Depositions and Legal Transcription: The Seven-Hour Record

This is Talk Type, from the team at Pepys, where we turn talk into text.

Here's a number that sounds precise, and isn't. The average deposition. People ask how long one runs, and they want a clean figure. There isn't one. No court system publishes an average, because the length swings with the witness, the pile of exhibits, and how many objections cut into the questioning.

What is fixed is the ceiling. In federal court, a deposition is capped at one day of seven hours of on-record testimony. That's Rule thirty of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Treat seven hours as the wall, not the norm. Plenty finish well short of it.

And that seven-hour clock is stranger than it looks. It counts only the actual questioning. Lunch doesn't count. Breaks don't count. So a seven-hour deposition can spread across a much longer calendar day, and it can run past seven hours entirely, because the court has to grant more time if that's what it takes to examine the witness fairly.

State courts? Different story. The seven-hour rule is federal. Most states set no durational limit at all. The few that do range widely. Illinois caps it at three hours. New Hampshire allows up to twenty. So before you assume a seven-hour day, check the rules of the court that governs your case. A single average would hide all of that.

Now the part that matters when the talking stops. All those hours become pages. A federal court's rule of thumb is one minute of testimony to one page of transcript. Run that against a full seven-hour day, and you're looking at up to about four hundred and twenty pages. Real transcripts run lighter, short answers, speaker labels, double spacing, all that white space. But that's the ceiling you plan around.

Here's what makes legal transcription its own animal. Two things. It leans verbatim, every word, every false start, because how something was said can matter as much as what was said. And it's confidential from the moment you hold the audio. A lawyer's duty to protect client information reaches every recording and every draft in the matter.

One more thing worth keeping straight, and this isn't legal advice. The official record is the transcript a certified reporter signs. Under federal law, only that certified transcript is the official record. An AI draft, however clean, isn't that. But it's the fastest way to a working copy. Manual verbatim transcription can run up to six hours of work for a single hour of audio. An AI first pass turns that hour into minutes, plus your own cleanup.

That's the honest split. Route the certified record to a reporter. Use the fast draft for the real work, reviewing discovery, summarizing testimony, pulling the one quote that wins a motion. And because the audio is privileged, use a tool that never trains on your files and lets you delete them once they're transcribed.

The deposition is over in a day. The record it leaves behind is the case.

That's this episode of Talk Type. The full write up, with the links and sources, is in the show notes. Pepys transcribes any file or link, any length, pay once, and we never train on your audio. Your first sixty minutes are free at pepys dot co. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.