Why is Legal Transcription Important?

Former United States politician Barbara Mikulski once opined that, “Courtrooms across the country are our protection against redlining and discrimination.” Was she right? Well, we can never be sure, but one thing is clear: that is certainly a high opinion to have of courtrooms as compared to what was once uttered by Clarence Darrow, himself a lawyer and member of the legal profession, “There is no such thing as justice — in or out of court.”

In any case, whoever may have been right between the two mentioned above notwithstanding, at least one thing for everyone remains clear: the legal profession is a very complicated one.

Daily, lawyers, judges, and other legal practitioners sit down and try to make sense of a hundred and one cases, which can differ wildly from something as comparatively simple as tax evasion to something more complicated such as arson or murder, to the somewhat bizarre or weird such as someone suing someone because a seagull attacked her.

With that kind of volume of work coming in, how do legal professionals adapt? How can they make sense of each court proceeding, each and every testimony and affidavit and memorandum and summonses?

Enter legal transcriptions, defined broadly as any spoken legal proceeding or dictation into a text format. These kinds of transcriptions deal with all aspects of the legal profession, can  be done live or via recordings, and can be created either by a machine or a human transcriptionist.

Legal transcriptions provide legal practitioners with a variety of benefits, which include but are not limited to:

1. Plan cases better - Perhaps the most important of the benefits that legal transcriptions provide, legal transcriptions significantly make it easier for legal practitioners to review cases and prepare their avenue of attack or defense. The legal profession is often said to be a profession that relies on quick tongues and the ability to keep calm under pressure. Legal transcriptions allow legal practitioners to do the above-mentioned things by giving them the tools to thoroughly prepare themselves to make piercing questions that might just break down the other side’s defense, or else mount a riposte that may even lead the other side to make a mistake that they can then exploit to win the battle of wits.
2. Get accurate information - What can a lawyer do without information with which to pursue the case? What can a judge without knowledge of the case he or she is hearing do? Legal transcriptions give legal practitioners a fighting chance by giving them all the particulars of a given case.
3. Target what needs to be targeted - Depending on how complicated a case may be, seemingly unimportant details that would actually lead to victory in a case can be buried under tons and tons of audio files, video recordings, and the like. Legal transcriptions allow legal practitioners to find these details, study them with an unflinching eye, and then mark them for future reference.

Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that legal transcriptions are the bread and butter of the entire legal profession, the Robin to lawyers’ and judges’ Batman, the Jack to legal practitioners’ Rose. Using legal transcriptions allow practitioners of the law to do their job with skill and grace.