Exploring Careers in Legal Transcription: Beyond Court Reporting (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: One of the very first things that people ask me when they find out I'm a legal transcriptionist is, wait isn't that what a court reporter does? That is a great question and I would love to explain a little bit about how a legal transcriptionist fits into this industry and I'd also like to explain some of the other careers that are kind of legal transcription adjacent so stick around. Six years into my career I have found myself in such a nice little niche and I really like it but I'm just one transcriptionist. There's lots of people with varying skill levels, varying experience levels that enter or end this career in different facets of the industry. Basically all over North America there is a lot of different ways that we can do takedown in the courtroom. For some reporters that might just mean recording the audio and then having to have a transcriptionist type it. That might mean that you're a stenographer who actually doesn't even use a transcriptionist that often or you could be a voice writer or other methods where it's kind of in between and you vary on the amount of help that you may need from a transcriptionist. There is also large agencies that work with many court reporters and many legal transcriptionists to make sure that all the work gets done from all of their parties and there is a large amount of proceedings and pages that are happening that aren't necessarily just from a court reporter to transcriptionist. There is a middleman in between to help facilitate some of that transaction. Another really secret part of the profession is another job called scoping. So this job is a little bit harder to get into because it requires software that's quite expensive. It's around three to five thousand dollars US and that is where you can actually go into the court reporter software and edit behind the court reporter. I recently started doing this a couple years ago and there's definitely things that are different but I think that my strength as a legal transcriptionist has made me a really immaculate scopist. Another career that's kind of in the realm of all this is what's called a proofreader. So that's when the document is pretty much done and you're just going through to check for errors or anything that needs to be adjusted. This is a really difficult job because you need to know the sites to the certain punctuation rules. You need to have a consistency and knowledge of this that's very advanced. So just in my personal opinion I think it's best to start as a legal transcriptionist because then you're really building the document from scratch and you learn every facet of that. And hey if you want to move on to be a proofreader one day it's less labor-intensive. You get paid a little bit less and there's a little bit less work available in the field but it's something you can do and services that you can provide as a legal transcriptionist. If you have any questions about this profession drop a comment below. I also have a frequently asked questions list listed in my bio. Please feel free to check out any of my One Alive events. I usually go live pretty much every day. Thanks for watching.