The long awaited court reporting system should be up and running in the Supreme Court within weeks, Chief Justice Richard Ground said yesterday.

?The last hurdle was to let the transcription contract which has now been done,? he said.

He added he is having what he hopes to be a final meeting to sign off on it, following which he will gazette a notice making the recordings of court proceedings the official record.

But he could not say when the system would be implemented in Magistrates? Court.

Testing of the system began in 2001. Court proceedings will be logged and recorded contemporaneously, saving judges from having to take everything down in longhand. Lawyers and judges will still have to take notes during cases because transcripts will be produced for appeals only.

?When there?s an appeal ?When there?s an appeal then a transcript will be prepared in time for the next session of the Court of Appeals and even that will be a big task. But what it means is you don?t get a transcript for every case,? he said.

?So the lawyer who is thinking about appealing and can?t make up his mind, can?t get a transcript to go through it to decide whether he can appeal or not. His job is to still keep a note during the hearing and spot his points as he goes along.?

And judges will have to sum up from their notes, ?but that note can be much more abbreviated? because they can sit in their office and refer to the recordings through their computers.

Justice Ground said that he was used to taking longhand notes, but ?I?m personally delighted to be able to abandon all of that for a system like this?.

He said another advantage of the system was that a judge could give a judgment without having to adjourn to write it down.

An IT professional will have to be recruited to maintain the system, he said.