Tag Archive for: Transcripts

Court Reporters and Digital Audio Recording: Time for a Change?

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My new favorite law blog is Judge Richard Kopf’s Hercules and the Umpire. Lately, it’s been the first place I click on my reader. His blog is conversational and offers a view of the Federal Court from the other side of the bench.

A recent post of his was particularly spot on. It begins “For a long time now, I have used digital audio recording, rather than a court reporter. Digital audio recording is the marriage of a computer and a sophisticated sound system with multiple channels. It is monitored by the courtroom deputy in real-time eliminating the necessity of a court reporter.” 

The daily recordings are uploaded to CM/ECF so that any person, at a small cost, can listen to them. The lawyers have access to what was said, and a transcriptionist can render things on paper in the event of an appeal. There’s no need to fund a court reporter for take down, and the job of transcribing can be outsourced for quick turnaround. I am not sure what certifications are necessary, but presumably a court reporter anywhere in the world could be contracted to transcribe the proceedings as necessary.

I use Speakwrite to transcribe office documents or interviews when my office is too overburdened. Generally, within hours of upload, I have a transcript sitting in my email inbox. Presumably, such a system could be set up for court transcripts with folks certified to do them.

I don’t know how long it will take for such a system to catch on in Georgia, but I hope it happens soon. Such a system would change the landscape of appellate practice. Consider:

  • The wait for the transcript is the single longest part of the appellate process. Digital recording with upload to a central server expands the range of possible people who could do the work, virtually overnight.
  • Often appellate lawyers are waiting around for months or years for transcripts to arrive only to be bombarded with three or four at once.
  • That wait can be a great source of tension between the lawyer and the client. It is hard to explain to a client who is languishing in prison that it is not the lawyer’s fault that the court reporter is taking a year or more to type up the proceedings.
  • For matters where a transcript is not essential, the recording provides a way to impeach witnesses or review what is said. It provides a tangible record of what happened in situations when there is not time to get a transcript prepared or in situations where it would not be ordered.
  • It would save lawyers, clients, and the State money.
  • More will get recorded. Judges order their court reporter to go “off the record” with impunity. When that happens, something bad is going to transpire. Ordering a recording system to be turned off seems more Nixonesque somehow.

The idea of having a court reporter seated with a stenograph machine in the age of digital recording seems a tad antiquated. If one were designing a recording system for courts from the ground up today, we likely wouldn’t dream up the position of court reporter (a point made in the comments to the judge’s blog post). It likely made sense in the 1930s, but we are left with this vestigial court official.

Take a look at this new blog. And, if you are a reader with power to make digital recording happen in Georgia, please do so.

iAnnotate PDF as a Transcript Reader

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A couple of days ago I posted about using the iPad in my appellate practice. In that post, I mentioned that one solution for reading transcripts on the iPad is the iAnnotate PDF reader as an application. There are several applications out for iPad that allow you to read pdfs, including Goodreader and the iBook app itself. None of those apps worked very well for me in my appellate practice. None allow you to annote a pdf, view it, move in and out through email or dropbox, or display the document on to a projector.

iAnnotate pdf does all of those things. Even better, there are several ways to learn to use the application. Writing the iPad post a few days ago made me want to dig into the app a little more to see what it could do. YouTube abounds with videos to show you the basics and teach you the ins and outs. Let me highlight a couple:

  • For a good basic introduction of the tools in the app as well as the use of iAnnotate with a projector or other vga output (I didn’t know it had that feature) is available from Tuescher lab. He demonstrates it as a way to view pdfs as slides and demonstrates annotation tools. A few weeks ago, a prosecutor who is using the iPad in court wanted to know what is available to post up photographs in court. I think that iAnnotate PDF might be the app for him.
  • Note taking on PDFs on iPad versus paper. There’s a video from Stanford Medical School comparing note-taking on PDFs on the iPad versus pen and paper. The results of this mini-smackdown are pretty interesting.
  • The developer’s introduction is also available on YouTube as well. In a couple of minutes, you can be up and running with the app.

The app is not perfect though. I found that it is currently impossible to annotate to scanned pdfs unless you run it through OCR, which I have found to be a pain. So, if you can get your transcripts emailed to you from the court reporter as a pdf or in an electronic format that you can convert to pdf, then you are in good shape. If a client has brought you an older transcript in hard copy form to review for habeas, you are going to be able to view the pdf but will have difficulty annotating.

It is stil a bit awkward to move documents into and out of the iPad. There is dropbox integration, but it is not ideal. I found it difficult to pull documents out of folders on Dropbox and into the application.

Still, it is a good tool for transcript annotation. Even without transcript annotation, I think it is a way to pack light and read PDFs. I could see myself dictating a transcript summary while reading from a transcript on the iPad.

