A Day In Court

In the course of my career as a property valuer, I have been called as an expert witness to appear in court several times. But before this I have only appeared in Brunei courts (I practised in Brunei for a good 13 years before relocating back to KK in 2002), until last Monday when I appeared in the High Court here in KK.

I think it is quite safe to assume that most of my readers hardly ever set foot in any of the courts in Malaysia, let alone being there to actually witness a trial in progress. So perhaps some of you would like to have a rough idea what it is like. But since this case is still not concluded yet, I shall carefully refrain from discussing the details of the dispute.

First of all, let me hasten to tell you that it is nothing like what you see in The Practice or Matlock. There is no excitement of litigators walking up to the witnesses with all those actions or body language nonsense. They don't bring monkeys to the courts too. But of course sometimes, albeit very rarely, they do bring mattresses as evidence.

What I experienced in Brunei was slightly different from what I went through last Monday. In Brunei, the judge himself had to write down, literally with a pen and paper, what transpired in court. And occasionally, the litigators and witnesses had to repeat what they said, because the judge was not fast enough to write what was said the first time.

Well, it's been some years since I last appeared in court. So I was sort of a bit rusty when I appeared on Monday.

In KK, the judge does not write nor type himself. The setting is slightly different here. There is a typist who does all the typing. I say typist, not a stenographer. Her computer is linked to 3 monitors—one for the judge, and two others for each of the opposing litigators. So as she's typing, the judge and litigators can read from the monitors. Thankfully, this particular trial was conducted in English. But if it was conducted in Malay, I think I could've handled it too. The only possible problem is, maybe, some technical words in Malay which I'm not very familiar with.

As I said, I was a bit rusty, so the first few minutes, I spoke at my natural pace, and I had to be stopped several times because the typist couldn't keep up with my pace. And yes, I had to repeat what I said. Occasionally, the judge had to spell the words out for the typist. But before very long, I was able to adjust myself so that I ended up speaking like giving a dictation test to a student. Even the litigators had to do the same thing. What could've been a mere 15 minutes appearance would take at least double that duration because of the recording process.

I don't know about other people, but for me, I kinda have to struggle to contain my thought process if I had to speak only a few words at any one time. That can sort of interrupt my ideas, whatever they are. I had to compose and re-compose my thoughts and it was quite a challenge and mentally exhausting too.

Contrary to what one might think, I wasn't nervous because of the questions that was asked; rather, the nervousness was more because of having to remember what I said the first time. Whenever I was asked to repeat what I said, I found myself having to think back, "Now what did I say just now? What were the exact words I used? How did I use them?". It's quite annoying, that!

After my turn, I lingered on to watch the next witness in action. I noticed that he went through the same thing too—occasionally having to repeat what he said. It will probably take a very long time, if ever, for our court system to improve in terms of speed. Maybe the only solution is to have more courthouses and even more judges to hear cases. Perhaps that should solve the problem of backlogs.