By Terralyn Graff, Barkley Court Reporters
As we venture further into this world of remote proceedings, I wanted to pass along to you some of the tips I have been hearing from our court reporters that you in turn can pass along to your attorneys or paralegals.
- When requesting a court reporter please provide a Notice of Deposition with proof of service. They need to know who opposing counsel(s) is/are, their contact info, and who they represent.
- Make sure the attorney or paralegal has an understanding of how the share screen feature works if that is a tool they would like to utilize during their proceeding
- Pay attention to those in attendance. Sometimes people drop off – like the court reporter or videographer.
- Remind your attorney not to talk over one another. The reporter literally can’t hear every single word if two people are speaking at once, including objections.
- Remind your attorney not to forget to take themselves off mute when they plan to object.
- When they do object, remind them not to whisper or veer far from their microphone. It slows the process down if the reporter must interrupt to have them repeat it.
- When marking exhibits, please have the files named with their corresponding exhibit number. If you don’t know what will be marked in advance, please label the file names during or after the depo before sending to the reporter.
- If they say, “I’d like to mark this” and not identify it, it makes for an unclear record. It’s a good idea to describe what everyone is looking at on the screen either through Bates numbers or the document’s title.
- Make sure they mute themselves and turn their camera off during breaks, it would be unfortunate for anything to be heard that was not meant to be.
- At the conclusion of the proceeding, please give the court reporter an opportunity to ask any questions or clarify something with all participants before they just say good-bye and leave.
I have a feeling that we will be staying remote for some time to come and anything we can do to help make it easier for all parties involved is the ultimate goal. If you ever have any questions regarding remote proceedings and how to best handle them. I would be happy to assist you.
Categorized in: General
| << previous | next >> |