Ann Kaufmann, 54, court reporter

Ann Kaufmann, of Andorra, an expert court reporter and accomplished scuba diver, died at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania after a two-week battle with lung cancer Saturday, Sept. 25, three days after her 54th birthday.

Ms. Kaufmann transcribed complicated civil litigation depositions including for product-liability, medical-malpractice, and patent-infringement cases, and litigation involving water-pollution issues, her husband, Robert Dunham, a lawyer, said.

In the 1990s, she traveled several times to Liberia to transcribe depositions for legal proceedings involving the destruction of rubber trees at Bridgestone-Firestone plantations during civil unrest. The country was still in turmoil, her husband said, and at one point security forces tried to confiscate her computer and court-reporting machine and threatened her with AK-47s.

Ms. Kaufmann grew up in Bustleton. After graduating from George Washington High School in Northeast Philadelphia, she worked as a secretary. Deciding to pursue a more stimulating career, she enrolled in Peirce Business School and became a certified court reporter. She was skilled in real-time technology that translates court reporters' stenographic notes into English text for display on lawyers' computers.

In the early 1980s, Ms. Kaufmann took up scuba diving and had participated in more than 500 dives including in Papua, Borneo, Thailand, the Galápagos Islands, the Red Sea, and Bali. She dived in New Guinea at the invitation of Stan Waterman, a five-time Emmy-winning cinematographer and underwater film producer.

She dove with everything from huge whale sharks to pygmy sea horses and took wonderful underwater photos, her husband said. "She was like a mermaid. She used less air than anyone else, stayed down longer, saw more," he said.

She and Dunham married in 2000. They met at his former mother-in-law's funeral where they were introduced by his ex-wife, who was a friend of Ms. Kaufmann's. They discovered they both enjoyed travel, and she introduced him to scuba diving in exotic locales, he said.

At home, he said, she was a remarkable gardener.

Besides her husband, Ms. Kaufmann is survived by her mother Anne Kaufmann.

A memorial service will be held at a later date.