Our Team in Asia

Jodi Harmon, Certified Realtime Reporter, Registered Merit Reporter

Jodi owns and operates American Realtime Court Reporters and is a working reporter. Following in her father’s footsteps, she became a freelance reporter in 1982. In 1993 she opened a court reporting agency in Florida, covering jobs throughout the United States and abroad on large-scale cases such as intellectual property, pharmaceutical, medical malpractice, asbestos, Big Tobacco and Enron litigation. Jodi's travels brought her to Japan in 2003 where her love for the culture, the people and the cuisine inspired her to open the first and only court reporting firm in the country.

Deborah Marshall, Registered Merit Reporter

Deborah's 31 years of experience include realtime closed captioning for television broadcasts such as NBC Nightly News, The Oprah Show, Good Morning America and a wide variety of sporting events from Major League baseball to World Wrestling Entertainment. While she was thrilled to be paid to watch TV, Deborah got the travel bug and took a two-year assignment in The Hague, Netherlands, covering history-making trials at the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Deborah loves to travel and learn about different cultures, hike, read, play chess and stay in contact with friends and family scattered throughout the world.

Dee Gentile, Registered Professional Reporter, Certified Shorthand Reporter

Dee started her career as a Communication Access Realtime provider (CART) for the hearing impaired, after which she worked as a freelance court reporter for seven years before accepting a position at the Special Court of Sierre Leone (SCSL) to report on the war crimes that took place during Sierra Leone's 11-year civil war. She later moved across Africa to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) where she provided realtime and daily copy during the multilingual Rwandan genocide trials for 1.5 years. Dee is now enjoying the less emotional job of covering patent depositions in Asia.

Melanie Giamarco, Certified Realtime Reporter, Registered Merit Reporter

Melanie has been reporting for 24 years and has spent a large part of her career freelancing internationally in such exotic locales as Brazil, Australia, Germany and England. She has extensive experience in reporting high-end cases involving pharmaceutical, re-insurance, intellectual property and asbestos litigation. Melanie enjoys mountain biking, skiing and whitewater rafting and is always up for an extreme challenge, both personally and professionally.

Tracey LoCastro, Registered Professional Reporter, Florida Professional Reporter

Tracey began her realtime career in 1993 when the technology was still in its infancy. Tracey’s reporting experience includes internet trials (2005 Coleman vs. Morgan Stanley trial, streaming realtime to 40 connections per day) and depositions in Italy, Venezuela, Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Korea and Taiwan. In 1997, she was on the realtime team covering the first ever "Big Tobacco" trial in Miami, Florida, which lasted 18 months, streaming hundreds of pages a day to attorneys and the media nationwide. Tracey enjoys the challenge of realtiming intellectual property depositions in Asia, experiencing different cultures and working with attorneys from all over the world.

Debra Duran, Registered Professional Reporter and Livenote Certified Reporter

Debra has been on both the management side and reporting side in her 17-year court reporting career, which gives her great ability to view the big picture. She has worked in London, the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas where she realtimed re-insurance, construction, eminent domain, disaster recovery, intellectual property and anti-trust cases. Debra’s hobbies include racquetball, biking, reading, hiking and traveling.

Barbara Diaz, Director of Operations

A graduate of St. Mary's College of Notre Dame with a BBA in Finance and Administration, "Babs" has been an invaluable asset to the company since 1993. She is located in our U.S. production office and keeps us running like a well-oiled machine 24/7 in spite of time zone challenges. When not hard at work, Babs manages to squeeze in time for her husband, multitude of children, Papillons and creative design projects, not necessarily in that order.

Rene' Stern, Administrator (U.S.)

Graduating from University of Florida in Gainesville in 1982 with a BS degree in Social Psychology and Industrial Relations, Rene' entered the legal field and joined a major South Florida law firm becoming a senior paralegal during her 23-year stint there. She obtained her paralegal certification from Florida International University in 1987. Rene's legal background and her gregarious personality blend perfectly as she spends hours a day conversing with attorneys and paralegals.

Marian Kinoshita, Bilingual Assistant (Japan)

Marian handles our communication with Japanese-speaking clients. She has also fallen into the role of "cultural advisor," saving us foreigners from embarrassment. Though Marian is American, her passion for the culture and language has inspired her to live in Japan for over 17 years. When not saving us from ourselves, Marian is usually hiking up a mountain or geocaching in the concrete jungle of Tokyo.