It would appear that last week’s ruling by the appellate court in the second district that basically said that a trial court had the authority to determine what constituted “reasonable fees” when it came to the expedite fees for deposition transcripts has hit a nerve. Members of the Deposition Reporters Association of California (DRA) have been sending questions and inquiries to the association in regards to the ruling.

In response DRA sent out an email to assure members that the ruling pertained to a narrow issue and that Coast Court Reporters, the depo firm involved in the ruling, was moving to have the matter reheard. Here is a portion taken from the email.

DRA just learned from Coast Court Reporters’ attorney that they will be filing a Petition for Rehearing later this week with the intention to correct certain factual errors they find in the Court’s decision and what they see as misstatements and/or misapplications of the cited laws. They have not yet decided on a course of action with respect to a Petition to the Supreme Court for review of the Appellate Court’s decision but will be doing so later this month.

If this case is taken up on appeal, it’s possible that this decision may be reversed or modified in some way, but in the meantime, the appellate decision says that the Court’s intervention to determine the “reasonableness” of the reporter’s fees would not be necessary when there is an agreement “between interested parties,” so reporters and reporting firms would be well advised, if at all possible, to obtain an agreement with the copy attorneys via email, or in other written form, to pay the exact charges quoted prior to providing transcript copies and other related services.

DRA’s advice to its membership, which consists mainly of depo reporters, is to detail and list everything that you’re going to charge for and get the parties to sign off on the written agreement before transcript preparation. This is a bit of advice that officials working in civil court would do well to heed especially when it comes to fees for providing services such as expedited transcripts, realtime hookup, etc.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.