The Different Types of Court Reporters

The job of a court reporter is more important than most people realize. You may not know what their exact job description is, but odds are you have seen a court reporter on television. Their role is more than just taking down notes from trials, and there is more than one type of court reporter.

List of Different Types of Court Reporters

There are six different types of court reporters:

• Scopist
• Officials
• Legislative
• Hearing
• Real-time
• Freelancers and Firms

The Different Types of Court Reporters

Taking the time to look at what each type of court reporter does can help you better understand their importance. A scopist is a court reporter that transcribes and edits for other court reporters. This means that they may take the transcripts from a real-time reporter and then work to edit and make them more concise for release to the public.

Officials are those that convert the procedures from court to text. This is for any sort of court proceeding, not just criminal proceedings. They can work transcribing traffic court, family court, and even jury duty court proceedings.

Legislative court reporters stand in while the United States Congress and individual state legislatures are in session. Hearing reporters work with trial and pretrial proceedings to ensure that each and every step of the process is reported and transcribed so that it can be referred to later. They often use equipment to capture the proceeding verbatim so that there is nothing left out and so that the exact proceeding is captured with no changes.

Real-time reporters create captioning for broadcasts. This means that they may be present in the courtroom if the trial is televised, and there needs to be real-time captioning of the proceeding for people watching it on their television or on monitors outside the courtroom. They also provide captioning for anyone that might be hearing impaired who is part of the proceeding.

The last type of courtroom reporter is freelance or working for a firm instead of directly for the court. These professionals can create records of stock meetings, meetings of unions, association meetings, and more.

All the different types of reporters have been trained similarly and have the same set of skills, but some have extra skills. These individuals are crucial to all sorts of proceedings and creating a written record of events so we can look back later to see what actually happened.

Categorised in: Court Reporting

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