Covert Transcription - a Tough but Necessary Procedure In any legal dispute, lawyers may require the assistance of a legal transcription company for transcribing phone calls, courtroom proceedings, testimonials, depositions, hearings and so on. These must be transcribed and recorded as documents for presenting to the court and also for future reference for the plaintiff’s attorney. The sheer volume of transcription would make it necessary for the task to be outsourced to a reliable transcription company. Covert recording transcription takes the transcription challenge to a significantly higher level. It involves transcribing audio recordings by devices placed in hidden areas, unknown to the person, or persons, whose conversation is being recorded. That’s why covert recordings are unclear and sometimes inaudible. It gets really hard to make sense of what’s going on. Just to give you an example, a mere two minutes of recording could take close to an hour to transcribe. Covert Transcription Challenge Police transcripts of covert recordings are often unreliable, and the jury just cannot get the true picture based on the transcription carried out by the police themselves of the recordings they’ve made. This has been proved in research in Australia. Covert recordings obtained legally are being increasingly used in trials and hearings in Australia, since they can often present crucial evidence which would not be available through other methods. However, the obvious noise distortion makes it practically impossible to make out what’s been said. The police, who do the covert recording, are allowed to present their transcript of the recording to guide the jury in understanding what’s being said. Since the police are not known to be transcription experts, the judge cautions the jury to not rely much on the police transcripts. In spite of this the transcripts do influence the listeners, and the research indicated how much the truth was at variance with what the jury presumed by combining the recorded audio with the police transcript. Accurate Covert Transcription Can Alter Lawsuits In the United States, these kinds of recordings sometimes play a crucial role in employee lawsuits, and in some cases the information gets misused as well. Employees secretly record their meetings or interactions with their employers or colleagues to drive home their point. Though this is considered a controversial practice frowned upon by some judges, the evidence presented via such recording is still considered admissible in employment tribunals. The truth that comes out from these recordings could turn the tide of the case, which is why it makes sense to outsource this to experienced legal transcription companies. They have the experience and the technological solutions that enable distorted voices to be deciphered more accurately. Vital Qualities for Covert Recording Transcription •
A vital quality that transcribers of covert recordings need to possess is immense patience. Parts of the audio may have to be replayed and listened to again and again for capturing even minute segments of data.
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A good deal of time and energy will be spent listening to the recordings, and then intelligence plus a combination of linguistic and phonetic skills will be applied to transcribe them, aided by software solutions to ensure accuracy.
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The transcriber of covert recordings must also be more experienced and skilled than the other transcribers who carry out general transcription. These recordings are almost always filled with background noise and there is plenty of distortion. This makes transcription really difficult. Experience is everything for a covert transcriber. It is also important that the transcription company realizes the sensitivity of the information at hand since it represents crucial bits of evidence. Security measures must therefore be high tech and foolproof to ensure confidentiality of the data.
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These qualities are crucial since wrongly transcribed recordings could hamper the delivery of justice. It is important to get the recordings professionally transcribed by transcriptionists thoroughly experienced in the field.