This article was originally published in Summer, 1998.
Depositions are one of the most crucial information gathering tools of any litigation action.
Getting the deponent to disclose or confirm the sequence of events, explain crucial documents, and tell their version of the story is the goal of every good deposition. While the purposes of depositions haven't changed in years, the tools available to help manage them have. If your arsenal for managing deposition and trial transcripts still consists of highlighters, sticky notes, and summaries or digests prepared by someone else back at the office, one of the transcript management products reviewed here may be for you. If you are still searching for the diskettes provided by court reporters using your word processor, it's time to take a look at one of the many software products designed to work with legal transcripts. There are numerous transcript management programs on the market, and we reviewed three that are designed to help manage every day tasks such as searching, annotating, and summarizing.