How to Automate ReporterBase

A court reporting agency is a scheduling business with a transcript attached

ReporterBase is office management software from OMTI for litigation support firms: court reporting agencies, legal video producers and interpreters. The current system is RB9, and the business it holds is one most people outside the law have never thought about.

A deposition needs a reporter, sometimes a videographer, sometimes an interpreter, a room or a link, a date, and a set of law firms who all have opinions about that date. The agency arranges it, then produces the transcript, delivers it to the ordering firm and every other firm that wants a copy, and bills all of them.

RB9 is where that lives: the job calendar with its colour-coded status, the reporters' turn-in, transcript production, the central repository and the invoices.

For an agency of a dozen reporters it is the schedule, the product and the receivables in one place, run by two or three people.

Keeping a job on the calendar takes longer than booking it

Scheduling a deposition takes ten minutes. Keeping it scheduled takes the week.

A depo booked for the eleventh gets continued, and the firm that cancelled tells one paralegal, who tells nobody. A reporter has to be confirmed and then reconfirmed the day before, because a covered job that turns out to be uncovered at nine in the morning is the one mistake an agency cannot make twice. The interpreter needs the language confirmed, and it is not always the one on the notice.

Afterwards comes the other half. Chasing exhibits that never arrived. Chasing the ordering firm about who else wants a copy. Submitting the invoice into whatever payables portal that client uses this year, then going back a month later to find out whether it was approved, rejected or parked.

None of that is court reporting. All of it decides whether the agency makes money.

ReporterBase

The depo that was quietly continued Court records checked against the calendar, so a job that will not happen comes off the board before a reporter sets off.

Invoices followed into the client's portal Whether a submitted invoice was approved, rejected or simply parked, read on the firm's own system rather than guessed at.

Credentials that expire on schedule Renewal dates for every reporter, videographer and interpreter on the roster, read from the boards that actually hold them.

RB9 moves information once it is inside RB9

RB9 automates the internal flow thoroughly, and that flow is the hard part of running an agency.

Information is entered once and then moves: a client request becomes a calendar job, the job feeds the reporter's worksheet and schedule, the worksheet feeds turn-in, and turn-in feeds the transcript and the invoice. Instant text message job notifications and email job confirmations reach reporters and clients without anybody typing them. RB Connect, the online office plug-in, lets clients view their calendar, order transcripts, download case files and pay invoices themselves, and lets reporters do turn-in and pull pay statements. RB-PDF Transcripts builds the PDF with a digital signature.

An agency running all of that has already removed most of its own retyping.

The limit is the one every system of record has. All of it starts from something RB9 was told. It was told the job exists, because somebody booked it. It was not told the case was continued, because that happened on a court's docket. It does not know a reporter's certification lapses in March, because that sits with a state board. It cannot see that June's invoice to a client's portal was rejected in July.

The dates that matter are set in somebody else's system

A scheduler could work from what the courts and the boards actually say, rather than from what the agency was last told.

Court records checked against the calendar, so a deposition continued last Friday comes off the board before a reporter drives two hours to a room with nobody in it. A cancelled job found late is either a fee the client argues about or a reporter's day given away.

The billing side has the same shape. Invoices followed into each firm's payables portal until they show approved rather than received, so a rejection over a formatting rule is fixed in July instead of surfacing in October when a client turns out to be ninety days out. Renewal dates for every reporter, videographer and interpreter, read from the boards that hold them, so a lapse is a diary note in January.

Requests that arrived by email overnight turned into a list on the scheduler's screen before the phones start. Cases watched for settlement, so the agency stops holding dates for depositions that will not happen.

Reading and comparing can run overnight. Anything going to a law firm, a court or a reporter is prepared and read by a person first, because here the relationship is the entire asset.

An agent can hold the calendar to what is actually true

The docket, the payables portal and the licensing board all have to be opened by somebody, and what they say written next to the calendar. None of that is court reporting.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as your staff are. It opens a court's docket, a client firm's payables portal or a state board's licence lookup, reads what each one shows, and sets it beside what your calendar says: what moved, what was rejected, what expires, what still needs covering.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it. Anything going to a client firm or a reporter is drafted and waits.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.