Legal Transcription Services

Legal Transcription is the process of documenting (writing down) a conversation between two or more people.

It sounds easy, but in fact requires immense concentration and without professional training, most people find it very difficult to do so adequately. Interview transcriptions can be done in real-time or from an audio or video recording. Interview transcription is required when a conversation is deemed important enough to be transcribed and put into text, shared, analysed, published etc.

If you are not a trained transcriber the sky is the limit in terms of how long it may take to transcribe a 60 minute interview! The transcription industry standard time is between 4 – 6 hours to transcribe one hour of clear audio, or about one hour for every 15-20 minutes. An interview 45-minutes long should take around 3-4 hours. This is an approximate number. Depending on the circumstances (how clear the audio is, if jargon terms are used, accents) the process may be quicker or longer. As our transcription team are professional and highly skilled, we normally transcribe around 40 hours of interviews every day.

Our professional transcribers can work on time-sensitive projects to the speed of up to 90 wpm (words per minute). Having said this, the actual transcription speed can change depending on the nature of what is being transcribed. There is no official typing speed in the transcribing profession, though most professional transcriptionists can type at a speed of at least 50 wpm. At McGowan Transcriptions our transcribers have a minimum speed of 75 wpm with the majority hovering around 90 wpm. This dramatically slows though if the recording is of poor quality, has strong accents, a complex template or is of a technical or medical nature.

Yes, AI transcription services can be useful, and they do have their place, but for the most part, the best way to transcribe your audio and video files is still to have a human being involved. Manual transcription will convert your audio files into the most comprehensible and legible text format, ready to use right away. This provides you with high-quality transcriptions that are error-free, well formatted and compliant. A few of the other benefits of using human transcription services include:

• Being able to ignore background noise and ensure it doesn’t make it into the final transcript.
• Handling and understanding regional accents and dialects, or non-UK accents, without errors.
• Being able to identify any number of different speakers in a recording.
• We can adapt to different templates and follow any specific guidelines, so your transcripts are unique.
• If you want a verbatim transcript, AI won’t be able to cope with it. Human transcribers can include laughter and other noises where AI can’t even recognise it.

In short, human transcribers can do a lot of things that AI software just isn’t sophisticated enough to handle yet. True, it is a more expensive option than using software, but the end result is a far better quality of transcription that you can be confident is correct and ready to use. At McGowan Transcriptions, we will always prefer using human transcribers over AI solutions, because while we’re a big fan of technology, this is one area computers just haven’t caught up with yet. We’ve been transcribing since 1993, so you can be sure we have the experience, expertise, and technology to provide you with the most accurate transcriptions possible for your business.