Thanks to Governor Newsom, the reign of the exploitation of stenographers in California is about to end! Starting next week, January 1, 2025, Senate Bill 988 goes into effect.
I attribute a majority of the shortage of court reporters to many of the things that this bill attempts to address and correct.
Just this past day after Christmas, I got an email from an agency saying they were not going to pay me on a copy because the attorney had canceled his order. But the transcript was already provided to that attorney. Then in a subsequent email, after my attempting to clarify things and pursue payment, the agency’s “Billing Director” cc’d all of the calendaring personnel, insinuating that calendaring should maybe flag me as a problem and perhaps take me off the distribution list for work. Why else would a billing person pull a calendaring person into an email that’s pursuing payment? Well, Newsom’s “Anti-Retaliation” part of SB 988 should take care of that, I hope.
How many of your freelance court reporters lost work because of attempts to collect payments from agencies?
How many of you have been stiffed on copy orders?
How many of you are still waiting to be paid on services provided over 90 days ago? six months ago? a year ago?
How many of you have had attorneys “cancel” the order to transcribe something after it’s been scoped and produced and sent to them?
How many of you have had agencies try to cut your invoice in half after the work has been done because their client wanted to negotiate their bill after the work was done?
The answer to this is: so many court reporters have been abused and exploited in these ways that many of them have left the field, so many that there is now a shortage. And those that remain in the field, refuse to recommend this field to any prospective newcomers and are refusing to positively mentor their generational replacements.
Agencies, attorneys, and judges are mainly to blame for the shortage of reporters, by the repeated, continuous, and ongoing abuse and exploitation of court reporters. There are many, many more I could add to this minimal list of 5 things, but addressing these five issues would be a great start to helping to turn around the destruction of our profession.
We are four days away from SB 988 taking effect. I’d better start working on my freelancer contract.
Mandatory contracts: Any freelancer performing over $250 of work for a hiring entity over a four month period is entitled to a contract outlining the scope of the work expected, the rate of pay, and the method of payment.
Published by stenoimperium
We exist to facilitate the fortifying of the Stenography profession and ensure its survival for the next hundred years!
As court reporters, we've handed the relationship role with our customers, or attorneys, over to the agencies and their sales reps. This has done a lot of damage to our industry. It has taken away our ability to have those relationships, the ability to be humanized and valued. We've become a replaceable commodity.
Merely saying we are the “Gold Standard” tells them that we’re the best, but there are alternatives. Who we are though, is much, much more powerful than that! We are the Responsible Charge. “Responsible Charge” means responsibility for the direction, control, supervision, and possession of stenographic & transcription work, as the case may be, to assure that the work product has been critically examined and evaluated for compliance with appropriate professional standards by a licensee in the profession, and by sealing and signing the documents, the professional stenographer accepts responsibility for the stenographic or transcription work, respectively, represented by the documents and that applicable stenographic and professional standards have been met.
This designation exists in other professions, such as engineering, land surveying, public water works, landscape architects, land surveyors, fire preventionists, geologists, architects, and more. In the case of professional engineers, the engineering association adopted a Responsible Charge position statement that says, “A professional engineer is only considered to be in responsible charge of an engineering work if the professional engineer makes independent professional decisions regarding the engineering work without requiring instruction or approval from another authority and maintains control over those decisions by the professional engineer’s physical presence at the location where the engineering work is performed or by electronic communication with the individual executing the engineering work.”
If we were to adopt a Responsible Charge position statement for our industry, we could start with a draft that looks something like this: "A professional court reporter, or stenographer, is only considered to be in responsible charge of court reporting work if the professional court reporter makes independent professional decisions regarding the court reporting work without requiring instruction or approval from another authority and maintains control over those decisions by the professional court reporter’s physical presence at the location where the court reporting work is performed or by electronic communication with the individual executing the court reporting work.”
Shared purpose
The cornerstone of a strategic narrative is a shared purpose. This shared purpose is the outcome that you and your customer are working toward together. It’s more than a value proposition of what you deliver to them. Or a mission of what you do for the world. It’s the journey that you are on with them. By having a shared purpose, the relationship shifts from consumer to co-creator.
In court reporting, our mission is “to bring justice to every litigant in the U.S.” That purpose is shared by all involved in the litigation process – judges, attorneys, everyone. Who we are is the Responsible Charge. How we do that is by Protecting the Record.
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