Pizza Hut of America, Inc. filed a petition in Cobb County against ACCC Insurance Company,1 seeking a declaratory judgment that Pizza Hut is an additional insured under a policy of automobile insurance that ACCC Insurance previously had issued to a Pizza Hut employee. The court below awarded summary judgment to Pizza Hut, and ACCC Insurance took an appeal from the entry of summary judgment. A transcript that was designated to be included in the record on appeal, however, apparently was not filed for another six months, and on the motion of Pizza Hut, the court below dismissed the appeal under OCGA § 5-6-48 c for unreasonable and inexcusable delay in the filing of the transcript. ACCC Insurance now appeals from the dismissal of its appeal, but because we cannot conclude that the court below abused its discretion, we must affirm. On October 10, 2008, ACCC Insurance timely filed a notice of appeal from the entry of summary judgment for Pizza Hut on its petition for declaratory judgment. In this notice of appeal, ACCC Insurance designated the entire record, including all transcripts, as the record on appeal. About four months later, a lawyer for ACCC Insurance telephoned the civil appeals clerk and asked about the preparation of the record on appeal. The clerk responded that she had been on a maternity leave when the notice of appeal was filed in October 2008, and she had not yet prepared an estimated bill of costs for the preparation of the record. The lawyer received the bill of costs on February 10, 2009, and ACCC Insurance paid it two weeks later.
The bill of costs indicated that no transcript had been filed of the hearing on the motion for summary judgment. The law firm representing ACCC Insurance then contacted the court reporter and asked her to prepare a transcript of that hearing on an expedited basis. The court reporter replied that she could not expedite the preparation of this transcript because she already had other transcripts, 3,000 pages in all, to prepare before she could turn to this request. The court reporter also said that, if only ACCC Insurance had made its request a couple of months earlier, “I had no transcript orders then and could have done it probably the same day.”
