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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

> Transcripts: Multiple dollars per pages. Want that expedited? Multiply that amount by four. Don't know the court date? Can't get your transcript. Clerks put in the wrong date? Tough luck. Payment for those transcripts? Over Zelle because the court reporters themselves are contractors and get paid independently.

Is this because a person has to literally transcribe the stenographer's notes into plain English? Is it expensive because it is labor intensive?

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Yes and yes. I'm sure there's historical or possibly ethical reasons for it being this way, but I don't understand why it's not the clerk of court's job. Something to figure out!

Over here in Sweden they justify the fees for printed cases by the paper cost. Cheaper than the number you mentioned but still quite costly if you want all nontrivial verdicts. And quite silly when they deliver pdfs..

Then every single case needs to have all PII redacted before it is made searchable, but that is a different story.

I don't know much about stenography, but that seems like something that would be trivial for a computer to do.

And certainly something that would only have to be done once...

The human should be left in the loop, full stop. Language is hard and court rooms can be chaotic places and you want the transcript to be clean.

(disability accomodations is a different conversation altogether)

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