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Maybe you’re asked occasionally to transcribe legal information. Or maybe you’re considering options for a career change. Either way, consider learning more about legal transcription. Legal transcription—listening to dictations from attorneys and keying them into document form to create and maintain organized and detailed legal records—can be key to helping your firm win more cases or helping your company conduct better business. It’s a new field with a lot of potential.
Currently, no formal training is required to become a legal transcriptionist and some firms and companies go offshore due to lower cost. In addition to keyboarding speed and accuracy, though, many firms and companies look for:
· Extensive knowledge of the English language
· Excellent grammatical skills
· Prior experience in the legal field, which brings knowledge of law and legal terminology along with an awareness of which information is necessary in legal documents—a point in your favor
Specific skills
A good legal transcriptionist needs to be able to:
· Listen to a phrase or meaningful word group, key those words, and listen again before completing the first group of words
· Understand legal terminology and use it correctly
· Analyze what is being dictated and listen to the dictator’s tone of voice as a guide to aid in correct punctuation
· Produce transcribed copy that is set up attractively and is free of spelling, punctuation, grammar, or typographical errors
· Transcribe legal reports at a minimum rate of 45 correct lines in 30 minutes
· Review documents for weak areas and make improvements by studying rules and examples
· Proofread transcripts with 100% accuracy.
· Use information found in the appendix, roots, prefix, and suffix sections of legal reference texts and materials
· Identify, define, and produce a variety of transcribed legal records and reports
Resources
Just go to www.altavista.com, www.lycos.com, www.yahoo.com, or any other search engine site—or to www.amazon.com or www.ebay.com—and search on “legal transcription” to find books, audio CDs, computer software, and background information that can help you sharpen your skills or consider a new career. Or go to www.google.com, where you’ll find course offerings.
Whether you just want to make yourself more valuable to your current employer, or you’re making a change of career, best of luck!