Realtime Feed Degrading Mid-Arbitration: Untranslated Strokes and a Dying Battery
During a three-day arbitration you provide a live realtime feed to the arbitrator, both counsel tables, and a remote expert on a conference bridge. The venue will not permit a hardwired connection, so the feed runs over guest Wi-Fi. At 2:40 p.m. on day two, direct examination of a biomechanical engineer reaches 235 words per minute, and the feed begins showing 8 to 12 untranslated strokes per minute. The engineer's surname, Kirchgässner, renders as "church gasner," and the term tibiofemoral comes through as "table femoral." Counsel has already quoted one realtime line in a sidebar. Your steno machine battery is at 62 percent; the laptop running your CAT software is at 19 percent; the hearing runs until 5:00 p.m. with one 10-minute break left. You have a backup steno writer in the car but no second laptop.
1. What do you do in the next 90 seconds, and in what order do you prioritize those actions?
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The order is fixed by what is irreplaceable. The verbatim steno record is the official record and cannot be reconstructed; the realtime feed is a derivative courtesy. So:
- Keep writing without stopping. Do not halt to fix a dictionary entry mid-answer at 235 wpm. A missed stroke is a gap in the only authoritative record.
- Stroke the problem terms by other means immediately. Fingerspell Kirchgässner or use a brief you can define later; spell tibiofemoral letter by letter rather than accept a bad translation. Bad realtime is recoverable; a blank is not.
- Protect power. Plug the laptop into venue power now and swap to the backup writer only if the steno machine's charge genuinely threatens the session. A 19 percent laptop with roughly two hours of runtime is a closer risk than the writer.
- Characterize the fault. Untranslated strokes are a dictionary problem, not a bandwidth problem, so a hotspot will not fix them; the Wi-Fi may separately explain feed dropouts. Diagnose before prescribing.
Do not interrupt the examination to troubleshoot. Nothing here justifies stopping the record.
2. At the 10-minute break, how do you handle the dictionary, the realtime consumers, and counsel's earlier quotation of a bad line?
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At the break, work in this sequence:
Dictionary. Define Kirchgässner correctly (confirm the pronunciation with the witness or counsel rather than guessing), add tibiofemoral and the surrounding surgical vocabulary, and run a test feed through the bridge. Check whether the miss was a misstroke or a stale entry; if the term was already defined and lost, the entry may have been corrupted.
Consumers. Tell the arbitrator and both tables, on the record if possible, that realtime is an uncorrected working feed and that names and technical terms may appear incorrectly until the certified transcript issues. Advise the remote expert not to quote realtime lines in any filing and to cite the certified transcript instead. Realtime consumers are entitled to that warning; it is not an admission of incompetence.
The quoted line. Note the timestamp and the exact realtime rendering. It will almost certainly be corrected in the certified transcript, so flag it now so counsel can verify before relying on it. Offering the correction proactively is better than letting an error surface in a brief.
Document all of this in the job log for later reference.
3. After the session ends, what do you document, and what goes on or with the certified transcript?
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Document four things in a contemporaneous job log: the times the degradation began and ended, the specific terms affected and their incorrect renderings, the corrections made and when, and the notifications given to the arbitrator and counsel.
On the certified transcript, the corrected spellings and terms simply appear correctly; a certificate attests to accuracy, and the transcript should read as it should have read. If a realtime line was quoted by counsel before correction, include an errata or correction page identifying the page and line and the change, so the record is transparent about what consumers saw. Do not silently alter a line that may already be in a brief.
Check the notes against the audio if the venue recorded it, particularly for the two minutes after the rate spike, when strokes may have been dropped. Verify the surname's diacritics against the witness's own spelling. Retain the original steno notes and the pre-correction dictionary state until the appeal period expires; if the accuracy of the certified transcript is later challenged, the notes are the evidence. Notify the arbitrator in writing that the certified transcript supersedes all realtime output.