Vegas court reporters try dispelling myths

Grace Leong

Thursday, April 25, 2002 | 11:12 a.m.

Despite limited training opportunities and worries that advances in technology may make them obsolete, court reporters say they have a bright future in Nevada.

Several members of the Nevada Court Reporters Association challenged what they called misconceptions that they are a dying breed that may eventually be phased out by technology.

Cherie DaLynn, a retired court reporter in Las Vegas and a certified instructor with the National Court Reporters Association, said these "misconceptions" stem from the "advent of recording technology and the fact that some people think an audio recorder can do just as good a job as a live person and represents cost savings."

She said demand for court reporters, who also provide Computer Assisted Real-time (CART) captioning for the deaf or hearing impaired on television and in classrooms, is expected to grow following a federal mandate that all broadcast programming by 2006 be live-captioned or transcribed in real-time by certified court reporters.

Dawn Jackson, executive director of the Nevada State Certified Court Reporters board, said there are 26 court reporters employed by the civil and criminal divisions of Clark County District Court, Las Vegas Justice Court and U.S. District Court.

She said there are 183 licensed court reporters in Clark County out of 457 court reporters in Nevada. The majority of freelance court reporters are hired by attorneys to record depositions and minutes of meetings, arbitrations and government agency hearings.

Several court reporters and Clark County Court officials acknowledged a need for additional education opportunities for court reporters and for greater efforts to promote court reporting as a viable career in schools. DaLynn, who said she has been trying to get approval for the past three years to introduce a court reporting program at the Community College of Southern Nevada, said her efforts have so far been stymied by these "misconceptions."

"CCSN's Criminal Justice department is agreeable to accepting a court reporting program, but we're still waiting for approval from CCSN," she said.

Several Clark County District Court officials say although more courtrooms are using alternative technologies such as voice recognition recording and audio tape recorders to capture court proceedings, the future remains bright for court reporters who adapt to technology such as CART because it allows them to produce written transcripts within minutes of the ending of a hearing.

"Not all reporters have that skill yet," Chuck Short, Clark County District Court's administrator, said. "In the past, the court reporters' ability to produce transcripts on a timely manner was an issue because they didn't have real-time capability. They had to take their stenotype machine back to their offices and transcribe from there."

Clark County District Judge Mark Gibbons agreed. "Court reporters will never be obsolete. The biggest advantage with recording equipment is that the record remains with the court. But timeliness is sacrificed."

But Gibbons said he saw advantages in using sound equipment to make records.

"Because court reporters are independent contractors, the transcripts are their own product," he said. "In the last few weeks, I've had to bring a contempt of court action against a substitute court reporter, when she failed to respond to an attorney's request for transcripts for hearings on two cases."

Short said 10 of 19 departments use court reporters while the remaining nine departments switched to using electronic recording equipment in recent years.

Several judges at Clark County Family Court chose to use digital audio-visual equipment because of the "ease of replicating a copy for the self-representing litigants and cost savings to taxpayers."

Short said Clark County's Family Court division, which doesn't receive as many requests for written transcripts as the civil and criminal divisions, gained "a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year in net savings" when it chose to use audio-visual recording equipment.

Short said 25 out of 40 courtrooms in the downtown Regional Justice Center -- the new home of the Clark County Courthouse -- are being outfitted with recording equipment.

Short said audio-visual recording equipment is, in some situations, a more cost-effective method of recording court proceedings. But he said court reporters are generally a better choice because they can create verbatim transcripts of court procedures quicker than a court recorder -- who has to listen and transcribe a tape recording.

Lisa Makowski, a court reporter with Clark County District Judge Sally Loehrer, said audio-visual recording equipment can help trial proceedings move more smoothly, but believes "there's room for both court reporters and electronic recording technology."

"The written word is what's used by criminal defendants to appeal a ruling, verdict or death penalty to the Nevada Supreme Court. The criminal defendants' constitutional rights are tied into the proceedings. That's why having a written transcript is very valuable," she said.