When Professional Advocacy Drifts Off Message

Posted bystenoimperiumPosted inAI and the Legal System, Court Reporting, Judicial Ethics Watch, Legal ServicesTags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Every year, Court Reporting & Captioning Week is intended to serve a clear and urgent purpose: to educate the public, the legal community, and policymakers about the value of stenographic court reporters and professional captioners. The week exists to reinforce credibility, demonstrate expertise, and highlight the irreplaceable role that trained human reporters play in preserving the official record. In a time when the profession faces aggressive competition from digital recording vendors and automated speech recognition, the stakes are not symbolic. They are existential.

Against that backdrop, the decision by Lauren Tilbury to host a mandala-fitting workshop during a week dedicated to promoting court reporting raises a legitimate question about messaging, priorities, and professional optics.

At its core, the issue is not whether mindfulness, art, or personal wellness have value. They do. Many court reporters work under intense cognitive strain, sustained concentration, and physical demands that make stress management important. The problem is not the concept of self-care. The problem is context. A professional advocacy week is not a personal enrichment retreat. It is a strategic communications opportunity that should be used to advance the profession’s credibility in the eyes of those who do not already understand what court reporters actually do.

Public-facing events during Court Reporting & Captioning Week function, in effect, as a showcase. They are the profession’s equivalent of a trade exhibition, a public relations campaign, and a recruitment effort all at once. Attorneys, judges, students, policymakers, and potential future reporters are watching—sometimes for the first time—to decide whether this is a serious, technologically sophisticated, intellectually demanding field worth supporting or joining. Every event placed on that calendar sends a signal about who court reporters are and how they see themselves.

A mandala-fitting workshop sends a confusing one.

There is no clear, professional through-line between the technical, linguistic, and legal expertise required of stenographic reporters and the practice of designing or fitting mandalas. It does not demonstrate realtime proficiency. It does not educate the public about transcript integrity, certification standards, or evidentiary reliability. It does not highlight captioning accuracy, accessibility compliance, or the cognitive skill required to write at 225+ words per minute with near-perfect precision. In short, it does nothing to explain—or defend—the actual work.

In an era when critics already attempt to portray stenographic reporting as outdated, ceremonial, or easily replaceable, optics matter more than ever. The profession is currently fighting a narrative battle against well-funded companies promoting “method-agnostic” recording solutions and automated transcription. Those entities are investing heavily in messaging that emphasizes efficiency, scalability, and technology. The appropriate response from the stenographic community should be to double down on demonstrating expertise, precision, and professional rigor—not to dilute the message with activities that appear unrelated to the core mission.

This is especially important because Court Reporting & Captioning Week is not merely internal. It is outward-facing by design. Its purpose is to persuade. It is meant to influence how attorneys choose reporting services, how courts allocate resources, how legislators view licensure, and how students decide whether to enter training programs. Every hour of programming is, in effect, limited bandwidth. When that bandwidth is spent on topics that do not directly elevate professional understanding, an opportunity is lost.

There is also a broader branding concern. Professions maintain public trust by consistently reinforcing the seriousness of their role. Physicians do not use their primary advocacy week to host unrelated craft sessions. Airline pilots do not promote their field through activities disconnected from aviation safety or training. Certified public accountants do not showcase their profession with events that fail to highlight financial expertise. In each case, the messaging remains tightly aligned with the skills that justify the profession’s existence.

Court reporting should be no different.

The public already misunderstands what stenographers do. Many still believe reporters simply “type what they hear,” unaware of the extensive education in legal procedure, terminology, realtime translation technology, and transcript certification that the role requires. Advocacy week is one of the few coordinated moments each year when that misconception can be corrected at scale. Events that fail to illuminate the complexity of the job reinforce, rather than dispel, the myth that the work is casual or interchangeable.

There is also a morale component within the profession itself. Many reporters are currently working longer hours, covering increasingly complex proceedings, and defending their role against technological displacement. They are seeking visible, unified leadership that communicates strength, competence, and strategic clarity. When official or highly visible programming appears disconnected from those priorities, it can feel as though the urgency of the moment is being underestimated.

None of this suggests that community-building or wellness should be excluded from professional spaces altogether. Those efforts have a place—at conferences, retreats, or optional side programming clearly framed as personal support. The issue arises when such activities are positioned as representative offerings during the single week specifically dedicated to public advocacy and professional promotion.

Court Reporting & Captioning Week should function as the profession’s strongest annual statement of identity. That statement should emphasize accuracy, neutrality, technical mastery, and the constitutional importance of preserving a reliable record. It should showcase realtime demonstrations, attorney education panels, student recruitment sessions, and discussions about standards, ethics, and innovation within stenographic technology.

Anything that does not contribute to that message risks diluting it.

At a time when the future of the official record is actively being contested, clarity is not a luxury. It is a necessity. Advocacy efforts must be intentional, disciplined, and aligned with the profession’s highest strengths. The goal is not merely to celebrate court reporters internally, but to persuade the outside world that trained human professionals remain essential to justice, accessibility, and due process.

That goal is too important to blur.

Disclaimer:
This article reflects the author’s professional opinion regarding advocacy strategy and public messaging during Court Reporting & Captioning Week. It is not intended to make factual claims about any individual’s character, motives, or professional competence, and is offered solely as commentary on industry positioning and public perception.

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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