Actually he’s following, not leading, on this one.

One of the lawyers’ newspapers had an article about how PACER should be free, about two weeks ago. The article’s behind a subscription wall, so I won’t link to it. I read it in the hard copy.

Part of the issue is that PACER was built for a dial-up world and, like so many other government computer systems, has not been upgraded in terms of overall capability since then.

Another part which will need addressing is as it relates to transcripts. Y’all have to remember that the court reporters who do the transcribing are not judicial employees. They are independent contractors who are allowed by the Court to practice their trade in the courthouse. To an outside observer, they might appear as wholly part and parcel of the employees of the courthouse – they’ll have an office in the courthouse, they’ll work with one or two judges for extended periods of time, they’ll even have a courthouse phone. But they are independent.

This is an interesting check and balance, as their status as independent contractors means they are not (or should not) be under the thumb of (and thereby prone to tilt transcribing*) frequent users of the court system or the government. Their commitment can remain to accuracy, and not continued government employment.

Their deal is pretty simple: they have to report everything, but only have to transcribe what they report when someone requests the transcript and pays them for it. Their rates are set by the Court on a per-page basis, and vary according to how soon you want the transcript. If you don’t need it until two weeks from now, it might be a buck-fifty or so a page. If you’re in trial and cross-examining someone and need it in an hour (so you can spring the inconsistencies from one part of that liar’s testimony on him later in his testimony), get ready to get your wallet rocked. And it doesn’t take a lot of testimony to go through a page.

While computer-aided systems have made quick turnaround on transcripts a lot simpler (you can even watch it come up on a laptop in real time, now) than in the days of a guy with a pen and steno pad*, there still is no substitute for a skilled reporter.

So, I see paying for computer availability of transcripts as being an issue that is going to be not a little knotty. I can see a segregation of the issue into the two areas which are transcribed: trials, argument and testimony on the one hand and judges orally rendering decision on the other. It is a common practice in many courts on, say, a Friday afternoon, for the judge to come out on the bench into an empty or nearly-empty courtroom, and read into the record his/her decisions on any number of cases, usually motions of one sort or another. The reporter dutifully takes them down. This is an open judicial proceeding – few people ever attend – but the only thing the parties will get is a simple order saying the motion was granted or denied “for the reasons stated on the record in open court”. You want to find out why? Buy a transcript. I can see a need to have those transcripts freely available via computer, but not the trial transcripts.

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* If it was invented by people, it can be gamed.
** In past years, I did any number of depositions with a reporter who still used the pen and pad. He’d started reporting in the mid-30s and might have retired finally about five years ago. (Then again, he was getting smaller and slighter by the day and might have just blowing away in a strong wind. I dunno.) It was a trip to watch, and even moreso to see that, unaided, he got everything perfectly right.

I’ll be shocked if Lieberman goes any further with this once he gets an initial rebuff. “Oh well, I tried,” while he gets his liberal bonafides for merely speaking on the issue. Cynical Joe.