So, far iAnnotate is the best PDF app I’ve come across. But there may be better solutions out there that I have not found yet. And there may be better ways to work this app than I’ve found already. I think that this area of iPad use will get better over time. I think the medical community is likely going to push for improvement to the iPad as a means to consume journals. The academic community is likely going to push for improvement as well as a means for students to read texts.

Some Lessons from a Trial Appearance

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This week, I am trying a criminal case. My practice is predominantly appellate, but I have brief forays into the work of criminal trial practice. And today began such a case. While it’s not appropriate to go deeply into the particulars, I think that jury selection today was particularly instructive. I don’t know whether this case I am trying will eventually turn into an appellate case. If it does, I am trying not to waive anything.

I try to avoid the three-part essay, the three point speech, or the five paragraph essay. But it turns out that there were three appellate lessons that I learned today. The overarching lesson was that it is sometimes important to do a trial to remember just what it is like. But more specifically, I take the following three lessons from day one of my trial:

  1. Get the court reporter to take everything down. In the average Georgia felony jury trial, the court reporter will take down only the evidence, objections, and the charge conference. Ordinarily, that may be enough. But if you have a case where the topic is sensitive and where jurors are likely to be biased, it is best to have the voir dire taken down. Today’s voir dire wore me out. The case is a child molestation, and there are inevitably people who just don’t want to be on a case like that. There are also man who bring baggage with them into the trial. I had to work hard to get some jurors excused for cause with the Court and the State fighting to “rehabilitate” the jurors. In the end, I had to burn only one strike. Three jurors were struck for cause. The take-down was key. Don’t know what would have happened otherwise, but the court reporter probably was a big help in how the questioning went. She may have gotten those jurors struck. Don’t let the proverbial tree of error fall in an empty forest.
  2. Effective assistance of counsel requires frequent attorney-client communication followed by recitations on the record. There are two decisions that only the client can make — whether to go to trial and whether to testify. Both must be informed decisions. So, get ready to explain. Also, get ready to summarize some things for the record either way. I’ve done lots of writing, calling, asking questions, answering questions, and stating things for the record this week.
  3. It’s hard to try a case with an eye to an appeal. My best appellate issues so far have been deprived from me because the judge ruled my way. Well-founded objections get you one of two things — a fair trial or a shot on appeal. This trial reminds me of what a mental challenge a trial is. It is quite difficult to Sunday morning quarterback. It is much easier to play quarterback on Monday.

I’m sure more lessons will follow as this trial progresses.

Grand Jury Investigation Questions Georgia Court Reporter Fees

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The Atlanta Journal reports that a Cobb County, Georgia, grand jury has serious concerns about the fact that court reporters in that county earn a salary and also charge the county and private attorneys highway robbery fees to produce transcripts. The article evokes all sorts of thoughts for me about the frustrations that accompany getting the trial transcript. From an appellate lawyer’s perspective, the transcript is one of the trickier parts of the entire appellate process. Some of the issues identified in the article are part of the problem of representing clients on appeal. The problem is that court reporters are pretty powerful people. In fact, am going to be careful about cranking my car for a few weeks after I post this blog.

There are some pretty serious issues with the whole transcript process in Georgia. Court reporters include a mixture of free lancers, official court reporters, and employees of corporations. While they are all governed by the Georgia Board of Court Reporting, procedures for getting transcripts and getting them expeditiously vary with each reporter’s personality and with the personality of the Court. The fees for transcripts can be so high as to discourage appeals entirely (It’s important to compare what you are being charged for a transcript to the approved schedule for court reporters).

The other issue, and it’s a big one, is the matter of who owns the transcript. The client wants his own copy most of the time to “help,” and the lawyer gets one with an account accompanying warning not to copy it. Most appellate lawyers would prefer for the client not to have a copy because a bunch of time can be involved in trying to explain errant views of the law or an inappropriate emphasis on the facts (i.e. Sally was lying. Why don’t you make a bigger deal about that instead of this odd venue argument, Mr. Key? Whose side are you on anyway? I paid $3,000 for this transcript. Why can’t I have it?)

If I could be king for a day, court reporters would work out of a pool. They would not be one particular judge’s court reporter. They would just plug in where needed. They would be paid a salary instead of a salary plus a per page fee for preparing transcripts. And, if they had a backlog of five trials, they would not be allowed back into the courtroom until the backlog is brought current.

This grand jury is really onto something. But they’ve just scratched the surface. The real issue is not whether the transcript is the county’s property versus whether it is the client’s property. The real issue is that many court reporters view the transcript as their property even after you bought it. It is not unusual to see warnings in transcript threatening all sorts of consequences about taking the transcript apart or copying it. It’s worth than the warning on mattress tags. One would think that taking the transcript out of its binding is tantamount to opening the ark of the covenant.

Hopefully the grand jury’s action will evoke discussion and possibly much needed reform.

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