TIME FOR A CHANGE IN COURT REPORTING?

How easy it is to record what there is to see and hear in these modern times.

Anyone who wishes to preserve an accurate account of an activity or event can select from a wide range of video and audio recording equipment. Simple transactions like withdrawing cash from an ATM are videotaped. Phone-call business deals can be preserved on audio cassettes.

And yet most trials still depend upon court reporters to take down the words.

A few days ago, I was visiting with Sam Davis, who is retired after practicing law at Vinson & Elkins for many years, and he mentioned that he long has been an advocate of changing to electronic recording in courtrooms and had helped to make it so judges could have a choice.

A check of Chronicle files turned up a 13-year-old story that quoted Davis when he was a member of the Texas State Bar Committee on Court Costs, Efficiency and Delay. He said then, like he said the other day, that electronic recording is "cheaper, faster and more accurate." He maintains that it serves the client, the lawyer, and the court better than traditional methods.

Technology To The Rescue

The same story quoted a court reporter as saying that when she went to school in 1967, she was warned that her chosen career might soon be extinct due to modern technology, i.e. electronic recording. And one judge, who said he liked the idea of both audio and video recording systems, believed it was "time the legal system and judicial process enter the 20th century," and he predicted "it's not a matter of if it will occur, but when."

Four years ago the Chronicle reported a courtroom pilot project showed replacing court reporters with electronic recording systems could save $3 million a year in Harris County and $11 million across the state.

Armed with such information, and aware that electronic recording has been used for some years in federal magistrate and bankruptcy courts, I made a few calls to see what sort of defense court reporters could mount for their jobs.

Texas has about 3,200 certified court reporters. Dave Wenhold at National Court Reporters Association headquarters in Virginia, estimated there are some 50,000 nationwide, and "so much work out there we can't find bodies to sit in the courtrooms."

That is doubtless the result of sharp increases in criminal-justice activities over the past few years produced by the war on drugs.

Wenhold and others dispute that electronic recording is more accurate. Human reporters can tell people to speak up when something is said too softly and a tape machine might not get it, they say. An hour's worth of transcript from electronic recording during the 1993 Exxon Valdez case produced 66 instances of inaudible testimony, Wenhold said.

Decline In Electronic Reporting

Court reporters point out that special computer programs make it possible to print out their transcripts much faster than a tape recording could be transcribed. And some cutting-edge reporters offer real-time reporting that allows words to appear on lawyers' and judges' computer screens immediately, much like TV captioning.

Once proceedings are in a computer, a lawyer or judge can do a word search and locate whatever he wants to refer back to much faster and easier than dealing with tapes or paper transcripts.

Wenhold said that a 1998 study by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts polled 601 federal district court judges and found that only 7.5 percent use electronic recording devices, even though electronic recording has been allowed in federal district courts since 1984. That same study, he said, shows a steady decline in electronic recording since 1984.

A pool of nine full-time and two part-time court reporters serves the nine federal judges in Houston. Judge David Hittner said he has used electronic recording when conducting hearings at prisons, but he much prefers working with a computer-enhanced, real-time human court reporter.

But I keep remembering a case where the defense attorney went to sleep. Wouldn't you like it if that had been caught on videotape?