transcript.
Another technology, VIQ Solutions Inc. provides digital recording for courts and depositions with a suite of software solutions. These capture digital audio-video records that are searchable, shareable and easily stored. The company offers scalable solutions that range from all-in-one recording devices that replace aging analog tape decks, to complex, multi-location integrated audio-video systems that can transfer files across servers and networks. The Encompass Suite is a number of components that can be bought singularly or together and can manages all information for courts. One option, Encompass Networked, allows for multiple locations to record audio and/or video to a single server and every workstation can access audio recorded by any location across the network.

Providing court reporting services for depositions, hearings and arbitrations throughout the U.S., Esquire Deposition Services has more than 60 owned or networked conference and meeting rooms available. Customers can call their local company representative to schedule a court reporter for anywhere in the country. The company, which does 400 depositions per day nationwide, offers audio and video recording, remote video streaming and video-text synchronization, among many services, says Peter Hare, vice president of marketing. Also available in all states, Neal R. Gross & Company has court reporters that use a full range of litigation support software, offer compressed mini-transcripts with keyword and full-text indexing, e-tran-scripts, real-time reporting, as well as videotaping.

How Technology Has Helped
For a time, many thought—and some worried—that technological advances in recording systems would replace the need for court reporters. If someone could just pop a tape into a recorder, was there a need for someone to be in the courtroom or at a deposition with a machine taking notes? But what technology brings are more accurate transcriptions faster. "In this industry, everything has a time delivery deadline. If you have a court date next week, you need to have that deposition transcript in your hand in time to review it," explains Gross.

"There is a huge volume of data that needs to be managed," stresses Malcolm Macallum, chief technology officer of VIQ Solutions. "Court systems are now recognizing that this large volume of information needs to be kept for a long time, some up to 30 years for immigration and criminal cases." He explains that so much of the information stored in for cases is still on analog tapes, written transcripts or different CDs, making it unmanageable and difficult to search for. "But if all of this information is indexed, tagged and searchable, and can bring up video with a click of a mouse, then this becomes a very powerful tool."

Pitfalls to Using These Systems
"Most of the pitfalls with electronic recording systems occurred when analog recorders were used," notes Porter. "Now, the concerns are if something goes wrong and you don't know about it, or if data gets corrupted afterwards." AudioSoft's systems include live monitoring facilities which allow an immediate playback of the data that's been recorded onto disk, which can be done locally or over a LAN using the playback application or Navigator tool. According to Porter, Navigator allows the user to control, monitor and fault find on any recorder from any location connected to the recorders by LAN. If something should go wrong, the recorders support automatic archiving of data to CD-ROM, DVD or a separate archive machine. "This archiving is transparent to the user and they don't need to do anything, it just happens. The key thing is to give as many options as you can along with tools to make set-up as easy as possible," he adds.

"Like making a choice on insurance, what you put into it is what you'll get out of it," explains Macallum. "You always want to make sure you don't have a single point of failure. There used to be many concerns, but they've been addressed with the products that are available today."

Short of the power failing and everything in the courthouse shutting down, the only other pitfalls Gross sees is the same as any other human endeavor. "Someone still needs to be monitoring the equipment and the recordings, so you'll know immediately if there's a short in a microphone, someone kicks out a plug or a witness not speaking clearly," he says. "It always comes back to the operator. Is that person familiar with the equipment, knows its limitations, knows what's going on in the room, and paying attention?"

Storing and Retrieving Transcripts
Since flipping through pages and pages of transcripts seem to be a thing of the past, when information is needed, the expectation is it's found quickly. "But that means that easy retrieval becomes even more vital—we all have many files and information on our computers that we know are there but we just can't find them," says Porter. To overcome this, both AudioSoft and VIQ Solutions software has textual bookmark information and data tags embedded within the recorded data itself, so audio and video records can be retrieve quickly by doing searches through a simple interface or through hyperlinks within a case record document. And Encompass Suite also offers an easy search interface that allows audio to be quickly located as well as customizable hotkeys for quick annotation.

The Future of Recording Systems
Armed with a virtual crystal ball, these leaders offer their predictions for what's down the road and what to expect. AudioSoft's Porter sees two visions for the future: "Even more integration with case management software and complete audio/video workflow solutions for transcription. Machines are never going to replace court recorders and transcriptionists, but they will enable them to work more efficiently," he notes.

What Esquire Deposition Services' Hare feels is in the future is even better online searchable repositories. "We want to find things faster and faster, and customers expect that now." He also predicts more online viewing of audio and video clips. "Everyone's trying to be 'greener,' and if you can view these online, why do you need the paper versions?" he asks.

VIQ Solutions' Macallum agrees. "It's tough for courthouses to go through changes, but once the employees see the flexibility of these products, they'll want to manage all of the information they've captured. Workflow and information management systems are more than about just acquiring the information, but rather how you manage all of the information."

"But no matter how you do it,
ultimately, it's still a human being doing a job and they need to be professionally trained," Gross emphasizes. "We're not talking about machines versus humans, but humans choosing the most appropriate technology for their assignment." CT

For more information, contact:

Neal R. Gross & Co., (202) 234-4433, www.nealgross.com
AudioSoft, (877) 428-3464, www.audiosoft-usa.com
VIQ Solutions, (800) 263-9947, www.viqsolutions.com
Esquire Deposition Services, (973) 377-7750, www.esquirecom.com