Recording: Solely to help with trial work
The Crown Court has allowed six barristers to record proceedings instead of taking manual notes, recognising that the move is “something of a leap into uncharted territory”.
His Honour Judge Nicholas Rimmer, sitting in Southwark, attached strict conditions to the permission that prevent any transmission or use other than to transcribe.
In his ruling, reported by Crimeline [1], the judge said pointedly that the only reason for these arrangements was that the Crown Court did not offer “reliable provision of instant daily transcripts to professional court users”, unlike in other countries, like Australia.
“This court welcomes the day when provision of accurate daily automated transcripts is available for all professional court users, but until then considers it appropriate to make arrangements such as those the court is making in these instant proceedings.”
He granted an application made by all six counsel in the case before him under rule 6.9 of the Criminal Procedure Rules to use a personal recording device “solely for the purpose of trial work and preparation”.
HHJ Rimmer explained: “The primary purpose of counsel’s united joint application is to alleviate counsel of the need manually to take a note of live evidence; and so to allow them to concentrate on evidence as it is given (including evidence about the numerous technical exhibits in this case) but to still have access to an accurate note for their further and ongoing case preparations.”
He said he recognised that “granting this application in the specific circumstances of this application may prove something of a leap into uncharted territory”.
However, the technological advances since the 1981 Contempt of Court Act “mean that, increasingly, counsel are understandably likely to want to use technology to improve the accuracy of their note-taking.
“This is likely to improve productivity and the accuracy of submissions made about the evidence in trial proceedings.”
Each counsel has provided an assurance that they are a data processor registered to handle others’ data in compliance with the GDPR and will comply with the multiple conditions.
These included that the device would only be used for recording sound and generating “internal device-based non-internet transcription”.
Any recording must not be disseminated in any way and must also be deleted “as soon as practicable at the conclusion of the trial”.
HHJ Rimmer said counsel wanting to use an external transcription could upload it to Plaud.ai, “the only such service the court has had the opportunity to consider at this stage to appraise sufficiency of security”.
He set down the level of encryption expected, and said the recording must not be stored in the cloud and must be deleted from Plaud immediately after.
The judge also stressed that the recording must not be made available to any large language model training models, like Chat GPT and Claude.