Court reporters are often asked after a deposition, “What did you think of the witness? Did you find the witness credible?” If you consider that a court reporter who has worked 30 years has sat in on close to 5,000 depositions and transcribed close to a million pages of testimony, it would be reasonable to assume that we have good insight as to these questions.
The fact is, though, that a court reporter rarely ever forms an impression of a witness. Our sole focus for the day is getting a verbatim record, distinguishing between whether what’s being said is an “and” or an “in” or a “when the” or “whether the.” It takes a very high level of concentration to hear these distinctions. Hearing a word incorrectly can change or alter the meaning of an answer or a question.
There is, however, other feedback that a court reporter can provide an attorney during a deposition. Most court reporters have a computer screen set up in front of them throughout the day and can see in realtime what the final transcript will look like as the deposition is progressing .
When a witness starts to answer a question before the attorney has finished asking it, there are dashes and unfinished thoughts throughout the transcript. If a witness is handed an exhibit and it’s not identified on the record, it’s unclear in the record what the witness was being shown. If a document is read into the record too quickly, it is often misquoted, leading to a lengthy colloquy as to what part of the document was misread, which results in a disruption to the flow of the testimony. Nonverbal answers and mumbling by a witness will necessitate interruptions by the court reporter in order to get clarification, which will result in parentheticals inserted into the transcript to identify that the court reporter needed to interrupt.
A couple of weeks ago an attorney turned to me at a break and asked, “How am I doing?” I said, “If you could slow down when reading from documents, it would make for a more accurate record. I take down your words exactly as you state them, whether it’s what’s actually written in the document you’re reading from or not.” The rest of the day the attorney read documents slower and the transcript became much cleaner.
I would encourage every attorney during a legal proceeding to collaborate with the court reporter in an effort to make the final transcript of the deposition as clean and clear as it can be. It will be appreciated when weeks, months or even years later it is read or referred to.