Continuing Education or Professional Replacement?

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An Investigation Into NCRA’s CEU Approvals, Vendor Influence, and Financial Pressures

When Continuing Education Becomes Industry Re-Engineering – Questions Surround NCRA-Approved CEUs and Method-Agnostic Training

StenoImperium Investigative Series Draft

A Profession Being Rewritten — With Its Own Credentials

For decades, stenographic court reporters relied on the National Court Reporters Association (NCRA) as both their professional guardian and credentialing authority. Certification through the Registered Professional Reporter (RPR) designation symbolized more than skill — it represented the gold standard of verbatim record capture.

Today, however, a growing number of reporters are asking a question that would have once been unthinkable:

Is the organization created to protect stenographers now credentialing their professional replacement?

The controversy intensified following NCRA’s approval of Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for a 2026 corporate webinar hosted by Veritext Legal Solutions titled “Setting the Record Straight: Training, Technology, and Truth in Capture Method.” The session, approved for NCRA CEU credit, explicitly promotes training across multiple record-capture methods, including digital reporting workflows and technology-driven transcription systems.

Read Course Outline – Veritext Course

For many stenographers, the issue is not simply educational diversification. It is existential.

What The Approved Seminar Actually Promotes

Veritext’s webinar series states that it examines “realities behind digital reporting” while emphasizing that “every capture method must evolve through consistent training and certification.”

Participants are instructed to explore how technological tools, human oversight, and ethics intersect to preserve the legal record.

The session is part of a larger CEU webinar curriculum designed to help professionals “adapt to industry change” and “engage confidently with evolving technology.”

Veritext also notes that its webinars seek to strengthen relationships within its contractor partner community and improve client experiences.

None of this language explicitly promotes stenography as the superior or preferred capture method. Instead, it reflects what many industry observers describe as method neutrality — a philosophical shift with profound consequences.

How Vendor-Sponsored Training Receives NCRA Approval

NCRA’s CEU program is administered by the Council of the Academy of Professional Reporters (CAPR), which determines whether educational programs qualify for credit.

Under NCRA policy:

  • Third-party vendors can submit programs for CEU approval.
  • For-profit organizations are eligible.
  • Application and reporting fees are charged.
  • Approved vendors track attendance and report completion data to NCRA.

NCRA also publishes a list of qualified third-party education providers. That list includes both stenography training companies and organizations offering digital reporting, transcription, and hybrid capture method education — including BlueLedge and Veritext.

In other words, the same credentialing authority historically tasked with advancing stenography now provides continuing education recognition across competing record-capture methodologies.

Following The Money: NCRA’s Financial Reality

An examination of NCRA’s most recent IRS Form 990 filings reveals an organization facing persistent financial pressure.

2024 Financial Snapshot

  • Revenue: $4.6 million
  • Expenses: $4.93 million
  • Net Loss: $322,940
  • Assets: $8.04 million
  • Program service revenue represents over 93% of total income.

2023 Financial Snapshot

  • Revenue: $4.74 million
  • Expenses: $4.85 million
  • Net Loss: $110,906

2022 Financial Snapshot

  • Net Loss exceeded $627,000

Long-term financial data shows revenue was significantly higher in earlier decades, exceeding $7 million annually in some prior reporting years.

The filings also reveal executive compensation structures:

  • Executive Director Dave Wenhold received approximately $304,000 in compensation in recent filings.
  • Several senior staff members received six-figure compensation packages.

NCRA is legally structured as a 501(c)(6) trade association, meaning its mission is improving business conditions for its members — not operating as a charitable organization.

The CEU Revenue Model

The association’s continuing education system generates revenue through:

  • Vendor application fees for seminar approval
  • Attendance reporting fees
  • Individual CEU submission fees (approximately $45 per submission for members)

NCRA states these fees support credential tracking and database management.

However, critics argue the fee-based structure inherently incentivizes expanding CEU approval partnerships — including corporate vendors promoting emerging record-capture technologies.

There is no public evidence showing CEU approvals are directly influenced by financial need. Yet financial filings confirm that program service income represents the overwhelming majority of organizational revenue.

The Method-Agnostic Philosophy

NCRA’s own educational objectives emphasize equipping reporters to compete in an “ever-changing information and technology” environment and promoting open access to educational programs.

This philosophy reflects broader workforce trends across many professions. But in court reporting, the consequences are uniquely disruptive.

Stenographic realtime reporting remains the only capture method capable of producing an immediate verbatim record with live readback capability. By contrast, audio-based capture and AI transcription typically require post-event processing and carry additional equipment and audio integrity risks.

The method-agnostic framework, critics argue, creates a professional equivalency between fundamentally different technologies — a shift some stenographers view as institutional abandonment.

Corporate Influence and Workforce Transition Concerns

Large litigation support corporations increasingly promote integrated service models combining:

  • Remote deposition platforms
  • AI summarization tools
  • Audio-based capture
  • Transcription workflows

Vendor-sponsored education programs frequently mirror these business models by training reporters and transcriptionists to operate within technology-driven service ecosystems.

From a corporate standpoint, cross-training expands staffing flexibility and reduces reliance on stenographic labor shortages. From a stenographer’s standpoint, it may represent professional displacement disguised as workforce modernization.

The Advertising Vacuum and Influence Shift

Industry observers have also noted declining advertiser presence in professional publications and trade journals across the reporting sector — a trend that further shifts educational sponsorship power toward large corporate litigation vendors.

Trade associations historically funded operations through membership dues, conference sponsorships, and advertising partnerships. As those traditional revenue sources contract, corporate training partnerships often expand.

The Legal and Ethical Conflict

NCRA’s educational mission includes strengthening professional competence and advancing technical skills across reporting disciplines.

But the organization simultaneously serves as the credentialing authority for stenographic certifications.

This dual role creates an inherent tension:

  • Should a credentialing body remain technology-neutral?
  • Or should it actively advocate for the discipline upon which its certifications were founded?

That debate is now reshaping the profession.

Strategic Framing – The Real Stakes

This controversy is not simply about one webinar or one vendor partnership.

It represents a larger structural question:

Who defines the future of the legal record — stenographers or corporate litigation service providers?

Continuing education approval, once a technical credentialing function, has quietly become one of the most powerful forces influencing workforce transformation in court reporting.

By legitimizing alternative capture training through credential maintenance requirements, CEU approval effectively integrates reporters into the very systems that may ultimately replace them.

The Road Ahead

NCRA faces an undeniably difficult position. Workforce shortages, technological disruption, and changing litigation economics are reshaping the profession.

Yet stenographers are now confronting a profound professional crossroads:

Continue supporting an association pursuing method-agnostic education — or demand a return to advocacy focused specifically on protecting stenographic realtime reporting as the profession’s gold standard.

The outcome may determine not just certification standards, but the survival of stenography itself.

Legal Disclaimer and Transparency

This article relies on publicly available tax filings, vendor educational materials, and NCRA policy documents. The analysis and opinions expressed reflect interpretation of publicly documented industry trends and do not allege unlawful conduct by any organization or individual.

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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