Court reporting is a competitive industry and court reporters are always looking for ways to maximize the service that they provide to attorneys to get repeat business. By providing services like RealLegal e-transcripts (those .ptx files that you often get) or real-time reporting, court reporters keep their attorney clients happy, and the attorneys use them again and again for depositions.
I've tried out the product using some test transcripts provided by the developer, and it works quite well. Upon launching the app, you see a list of the cases for which you have depositions.
Tap on a case name to see a list of the depositions, and then tap on a deposition to start reading. When a deposition launches, you are given the option to start a timer in case you want the app to keep track of how long you spent viewing the depo. Unfortunately, the app itself cannot tell you how much time you spent reading a deposition; you need to access the website and view your account information to get the elapsed time.
The default text is white on black, but you have many other choices such as black on white. You can also change the font size.
When you are reading the deposition, you tap the arrows at the top right to go page by page. Each page represents a full transcript page, so if the app says "Page 6" at the top, you are on page 6 of the actual transcript. Unfortunately, there is no way to jump directly to a specific page number, and if you exit the app it does not remember which page you were on. I'd like to see that added in a future update. (As noted below, the developer does plan to add bookmarks, which would be one solution to this.)
It is nice to be able to read transcripts on an iPhone, but the real key feature is the ability to highlight text. As you read something important in the transcript, tap once on a line to highlight the line. Tap again to remove the highlight.
When you are looking at the list of all of your transcripts for a case, there is an Edit and a Mail button at the top right. The Edit button allows you to delete transcripts from your iPhone. The Mail button allows you to send either the transcript file itself (a plain ASCII file which does not indicate the lines that you have highlighted) or a table listing the page and line numbers that you highlighted (a format useful for deposition designations).
The developer told me about some of the improvements coming in the next version in a few weeks, such as better navigation controls, the ability to e-mail highlights from within the transcript instead of from the list view, and the ability to jump to the next highlight (a great addition). And when iPhone Software 4.0 comes out, the developer plans to add a bunch of new features including bookmarks, the ability to e-mail the entire transcript with yellow highlights as a PDF file, the ability to swipe a finger to move from page to page (instead of having to use the arrow keys), word search, and the ability to save when you are in airplane mode. Another feature on the horizon, one which will be very useful, is the ability to export highlighted lines as a Q and A in words instead of the current version which only sends page and line numbers.
The court reporter, not the attorney, pays for this service, and the price ranges from $29 for a single reporter to $99 a month for a large agency of up to 19 reporters. (Just as a point of comparison, an individual court reporter pays over $140 a month to create RealLegal e-transcripts, although of course the service that Mobile Transcript provides is different from what RealLegal provides.)
For the attorney, the app is free and it costs nothing to download transcripts. The only question for me is whether attorneys will see a value in this app — and, therefore, an advantage to hiring court reporters who offer this service. Do people want to read entire transcripts on a screen the size of an iPhone? If an attorney plans to read depositions during a commute or when traveling, then perhaps yes. In an office, however, most attorneys would probably rather use the larger screen of a computer. But for those for whom reading a transcript on an iPhone makes sense, the app certainly makes it easy for attorneys to read transcripts and highlight text, and the planned new features will make the app even more powerful. You don't need an app like Mobile Transcript to read a deposition on an iPhone; you can always just convert an ASCII transcript to a Word file and read (and even highlight) the deposition using an app like Quickoffice or Documents to Go. But Mobile Transcript offers a lot of advantages such as the ease of downloading transcripts, the ease of viewing and highlighting, the ability to prepare a table listing lines that you highlighted, etc.
Mobile Transcript is a nice app for attorneys looking to read and highlight transcripts on an iPhone. When the updates planed for the future, this app will become even more useful. And even if reading long transcripts on the small iPhone screen doesn't sound ideal to you, the developer tells me than an iPad version is also in the works, and on an iPad this app could be amazingly useful — perhaps even far better than reading a transcript on a computer. Thus, the Mobile Transcript app is interesting not just because of what the current version offers, but also because it provides a glimpse into the future of mobile lawyering using an iPhone or iPad. If this looks like something that you would want to use today, encourage your favorite court reporter to sign up for the Mobile Transcript service.
Click here to get Mobile Transcript (free): 
