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The Association of Litigation Support Managers (ALSM), the members of which
are the litigation support managers of major firms of solicitors in New South
Wales, Victoria and Queensland, has prepared Computerised Transcript on Disk
Draft Standards: ALSM Standards (1992). The standards cover media and file
formats (ASCII or WordPerfect 5.1), line and page specifications, numbering,
headers and footers, method of abbreviation to refer to witnesses (eg 'FXXN'
to indicate further cross-examination), miscellaneous matters (eg 'no
underlining') and special requirements for ASCII and WordPerfect files. Court
reporting representatives attend ALSM meetings.

Court reporting services have, of course, developed their own standards (see,
for example, the compendious style book, SA Court Services (1990)), but these
do not necessarily reflect all of the matters that the Association of
Litigation Support Managers, or other reporting services, would consider to be
desirable. For example, the format used in Western Australia (WA Crown Law
(1991)) relies considerably on underlining to identify when witnesses commence
evidence. Agencies such as the ASC use reporting services which have quite
different standards.

We consider that the co-operative involvement of court reporting agencies,
court administrations, prosecutors, agencies that conduct their own hearings
(eg the ASC) and defence representatives in the development of such standards
is very important to the more effective and widespread use of litigation
support software. National standards need to be developed, even if they are
only advisory, because of the likely involvement of national organisations
such as the ASC and Commonwealth DPP and national legal practices in
complex prosecutions. In a single complex matter a prosecuting agency   [PP59]
or defence lawyers may need to contend with transcript prepared from
hearings before different State courts, or before agencies such as the ASC,
and prepared by different reporting agencies.

   National standards for the form in which transcript is prepared ,
   with the aim of facilitating text retrieval., should be developed and
   published as a matter of priority. The standards should be developed
   co-operatively between the court reporting services and the users of
   transcript. The standards should cover such matters as consistent
   references to exhibits and witnesses, numbering, text formats and any
   other matters which will facilitate the input of transcript into a
   wide range of retrieval programs. The standards should also include
   timeliness and storage media. A national recommendatory standard is
   desirable.
   
We later recommend a national co-ordinating body to develop such standards,
but the most important thing is that such standards are developed.


Error checking of transcript


With the development of the LIS litigation support component, the South
Australian Court Reporting Division had to look more closely at the
suitability of its transcript output for text retrieval software. The
Department developed the Catscan software to check transcript for possible
errors and inconsistencies before it was loaded into the litigation support
component. Catscan generates a report which identifies the transcript page and
display the line where an error may have occurred together with one of 36
possible error messages such as:

   'CAT 34: Exhibit tendered out of sequence - possible error in exhibit
   mark.'
   
   'CAT 22: Found a reference to an exhibit which has not been tendered.'
   
   'CAT 12: Recalled witness can not be found in the database.'
   
   'CAT 26: No 'VOIR DIRE' in page header but end of last voir dire not
   found.'
   
At present, transcript is checked with Catscan and loaded onto LIS only at the
end of each day. However, the Department hopes to produce a DOS version of
Catscan which can be used on the same PCs as the court reporter uses to edit
transcript at the end of each shift. It would then be feasible to have
transcript loaded in the LIS component within an hour. Catscan is also now
used to check all transcript provided to the parties on disk, where the
transcript is to be loaded into LIS. The Department considers that it is
preferable to only release checked transcript, despite the slight delay that
this causes under the present system.

In our view, it would be advantageous to all recipients of transcript who
wished to load it into any litigation support database if it was first put
through such 'quality control' checks. The use of litigation support software
exposes inconsistencies and other errors in transcript preparation which
previously may have gone undetected. It is more efficient, and a reasonable
quality expectation, to have such inconsistencies removed from transcript at
its source than to require each user to develop and run such checks before
loading transcript. As there is no reason to consider that transcript
production standards are any lower in South Australia than elsewhere (if
anything, the contrary may be true), it seems reasonable to conclude that the
product of all reporting services might benefit from the use of such error-
checking software. It should be possible for such checks to be done without
any significant delay to the provision of transcript,

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