We’d love for YOU to vote for us!

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We are honoured to once again be nominated by you, our amazing clients, for the Canadian Lawyer Readers Choice Awards for 2021.

We’ve had a big year, building partnerships that matter, to provide the best court reporting and legal solutions across the province. Now, we hope we can count on your vote. 

Our category is #25 Court Reporting and Deposition Services.

Our partners at United Reporting are also nominated in that category and congratulations to them!

You can find the link to the voting survey here.   You have until August 20th to submit your survey answers. 

Introducing REMS: Reportex Errata Management Solution

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Trial transcripts of complex proceedings involving constitutional and charter challenges that will likely find their way to the Supreme Court of Canada require special care and consideration in order to ensure that appellate courts have the most accurate evidence before them. These types of trials tend to run for months or even years, and the volume of transcript pages produced can reach into the tens of thousands. Highly technical expert evidence, dense terminology, and First Nation orthographies involving multiple dialects are just a few of the challenges court reporters face when striving for accuracy and consistency across their transcripts. Add in more and more virtual courtroom attendance by counsel and witnesses, and these challenges increase exponentially. 

Why REMS?

For 15 years Reportex has utilized a complimentary errata protocol for its complex trials, giving parties the opportunity to provide suggested corrections to the reporter for their consideration prior to certifying the transcripts. This protocol is not mandatory and is only implemented if the parties choose to participate; however, in our experience, parties are pleased to have this opportunity, and their efforts ultimately ensure the best possible transcription of the evidence. 

Until recently the parties would provide their errata suggestions to the reporter by email. Depending on the number of parties involved, this could get a bit unwieldy, and this prompted Reportex to find a better solution. For the past six months, we have been building the Reportex Errata Management Solution (REMS), which we recently launched for the Cowichan Tribes trial. 

What is REMS?

REMS is a cloud-based repository (in Canada) where counsel can access transcripts (and download them individually or in batches) and enter their errata suggestions. Reportex can then respond directly to suggestions right within the REMS. The program is automated to generate email reminders of impending errata due dates, and responses to the errata are in different-colored font. Parties can collaborate on their errata lists as a team, and they can collapse/expand days to see the errata that has been received and/or responded to. There is also a prompt for reporters if they upload duplicate files, and REMS will automatically update the transcript status accordingly based on file naming conventions.  The list of features goes on and on.

REMS was built for Reportex by Penticton-based developer Colin Fletcher in conjunction with realtime reporter Kelsey Fletcher, who is currently reporting the Cowichan Tribes trial in Victoria, which was going into its 300th day at the time of this announcement.  This case involves seven parties, three First Nations orthographies (Halkomelem, Hul’qumi’num and Hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓), numerous expert witnesses and reams of historical documents. Although Reportex’s reporting/editing teams utilize well-honed systems to ensure accuracy and consistency, the sheer volume of evidence spanning years makes it inevitable that errors will creep into the transcripts.

Christy Pratt, realtime reporter, and owner of Reportex, told us that “REMS has completely revolutionalized our errata process, making things so much more efficient for our clients and our reporting/editing teams. It’s clean and polished and professional and just generally fabulous.”

Developing systems and efficiencies like REMS for our court reporters is part of what we at Reportex consider to be thoughtful extras. Enabling our teams to work more efficiently in the production of highly accurate, consistent transcripts ultimately means better service to our clients.

You can learn more about our services and solutions here.

Connect Series: Meet Shishi Fan

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Shishi is Reportex’s production coordinator. She has the responsibility of printing, assembling, and couriering all legal transcripts and making sure they are delivered to our clients on time. She is also responsible for providing clients with invoices for reporter-attended proceedings, medical transcriptions, and mediations.

Shishi is a true-blue Vancouverite (born and raised here) and another indispensable HQ staffer.

Your talents are in great demand at Reportex. What personality traits do you believe are most important for the role of production coordinator?

It’s hard to pick one in particular, but the ones that come to my mind are adaptability, persistence, and patience. There are many small pieces in my job, so I need all three of these traits to set a schedule for the day (and/or week) to juggle and determine the priority of said tasks. If certain tasks don’t get done in a day, they will snowball into a little mountain, and I’ll find myself trying to dig out of the mess later. If I have to pick just one, then I will say persistence. You need persistence standing in front of a mountain of transcripts, persistence in getting answers from clients, persistence in staring at numbers on invoices every day, and persistence in chasing fellow co-workers for their coffee orders every Friday.

All in all, I would say you need to be a good multitasker with a weird memory reminding you of things that Slack reminders don’t.

At Reportex our core values of team, mentorship, equality, community, and industry are central to what we do. Which of these values resonates most with you and why?

I would say team and community. I feel I am working with a highly efficient team that helps me while I help them out too. I can’t do my job without my fellow colleagues, and I know they rely on me as well. We have so many people working in Reportex doing their own things now, and Reportex needs every one of us. I can still remember the days when I had to share an office with Kim and Max. I’m delighted to see how much the Reportex team has expanded.

We have been discussing wellness on the blog and our internal Slack channels. Do you have a favourite way to recharge or any tips to share on staying well, especially during these COVID months?

