DEPOSITION TRANSCRIPT SERIES / PART TWO OF THREE
Use the right tools to analyze your deposition transcripts and build a winning case story.
As we mentioned in Part 1, there are many important tasks and responsibilities involved in a litigation matter, but telling a story is a key goal of an effective litigation strategy. Reviewing emails, texts, and PDF files in an ediscovery project reveals a sliver of the story. Litigation teams also frequently depose individuals and witnesses to get a fuller picture of the interplay between people, events, and issues. The transcripts from those depositions (as well as those from other legal proceedings) are invaluable for constructing a compelling story.
Deposition Designations: An Essential Tool
“Designations” are the basic building blocks for tracking information in deposition transcripts. You can create designations for relevant issues and assign them to corresponding sections in the transcript text.
But don’t limit your designations to specific “legal” issues – the tool becomes even more useful when you capture all your relevant thoughts and pertinent facts. You can certainly use a “negligence” issue designation when appropriate, but you should also set up designations for “evasive” or “non-answer” or “important!” so you can track everything that’s helpful. Ultimately, you can use these additional notes as you incorporate transcript testimony into your overall case story.
You can also create designations for specific events so you can identify them quickly whenever they’re referenced in the transcript. All your designations become the basis for running reports; they can also provide a clickable list that allows you to jump directly to a specific section of the transcript.
For example, in Nextpoint, your case administrator can set up designations in Settings, which will be available for all users when they read through a transcript. They can assign a unique color to each designation so they’re easy to differentiate in the transcript text.
To add a designation in the transcript, click the first line of the relevant section and you’ll see a green arrow appear on the right. Then, click the last line of the section you want to mark and you’ll see a red arrow. Now, head to the dropdown at the top, select a designation or issue that pertains to the marked section, and click “Submit.”
Choose the issue or sub-issue for your designation.
Click two lines of your transcript to create a deposition designation.
In the left margin of the transcript, you’ll see colored dots that correspond to the color that was assigned to the designation. This gives you a quick visual when scrolling through the transcript as to what sections have been associated with a designation.
You can also add a note for any designation, which would be the equivalent of putting a sticky note on a printed paper transcript. Add any notes that will help you remember why you marked that section. It’s also helpful to add notes that connect the designation to the overarching issues in your case.
When you add a note to a designation, the colored dots on the left margin change to exclamation points, and you can hover your mouse over them to reveal the note’s content.
Deposition designations appear with their associated color on the left-hand margin. Exclamation points mean the designation has a note; hover over it to see its contents.
Browsing Designations and Exporting Reports
Once you’ve read through the transcript and assigned designations, you can click the “Browse Clips” dropdown, select a designation, and view a list of those designations by page and line number. Clicking an entry will jump you directly to the specified section of the transcript. This is extremely helpful when you need to focus on precise segments or questions.
The “Browse Clips” section also gives you the ability to create video clips based on your designations, which will be covered in the third post of this series.
Click on a timestamp to head to that portion of the transcript.
As you may have already surmised, designations are a tremendously effective method for summarizing lengthy transcripts, enabling you to zero in on the most significant discussions. There’s usually a lot of extraneous chatter in deposition transcripts that gets in the way of the juicy parts you need. Adding designations to the relevant sections helps you cut out all the noise, and you can export a list of page and line numbers for easy reference to the key sections.
Even better, you have several options for generating reports that cover all or some of your designations. First, you select which designations to include in the report. Next, select your preferred report type. The Summary PDF will generate a PDF that only includes the text from the selected designations, and you can elect to include the associated notes. You can also export a simple text file, which is useful for importing the transcript into other platforms. There’s also a CSV report type in case you want to view the designations in spreadsheet format.
Construct your customized transcript report.
A Full PDF Report from Nextpoint’s transcript management platform.
Related Documents and Convenient Links
Another helpful capability of transcript management tools like Nextpoint is the ability to quickly jump to a relevant document or exhibit from a transcript without having to open another piece of software or take time to locate it in a labyrinth of boxes or folders. When the transcript refers to an exhibit, wouldn’t it be convenient to click a link and open that document immediately?
In Nextpoint, the first step toward this convenience is to create a folder for the related set of exhibits or documents. In your transcript, you can click the “Relate Folder” button to associate that folder with the transcript. Now, you can see a list of documents that you can open without having to click away from your transcript analysis.
If you sync related documents with your transcript, you can easily click to relevant exhibits without disrupting your transcript analysis.
The next step truly makes your workflow seamless by creating hyperlinks in the transcript to specific documents. Certain types of transcript files may already include linked exhibits (see Part 1 blog post); however, it’s also easy to add them manually in Nextpoint. In the related documents tab, you can add “link text” for each document. When you make “Exhibit 1” the link text for a file, it will automatically hyperlink every mention of “Exhibit 1” in the transcript to that document. Clicking the link opens the related exhibit in a separate tab in your web browser. No more wasting time and frustration trying to track down the right exhibit – it’s just a convenient click away.
Add “link text” to a document to create hyperlinks across the entire transcript.
After connecting the relevant documents, you can create hyperlinks in the text of your transcript.
Comprehensive Case Analysis Done Right!
While having the transcripts, designations, and related files in one place is incredibly useful, these are only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to a legal case. You always have a set of facts and important details that just need their own place to live as you use them to construct a cohesive argument.
In Nextpoint, that home is the new “Chronology” tab, where the litigation team can collect Facts, Issues, People, and Key Documents and identify relationships between those items. You can even transform your case story into a visual timeline to use at depositions, hearings, trials and more.
Finally, you can track the progress of your case using the Evidence Dashboard, which provides an overview of your documents, deponents and more. It also includes space for case notes and supplies quick links to important items in your database.
Nextpoint’s Evidence Dashboard provides an overview of your documents, deponents and more.
The Evidence Dashboard also supplies quick links to your deponents and linked exhibits.
More Deposition Transcript Tips
As you can see, assigning designations to your transcript is the most powerful and flexible method to effectively track the information you need to craft your story. In Part 3 of this series, we’ll discuss how designations can even be used for video testimony.
★ Get the Right Tools for Your Deposition Transcripts
Nextpoint’s comprehensive deposition transcript software is integrated with the rest of our ediscovery and case building tools, so you can keep all your evidence in one place. Click the button below to schedule a demo and see how Nextpoint can streamline your deposition and case prep process.
