What is legal transcription?

Legal transcription is the work of turning recorded speech from legal settings into written text. The text must be exact, follow a format set by a court or a firm, and keep the matter confidential. The four main kinds are court proceedings, depositions, law-firm dictation and evidence recordings.

Legal transcription turns four kinds of recording into written text

Most legal transcripts come from one of four sources. Court proceedings are recorded and written up as the official record. Depositions are questioning under oath outside the courtroom, and the transcript goes to the lawyers in the case. Law-firm dictation is a lawyer speaking letters, memos or drafts for someone to type. Evidence recordings are the audio of interviews, calls or meetings that a party needs written out.

Law-firm dictation is often the simplest entry point, because one speaker records into a device. Court work is the most demanding. The official court record is written by a stenotype operator or a voice writer using a voice-writing mask, and that method takes years to learn.

Federal law requires a verbatim record of court proceedings

The official record has a legal basis. Under federal law, each session of a federal court must be recorded verbatim, by shorthand, mechanical means, electronic sound recording or any other method the Judicial Conference approves ¹. The method can be a recording, but a recording is not a transcript. Someone still has to write the words down in the required form.

The format is set by rule, and it is part of the job

Courts set the format of a transcript. In the federal format, each page of transcript must contain 25 lines of text ². The federal format is fixed, which is why federal transcripts follow the same layout. Our question on the format of a legal transcript covers the federal rules in more detail.

The format also affects price. Some courts charge by the page: Maricopa County's contract sets a fee of $2.00 per page for a regular deposition transcript ³. A format error can change the page count, and with it the bill.

Confidentiality is part of the job

A legal transcript often holds privileged or sensitive material. Before you send client audio to any tool, including an AI transcriber, you need to know whether the tool keeps or reuses what it receives. A commentary on the American Bar Association's Formal Opinion 512 says that informed consent is required before client information is entered into self-learning generative AI tools whose outputs could disclose it ⁴. Ask the firm or court that owns the case before you upload anything.

Drafts from software must be checked against the audio

A transcript can start as a machine draft, which a person then checks. Machines can invent text. In a 2024 study, roughly 1 percent of Whisper transcriptions contained entire hallucinated phrases or sentences that did not exist in the audio ⁵. Comparing the draft with the recording is the check that catches those errors. A reader of the finished text may not notice them.

A workable check follows four steps. Play the audio, compare every sentence with the draft, check names and amounts against the case file, then apply the format last so the page count is correct.

Where to go next

Legal transcription is a field with its own credentials, pay and training. For how the work is done, read the guide to legal transcription. For the difference between dictation and transcription, see dictation vs transcription. For the job itself, our question on whether legal transcription is a good career covers the pay and demand, and the dictation for work overview covers the wider field.