From Court Reporting to Trial Preparation (Software Tools Part 3)
CT Summation iBlaze® has long been one of the standards of in-house document review. Less well known is the fact that this software (which originally launched under DOS) started as a way to capture (using built-in Realtime reporter support), analyze and annotate transcripts.
This capability is still an inherent part of Summation’s make-up. A glance at the Case Explorer panel shows Transcripts as a main section. The check boxes in this and other components – the document coding and metadata Core Database, OCR text, electronic documents, document collections, Pleadings, Chronology, and People – allow “blended searches” to be run across all elements of a Summation case database.
In Summation, a transcript or group of transcripts may be searched, annotated, and digested. Selected portions of transcripts may be linked to images or Core Database records to create a “chain of evidence”. Notes themselves may contain the selected excerpt, individual comments, flags, creator and date information, and Issue codes selected from the same lookup table as that used in the Core Database. The mark in the margin of the transcript looks like this:
It is easy to go from one note to the next, or search notes by text, issues or other criteria. As mentioned above, creating and saving a digest for one or more issues is also simple. Three clicks on the Digest menu produce a report that looks like this:
Summation pulls together all the pieces of a case, with excellent transcript analysis tools at your fingertips.
