Efficient Protest Hearings

There's always a certain time pressure on the PC when doing protest hearings. The sailors don't want to spend waiting longer than necessary, the scorer wants to finalize the results asap, and the organizer has the sponsor giving prizes at 16:00 hours. In short, if a hearing can be conducted efficiently and in as short a time as possible, the better. The PC however needs a certain amount of time to give all the parties and witnesses the opportunity to tell their side of things, there's a procedure which must be followed, and a few minutes to discuss the rules would be appreciated as well.

In an International Jury you have the luxury to be with 5 people. To be as efficient as possible you can designate a couple of tasks individually. There's a designated panel chairman (not necessary the same as the chairman of the jury), you can have a people fetcher, the person who calls parties, witnesses etc and runs interference between RC and PC, and there's someone who's designated a scribe. It is not necessary that every jury member asks questions, if all issues have been covered by others, there's no need. Therefore a scribe can concentrate on writing the facts found during the hearing when parties and witnesses tell there stories. He will have already a list of facts found prepared together with a preliminary conclusion and decision, when the hearing part is finished. If the issue is clear and nobody has any doubts or wants to talk about a particular detail, the protest can be decided very quickly. Sometimes the issue hinges on one fact, i.e. there was an overlap at the 2 BL-zone or not. The scribe prepares his list with an or/or option. and prepares two conclusions/decisions.
Instead of loosing a lot of time after the hearing in writing all the facts found, this can reduced to only one or two key facts, which need to be discussed. After the decision is reached, you can immediately call back the parties and use the list already prepared to read out the result to them. Filling in the protest-form is something you can do afterwards.

In your PC with only 3 persons this is a little harder, but still it's a good idea to designate a chairman, a scribe and a question-asker. That way - at least partly - you can reduce protest time.
To be a scribe takes practice. You must be able to write down what is said in the format of facts found, while still listening to the parties. You must ask a question you need to know if the others haven't. But if you do a little preparation it is certainly do-able. Of course some people are better at it than others, but why not try?
To be able to write quickly I use a hearing- form where I can keep track of who's saying what. You can download an English copy here and a Dutch version here