Trowbridge v. Superior Court

WOOD (Fred B.), J. Petitioner questions the validity of certain features of an order made by the trial court in a proceeding for settlement of a proposed agreed statement for use upon petitioner’s appeal from an order denying his motion for allowance of attorney fees for the conduct of the defense of an administrator of an estate as defendant in the trial of a ease in that court.

Petitioner as such appellant prepared and submitted to the opposite parties and to the trial court a proposed statement on appeal. This statement was in two parts. One part in substance was a clerk’s transcript. The other part was in form a condensed narrative of the oral proceedings had upon the motion for allowance of fees.

The respondent real parties in interest proposed no amendments to the first part of appellant’s proposed statement. As a substitute for appellant’s statement of the oral proceedings, they proposed a reporter’s transcript of those proceedings and presented a complete transcript, certified by the reporter, for use in effecting such substitution.

The court granted the request for such substitution. Petitioner claims that in so doing the court committed an abuse of discretion and exceeded its jurisdiction, but has failed to convince us that there is in the record before us a basis for us so to hold. He argues that there is much extraneous matter in this reporter’s transcript. That may be true (he condensed 78 pages into 47), but it is a fair inference that [623]the trial court found and concluded that appellant’s elimination of the extraneous matter actually resulted in a condensed statement which fails in various respects to give a completely adequate picture to a reviewing court of what was presented to the trial court during the course of the oral proceedings.

Another feature of the order to which appellant takes exception is a direction that there be added to the proposed settled statement “all of the proceedings” in the main action “in the form of the record on appeal from the judgment” in said action “as and when the same is finally settled and certified by the above entitled court; and that the hearing on the settlement of the proposed settled statement on appeal of Delger Trowbridge, and the final settlement, engrossment and certification of said settled statement be and the same is hereby continued until after the settlement of the record on appeal from the judgment in the” main action.