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Realtime transcription
software for the 21st Century
Sellers Legal Services has some 90 years experience in providing
courtroom services in the UK. Today it combines a team of expert
stenographers and fully supported specialist software to provide
a complete solution. Among the litigation support software that
Sellers produce is a powerful new realtime transcript analysis
tool called BriefCase.
Realtime transcription simplifies and speeds up court procedure.
Mental notes can be quickly transposed into on-screen notes,
making hastily hand-written reminders a thing of the past. Delays
caused by note-taking, poor courtroom acoustics or ambiguities
in evidence are avoided. Time spent each evening searching the
transcript for key passages of evidence is greatly reduced.
BriefCase enables solicitors,
barristers, judges or paralegals to mark, annotate and search
for text in a transcript live in court within seconds of the
evidence being given. Briefcase integrates with Computer Aided
Transcription (CAT) - which translates stenographers' shorthand
into English - to turn realtime transcript into formatted text
on screen. Uniquely, BriefCase allows users to search the text,
write comments on it, print or e-mail it, without disconnecting
from realtime (CAT) so that nothing is missed from the proceedings.The
system is completely networkable so that text can be transmitted
to any number of courtroom laptops.
"We were looking for a 32-bit solution which would offer
our clients greater speed, functionality and reliability than
our competitors' 16-bit designs. After comparing with other search
tools on the market we chose dtSearch", said Nic Lyons,
chief developer of BriefCase.
The dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine allows BriefCase to offer
full-text queries both on the transcript text and the annotations
which the user had added, with Boolean, phonic and fuzzy methods
supported. Query 'hits' are provided along with context and position
information. Users just click to open the transcript with matched
words highlighted.
"The dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine has allowed us to
quickly produce a very advanced product, and its 32-bit design
allows for greater integration with future systems", said
Mr Lyons.
"Sellers is well qualified to support BriefCase, having
provided CAT training for three-quarters of all UK courtroom
note-takers when it was first introduced into British courts
in the early '90s", noted Ray Harris, MD of ElectronArt
Design Ltd., UK distributor of dtSearch since 1992. |
BriefCase