Transcripts Anywhere from $200 to $750
Video Transcribed: How much does it cost to get a transcript for an Oklahoma hearing? I’m Oklahoma Attorney James Wirth. We’re talking about court reporters/stenographers’ transcripts. And this question is, how much does it cost?
And there are two fees involved. Initially, you pay the $20 nominal fee to have a court reporter present at your hearing. It’s a civil hearing, you do have to make that request and pay it. Otherwise, it will not be a court reporter, you essentially waived that. And then it comes down to what’s the cost of the transcript, and that’s the substance of the question here.
What does it cost to get a transcript? And the court reporter will quote that for you based on an estimate of the number of pages. And these pages, are not single-spaced, they are double-spaced. There is not a lot they fit on a page because they charge per page, and that’s a standard way that they do it in the industry.
So the cost per page last I knew for an official court reporter at the courthouse, rather than a private court reporter or stenographer, they charge $3.50 cents a page.
If I’m putting on a preliminary hearing, I’ve had transcripts anywhere from $200 to $750 depending on how detailed that preliminary hearing was, the examination on that. If you’re putting on family law hearings, trials, it depends on how much information was put into the record, how long did that hearing last.
They can be very expensive. For some of the appeals I’ve done, the record just to pay for the transcript, the cost was thousands of dollars. But that’s if you want that transcript, it’s got to be paid.
It’s paid to the court reporter. And then they take two, six weeks is a reasonable turnaround time that they’ll give you, and then they’ll have that available for you.
Now, the estimate that they quote you upfront, that you pay before they start, could be slightly off from what it ultimately ends up being. They estimate the number of pages. Once they get it transcribed, this number of pages could be different.
And they have to put in a lot of work to transcribe that. It’s not just what they type down when they’re in court, that’s shorthand for it. So they’ve got to turn that into the full transcript. And a lot of times, there might be some holes, some gaps, and things that may have been missed or misunderstood. So they actually use an audio recording they take in order to fill those in, which requires them to listen to it, rewind, go back, forward, try to figure out what was said, and get it in that record.
So that takes time, and that’s why they charge for that time. There’s a standard fee. As I said, I believe it’s $3.50 cents per page. And that’s what the cost ends up being. Once that is done, their estimate of the number of pages may have been slightly off. So they may be a little bit nominal.
You need to pay above that for a few additional pages if they are estimated incorrectly. So that’s the general information of what does it cost to get a transcript for an Oklahoma court proceeding. If you’ve got specific questions or you’ve got a scenario you need to talk about, you’re going to want specific information, not just general information from this video. You’re going to want to talk to an attorney privately, confidentially about that. To get that scheduled with somebody at my office, you can go online to makelaweasy.com.
