A year ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Jameson v. Desta (2018) 5 Cal.5th 594 that superior courts must make court reporters available to indigent litigants who cannot afford to hire a private reporter and who, by reason of having had their court fees waived, need not pay a fee to have a court-provided reporter attend a proceeding. Now, the Legislature might substantially raise the fee all litigants will have to pay for transcripts that reporters prepare of those proceedings.
AB 1385 — which the Assembly passed last month and is pending in the Senate — would, over a less than three-year period, increase by 30 percent or more the cost of reporter’s transcripts for appeals.
The bill also keeps in place a questionable method for calculating a transcript’s cost. A fee is assessed based on a set price per 100 transcribed words. But, instead of requiring court reporters to do a simple computer word count on a transcript, the current statute allows determination of the fee according to an “estimate or assumption as to the number of words or folios on a typical transcript page.” Appellate attorneys have found that these “estimate[s] or assumption[s]” lead to fees significantly higher than would be charged based on actual word counts.
It’s not just litigants who would pay more under AB 1385. An Assembly committee report states that courts themselves currently spend about $21,000,000 on transcripts each year and estimates that those costs would increase about “$1.9 million dollars in each calendar year 2019 and 2020, $4.5 million in each calendar year 2021 and 2022, and $6.9 million in calendar year 2023 and each year thereafter.”
Similar legislation passed the Assembly in 2018, but died in the Senate. Yet another fee-increase bill was approved by the Legislature in 2016, but Governor Jerry Brown vetoed it, saying, “This bill results in additional pressure to the General Fund by increasing costs to the judicial system. It covers spending that is more appropriately considered during the budget process.”
The Jameson court said that court rules and even the Legislature itself recognize “the realistic, crucial importance that the presence of a court reporter currently plays in the actual protection of a civil litigant’s legal rights and in providing such a litigant equal access to appellate justice in California.” (5 Cal.5th at p. 608.) However, guaranteeing a court reporter but not an affordable transcript leaves unfulfilled the promise of equal access to appellate justice.
