Planet Depos recently provided court reporting services for a week-long arbitration in front of the American Arbitration Association (AAA). For consistency purposes, one reporter was scheduled for the entire proceeding. The parties were on the record at 7:30am each day and ran some nights until almost 10pm. Realtime feeds were provided to all parties and rough drafts were sent out to a distribution list immediately following each day’s proceedings. The following excerpt was taken from the transcript on the last day of the arbitration.
ARBITRATOR: And then last, but not least, our court reporter. I think she did an astounding job.
(Applause)
ARBITRATOR: And I order you to put in the middle where we, I just said that, parentheses, applause, end parentheses, by everybody in the room, because it was well deserved. And as you well know —
Attorney 1: And she did it.
ARBITRATOR: — I’ve used lots and lots of court reporters in my life, and had them at hearings of mine. And this was, as I told her some time earlier off the record, the job of a court reporter is to do a perfect job and be totally unnoticed. And she not only did a perfect job, she was totally unnoticed. She never had to ask us to stop, and she never asked us she needed to take a break. She never had to ask us for a minute that said we had to turn to her and say, oh, she’s somehow interfering with the flow of this case. It was, in my view, perfect. Thank you.