Court Reporters

A court reporter is someone who has special training enabling them to write down everything that is said in the course of a hearing in court. They use a special machine that creates paper and digital notes of what everyone says. If necessary they can prepare a verbatim transcript of what was said from these notes.

With a few exceptions, I have reporter at every hearing where I am appearing as counsel.

I do this for several reasons.

• The first is that no one, not even the judge, can remember perfectly what is said at the hearing. Taking notes is helpful, but they will always be incomplete and sometimes they will also be unreliable. The judges hear hundreds of cases in the course of a year and they have only a vague memory of most hearings. The lawyers also participate in a lot of different proceedings and will have imperfect recollections of what was said. I never trust my own memory and always check it against the transcript to be sure I have remembered correctly.

• The second reason is that the parties and witnesses may say something extremely important.
  • A party may admit to something that would be hard to prove otherwise.
  • A party or a witness may tell a lie that can be disproved through other evidence that isn’t available in the court room at that time.
  • Unless there is a written record of these statements being made, it will be very difficult to prove them later. A liar can tell three conflicting stories in the course of three separate hearings and get away with it if there is no transcript available to prove what they said each time.

In one custody case, the mother admitted she has bi-polar disorder and the judge said she had been “playing games” keeping the child from the father. We could not have a court reporter at that hearing because the client’s funds were limited. Later, it became extremely important to prove these statements had been made but, without the transcript, it was very difficult to convince anyone of it.

• The third reason, and the one that comes up the most often, is that decisions by the judge only have force when they have been expressed in a written order they have signed.
  • Most of the time, the orders are not written and signed at the time of the hearing.
  • Sometimes weeks and even months can go by before this step is done. By then the lawyers may disagree about what the judge decided and it becomes necessary to go back to the judge for clarification. If there is no transcript this can amount to doing the whole thing over and risks having the judge change the decision itself.