Is it "our job" to keep time for the seven-hour rule?

[Quyen]

I don't remember it being a code/reg that we, as court reporters, are required to keep time. Isn't it technically the lawyers' job to do this, since they are the ones required to abide by it? I had an attorney tell me it's "my job" to do so; I beg to differ. Am I wrong? I despise keeping time. :/

[Marge Teilhaber (TILE hobber)]

If they want an estimate, I go through the transcript and tell them when we went on and off and they jot it down and take it from there.   Our only job is to make that info available to them when they ask.   AND THAT IS IT.  That lawyer is a jerk.

[Quyen]

"That lawyer is a jerk." -- Yup. You said it. He even admitted it to opposing party, not in so many words. I wanted to tell him we can do it as a courtesy, but it's not "our job." Decided against it and choose my battles, so I bit my tongue since it was a big firm . . . and his ego even bigger.

[Marge Teilhaber (TILE hobber)]

Smart move to STFU.  Big firm, hopefully excellent work, so we eat it!

[Kelli Combs (admin)]

Hey, Quyen, I hated doing it too till I realized my iPhone has a stopwatch on it and you just pause it when you go off the record and start it again when you go on.  It takes all the headache out of keeping the time.  However, you have to remember to turn it off and on and that's the hard part.

I've been doing it myself for quite a while.  I love when the videographers are there and they take care of it.  Do you have an iPhone?  It's so much easier.

[Quyen]

I have the Samsung Galaxy S5, and it does have a stopwatch feature. The only problem is that I don't always remember to stop/start/pause the damn thing, so it ends up being a futile attempt. Then I have to go back and find all the breaks and manually add up the time. Grrrrrrr!!! I just don't want to be responsible for the precious one or two minutes or 10 minutes, even, remaining/over if my math is off.

[Amanda Leigh]

I don't know about the federal 7-hour rule; but I know in Texas, for the 6-hour rule, the reporter is required to keep up with the time.  My software does it. Now, that being said, it also says, for Texas rules, that lengthy time spent looking a documents is not to be counted as time used and that it is the court reporter's responsibility to keep up with that time, as well, and deduct it from total time.  It does not give a definition of how long is a long time, so quite subjective.  Guess it could be a marketing tool: "Our reporters consider any time spent reading documents a long time!"  Lol.  Eclipse needs to let us set a timer where it will stop the clock after X seconds/minutes.

[Martha R]

I have timers linked to my question Q stroke (timer on) and Recess Taken stroke (timer off).  So it's not a problem for me. I'm on CC.  I'm sure Eclipse has that too.

[Quyen]

Omg, Martha, thank you! When you said CC has that feature, I figured Eclipse must have it also. Took me all but less than a couple minutes to find it! It even breaks it up into individual speakers and the total time. YAY!!!

[Marge Teilhaber (TILE hobber)]

Martha, how does it work in Catalyst?  You add [timer on] to what?  All your Q strokes?  I have billions of them.   It's certainly easy to add [timer off] to "recess taken" parentheticals.   Can you explain it a little?

[Martha R]

Well, you can add it to a stroke any way you want, but I added it to Q.   Basically in your personal dictionary I have Q. designated as    Q.{start timer}[1]  

my stroke RAOES/RAOES  is defined as {stop all timers}<Centered Paragraph>(Recess taken.)

Pay close attention to type of brackets { } vs. []

Under Tools/Option/Timer information  there should be a Timer 1 set up.

To see the timer on your transcript.  View/Show/timers.

I might be missing something but I think that's it.

[Marge Teilhaber (TILE hobber)]

Thanks so much, Martha.  Great to know this.  Appreciate you taking the time to give me specifics.

Marge

[Eric Gilliam]

I think that timer function on Eclipse is called timekeeper.  It's a great function.  Quyen, I think there is a FAQ on that subject on the Calif CSR board website.  It's been a while since I've read it, but I believe that the CSR board's position is that we are NOT responsible for keeping track of the time.  It's up to the attorneys.  However, with timekeeper, it's so easy to do, it's sort of a no brainer.