Realtime is where you make your money. It’s the foundation for a good rough draft and a final that can be delivered quickly.
An attorney who books a realtime reporter is paying to follow testimony as it happens. A rough draft as clean as you can get it shortly after the depo is also a paid deliverable that clean realtime allows. And the attorney who gets your final transcript is paying for an accurate record.
Readable realtime, a rough draft shortly after the depo, and an accurate final transcript. Three deliverables.
Two Approaches
One writes phonetically. You choose to employ some conflicts because they enable easier writing— outlines trained in the dictionary that may not always translate properly in every context.
You know they’re there. They’re not surprises. You catch them in editing and fix them with a selection or a global replace, same as you’d fix anything else on your editing pass.
Part of the job.
The other briefs everything. Every phrase gets its own dedicated outline. The memorization is massive. The key combinations are physically demanding. You have to predict what the speaker will say next before you commit your fingers.
The goal is no conflicts on the screen.
But more difficult writing doesn’t produce nicer realtime. It produces misstrokes and drops.
A trained conflict is a known quantity you can find and fix. A misstroke or drop can be anything.
Trying to be perfect will make you worse. So will selecting a subpar approach.
The Realtime Screen
The attorney following along doesn’t need perfection. They need to follow what the witness is saying. A conflict that translates wrong in context doesn’t break anything. The attorney reads right past it. Most of the time, the trained conflict translates correctly anyway.
The attorney doesn’t tell the sales rep following up that the conflicts bothered them. The attorney says they couldn’t follow what was happening.
The Rough Draft
Conflicts get cleaned up in editing along with everything else — punctuation, paragraphing, parentheticals. They’re one more thing on the editing pass you’re already doing. Global. Move on.
Drops are a different story.
The word never made the page. You can fill some holes later from audio, but if there are too many, you won’t get to all of them before the rough has to be delivered.
It’s a separate task on top of your normal editing pass — listening back, hunting for gaps, reconstructing what was said. Time you’re spending because you couldn’t keep up, or they whipped the words past your brain, and you had to let them go. Attempting to reconstruct causes more damage.
Reserve
The reporter writing phonetically isn’t maxed out during routine testimony. When the witness speeds up, when attorneys talk over each other, when the expert launches into a technical explanation at 240 words per minute — there’s somewhere to go.
The reporter running the brief-everything system is already at the ceiling during routine testimony — just to keep up with normal speed. When it gets hard, there’s nothing left to give. That’s where words disappear, and the system is the reason.
What Phonetic Writing With Trained Conflicts Gives You
A more complete record — nearly every word makes the page
Readable realtime the attorney can follow
A rough draft you can deliver no matter how hard or long the proceedings
Reserve capacity when testimony gets hard
Trained conflicts that get globaled on the editing pass you’re already doing
No memorization load beyond the base theory
No prediction gambling
No physically demanding key combinations
A system that holds up under fatigue
Confidence in your transcript
Clients who call back
What Brief-Everything With No Conflicts Gives You
Fewer strokes per phrase on paper
The illusion it works when conditions are ideal.
The reporter with reserve outperforms the reporter running at capacity — every single day, and will still have his job when the first wave of AI digitals take the low- and medium-level reporters right out.
That day is coming. You don’t see it yet.