The Complete Court Reporter's Handbook

by Mary H. Knapp, Robert W. McCormick

This practical guide presents all aspects of court reporting across a wide range of court and legal procedures. Packed with forms, sample written knowledge tests, and review questions, this book provides an excellent source of information about how court reporters function in the real world. Serving as a hands-on ÒHow toÓ reference on different aspects of Court Reporting, this important resource covers various types of reporting assignments; how to administer oaths; how to report interrogatories, statements, and depositions; how to handle parentheticals, objections, exhibits, and interpreted proceedings; how to take and transcribe court cases, computer-aided transcription, word-processing, daily copy, testing, and video grand jury work. It also covers topics such as ethics and notary public duties. Finally, it provides practical advice to typical problems encountered in the field. With a reorganized presentation, the third edition of Legal Assisting/Court Reporting has been revised to incorporate changes in technology and demonstrate how these changes affect the role of the court reporter. Among these new technologies are: realtime writing, computer-aided transcription, instantaneous viewing of the transcript, immediate recall of all litigation documents, closed-captioning for the hearing-impaired, Braille copy for the visually-impaired, and instant multi-language translation. The book also discusses the use of court reporting skills in a variety of other professions including rapid data entry specialists, medial transcriptionists, classroom captioners, business meeting reporters, and others. An essential reference for every law professional and court reporter.

332 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[Amiee · Rating 4 out of 5]

The current edition (5th) of this book is $200, so I was happy enough to start with the 2nd edition (1991) for $7 off eBay to start.

Clearly, a lot of this is outdated, having been published right before the advent of things like Google and Wikipedia. And some of it is old school sexist, like the bit that instructs me to make sure my skirts, "are short enough so everyone knows I'm a woman, but long enough they know I'm a lady," which is definitely the kind of advice my 75-year-old father might give someone. I suspect some of the work depicted as reporting in this book might now belong to paralegals instead, but I'm not positive.

But there is a lot of great content, much of it similar to what I learned in my (2022) Procedures class. In fact, my mentor says this WAS the procedures book when she was in school. There are sample transcripts, lots of good info on what reporters do besides steno, and more. I'm sure I'll look for a current version eventually. The new version includes things like realtime so I'm sure it's worth the $$.