The Backfire of the Stop the SoCal Stip Movement – How a Campaign to Protect Court Reporting Accelerated Its Threat

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By StenoImperium

When court reporters rallied to stop the Southern California stipulation several years ago, the goal was clear: protect the integrity of the legal record and defend our profession from slow erosion by digital and uncertified alternatives. On the surface, it was a movement grounded in legal ethics and professional preservation. But in hindsight, it had unintended consequences we must now confront head-on.

The Ironic Fallout

The irony? The Stop the SoCal Stip movement, designed to protect us from being replaced, may have actually accelerated the threat of our replacement. Instead of sparking an informed legal community ready to stand with us, the campaign was misunderstood, resented, and ultimately weaponized against us.

We told attorneys they couldn’t stip. What we didn’t do was explain why. In many instances, reporters refused to accept stipulations that had been casually used for over 40 years, simply saying “No” without the full context. There was no coordinated communication strategy, no mass education campaign, no CLEs explaining the chain of custody, certification laws, or legal consequences. Just silence—or worse, condescension.

The Emotional Repercussions

Plaintiff attorneys—many of whom had long-standing relationships with reporters—felt slighted. They were used to driving the process, not being overruled by those they considered subcontractors. Their egos were bruised. Their convenience was disrupted. But more than that, they were humiliated in front of opposing counsel and clients.

That humiliation turned to resentment, and that resentment has now turned into retaliation.

Make no mistake: many plaintiff firms are now using digital reporters, ASR, and electronic recording not because they believe in the technology—but because they want to punish us. They’ve said as much. This is a professional vendetta disguised as cost-cutting.

What They Don’t See

The worst part is that most of these attorneys have no idea why the Stop the SoCal Stip movement happened. They believe it was about greed. They look at invoices, see high per diems or transcript totals, and assume the reporter is making a killing. They don’t know that agencies are taking 50% or more, that reporters often don’t see a dime from exhibit handling, digital fees, or condensed formats.

They don’t understand that the stipulation violated the law in many states, including California, where trying to admit an uncertified transcript into evidence is a misdemeanor. They don’t realize that a stipulation between two parties does not override state law or court rules. They never saw the larger picture—because we failed to show them.

What They Need to Know Now

When we do explain it, the lightbulb goes off. One attorney, after learning the context, said, “Oh, that’s why the court reporters were all creating a stink about the SoCal Stip.” He got it. Not only that, he was outraged and ready to fight with us. This is what happens when we stop assuming people know the backstory and start telling it.

The Bigger Machine at Work

We also underestimated the broader market forces circling overhead. Big-box firms like Veritext, and even our own CAT software and hardware vendors, are not abandoning their digital strategy. Why would they? It’s a gold rush. If 10% of the $1.2 billion court reporting market has already gone digital, that’s $120 million annually. And Veritext has a shareholder mandate that every office must be at 50% digital.

This is no longer a niche innovation; it’s a hostile takeover.

And it’s being justified, in part, by the narrative that court reporters are expensive, inflexible, and unwilling to work with attorneys. That narrative—whether accurate or not—was fed by how we handled the Stop the SoCal Stip campaign.

The Offshore Certification Scam

Let’s not forget: agencies are now having notaries certify transcripts. In many cases, those transcripts are likely being produced offshore and then rubber-stamped in-house. The client believes the transcript is certified and official—but it’s not. That’s not just a due process problem. That’s a legal ethics crisis.

The Due Process Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantees fairness and reliability in civil and criminal proceedings. Substituting a certified legal record with uncertified, off-the-books transcripts violates the spirit—if not the letter—of due process. This is exactly what the SoCal Stip movement was trying to protect against. But we never connected those dots publicly.

Where We Go From Here

Now that the retaliation is here, and the digitization wave is swelling, we must do three things:

  1. Educate the Legal Community We need CLEs, white papers, one-pagers, lunch-and-learns—whatever it takes to explain why certified transcripts matter. We need to walk attorneys through what happened, why it mattered, and how they were manipulated into believing that we were the problem. We must win them back.
  2. Reframe the Hierarchy Stenographers are not interchangeable with digital recorders or voice diarists. We are the gold standard. We need to establish a clear professional hierarchy where licensed, tested, and certified court reporters sit at the top—commanding top-tier work and top-tier pay. Let ER and ASR serve the bottom of the market, but never let them sit at our table unchallenged.
  3. Seize the Leverage We Still Have We still have the law on our side in 25 states. We still have 27,000 working stenographers. We still have the gold-standard skillset that no AI can truly match. We have leverage. But leverage is useless if we refuse to use it. We must unite, tell the truth, say “no” when necessary, and build alliances with those who value the certified record.

Wag the Dog

There’s a reason Hollywood made a movie about this concept. Are we the dog? Or are we the tail? Right now, profit-driven conglomerates, tech platforms, and non-certified recorders are wagging us—telling us what our value is, what we should charge, and whether we deserve to exist.

We must reverse that. We must take back the leash.

This Is Our Hostage Negotiation

Hostage negotiators don’t hope for the best. They plan for the worst. And the worst is full-scale annihilation of the stenographic profession. No software support. No hardware vendors. No new students. Just extinction.

We must operate like that future is already here—because if we don’t act like it is, it soon will be.

We still have a window. A very small one. But inside that window is the opportunity to secure our future: a future where court reporters are respected, compensated, and irreplaceable.

The SoCal Stip movement was the right fight. But now we must finish the job we started—and this time, we must bring everyone with us.

Steno Imperium
Court Reporting. Unfiltered. Unafraid.

Disclaimer

The content of this post is intended for informational and discussion purposes only. All opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are based on publicly available information, industry standards, and good-faith concerns about nonprofit governance and professional ethics. No part of this article is intended to defame, accuse, or misrepresent any individual or organization. Readers are encouraged to verify facts independently and to engage constructively in dialogue about leadership, transparency, and accountability in the court reporting profession.

  • The content on this blog represents the personal opinions, observations, and commentary of the author. It is intended for editorial and journalistic purposes and is protected under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
  • Nothing here constitutes legal advice. Readers are encouraged to review the facts and form independent conclusions.

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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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