From the President

Because the legal profession is one of the fastest growing, we know how important it is to you to become a skilled and highly trained professional. Atkinson-Baker wants to help you be the best in your work, and when planning depositions.

This month, we included articles and tools that touch on learning more about handling deposition exhibits, the benefits of e-transcript features, and we lead off with a very interesting piece on how the brain of a court reporter works as they are taking a deposition.

As always, please send us your stories of professional successes or any tips and tools that you think other legal professionals will benefit from so we can share them with our other clients.

Best regards,
Sheila Atkinson-Baker

Frequently Asked Questions About Exhibits

Answers to Questions Regarding Handling of
Deposition Exhibits

Over the years, various questions have come up from attorneys and their staff regarding the court reporter’s responsibility for the handling of deposition exhibits and other documents. Following are some of the questions which have arisen and the general way in which such situations are handled. In this article we will be primarily looking at the issue from the viewpoint of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure since most states have fashioned their rules on the federal model.

Why doesn’t the reporter keep a copy of the exhibits?

This question most often comes up when an attorney wants to order a copy of a deposition after the reporter has already released custody of the original transcript to one of the parties or the court. A reporter is generally required by law to maintain a paper or electronic copy of their notes or the finished transcript (e.g. Federal Civil Rule 30 (f)(2) and similar state rules). The transcript is the product of the reporter and any copy of the transcript later produced by the reporter is an exact duplicate in content of the original.

Exhibits, however, are not the product of the court reporter and it is sometimes critically important which is the original and which is the copy.

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