It’s no big secret, but my favourite way of recharging is definitely napping. And not just any napping — I feel the best napping is on weekend afternoons with the guilty pleasure of wasting the best sun hours away. I don’t see the need to force myself out in those best sun hours if it’s not in me. I think what’s most important is to feel comfortable and allow yourself to feel comfortable. After a good recharge nap, I will get up again and get going on my tasks for the day. And then at the end of the day I can reward myself with some snacks. I go through a cycle of work, rest, work, rest because inevitably I will burn out if all I do is work, work, work without thanking and rewarding myself in some way.

So yes, I do talk to myself in my head occasionally saying Shishi, if you finish this task, you can go eat some of that chocolate; it’s waiting for you; you can do it!!

We all need a bit of encouragement to get through the days sometimes, and chocolate sounds like a great way to reward ourselves! 

Mask Policy (Update: July 9th, 2021)

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As we now know the BC Government has moved us up to stage 3 of their Covid Recovery Plan.  For the workplace, this includes switching from a Covid-19 safety plan to a communicable disease plan and allowing for more staff to return to the workplace and more in-person meeting capacity.

We at Reportex have worked hard to safely accommodate our clients who required a safe and efficient space for in-person legal services throughout this pandemic.   And while the BC PHO has dropped the mask mandate to a recommended status, the BC Centre for Disease Control still encourages masks to be worn in indoor settings and especially for those not yet fully vaccinated.

Being that this includes a great many of our in-office staff, we ask that you continue to respect the safety of our staff, yourself, and your clients and wear a mask inside all common areas, and meeting rooms unless plexiglass barriers are present.

For in-person meetings, we are also going to continue to limit the number of people present to 6, including the court reporter.  We will review and revise this policy as new health & safety information presents itself. 

You can learn more about our safety protocols here.

We thank you for your patience and understanding.  Our goal is to always ensure the best service for our clients and this includes your health & safety.

How to Celebrate Canada Day

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by Kerry Sauriol, Marketing Coordinator

Last year we all felt cheated out of our Canada Day fun thanks to COVID-19. This year feels even worse and for so many more reasons. The pandemic has dragged on for over a year now, despite advancements in vaccine distribution and slightly lower numbers here in BC. While we have not experienced the lockdown rules that many provinces and countries have endured, we are all still feeling a bit put out about the restrictions that have hampered many things that we all took for granted.

When my kids were small, one of my favourite places to take them to celebrate Canada Day was Queen’s Park in New Westminster. As an expat from the UK, it felt more British to my mom and myself. However, after living in Canada for over 40 years, I am fully aware of how loaded with a horrific history that feeling really is. 

If an immigrant like myself is feeling overwhelmed by the news about the children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, and the many graves still to be found across Canada, imagine the feelings of the Indigenous people who are once again having to face the facts of the intergenerational trauma that has been placed upon them to this day.   

Over the last year and a bit COVID-19 has exposed the many inequities that the people of Canada face. This includes (but is certainly not limited to) access to healthcare, sick pay, work-at-home opportunities, lack of safe work environments, unemployment and the underhoused.  The news surrounding these issues has been one bad story after the next. For a country that prides itself on equal opportunity, it’s hard (and controversial) for many to find anything to celebrate in all of that.

Then we all got more bad news: 215 bodies of children found in a mass grave at a residential school in Kamloops. And the numbers keep growing with 715 unmarked graves in Saskatchewan being announced on June 24. If this news was shocking and upsetting to the non-indigenous citizens of Canada, imagine how it feels to the First Nations people? As Alison Tedford, diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant, recently said in a Facebook post:

“It’s hard to celebrate a country where people in power don’t care what happened to people like you, like your grandparents, like your parents, like your sisters and cousins.”

So what do we do?

We listen. We learn.

At Reportex we are looking at how we can make sure we are walking the talk, especially when it comes to living our core values: team, mentorship, equality, community and industry. This may take the form of sensitivity training as part of our onboarding and an audit of our current diversity and inclusivity mandates. We also want to make sure that we as a legal service are inclusive and sensitive to the needs of our First Nations clients.  

For the rest of us it means taking a long, hard look at what it means to be a Canadian and what we want it to mean moving forward. How do we make Canada a better place for all?

Part of it means becoming more aware of our own inherent biases and our blindspots when it comes to understanding what living in Canada is like for other people. We need to be able to have the uncomfortable conversations and make the effort to uncover the truths of how this country was built and the cost to those who were here already.

In an article for VancouverMom.ca Alison said:

“I believe the key to reducing and, ideally, eliminating racism and race-based violence is increasing understanding of each other. It’s easy to lash out at groups of nameless, faceless people who are different from you. Familiarity can reduce the tendency to lump people in as ‘others.’ When we make room in our circle for people who are different from us, we expand our circle of responsibility for each other and leave less room for hate.”

So while we do have many reasons to celebrate being Canadian today, we can also spend some time getting to know more about the people whose land we now exist upon:

We need to own the discomfort that these new revelations and the many other atrocities put upon the First Nations people of Canada and sit with them so we can reconcile all the negative aspects of our Canada with the positives that have made this country great. We can then take that knowledge and move forward with the goal of making this place better for all who live here.