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.
Stenographers in Los Angeles received this in their email inbox today, November 20, 2024, at 11:20 a.m.
If you go to their website, they have an explainer video that shows the product in action. It looks to be nothing more than a search filter to help find words amongs all of an attorneys’ depo transcripts.
It provides you with only three search filters, which doesn’t seem very sophisticated, but maybe it’s better than anything they have available to them now to search for something among multiple proceedings.
But does this really add something to the industry that didn’t exist? Is it “innovative,” as they claim? If you go to the Veritext portal, there’s one search field that let’s you do all three searches in that one box – attorney, witness, case. So do we really need three designated boxes for searches, when one box does the trick for all 3? Well, I guess Steno didn’t know that because they’re not a Veritext client and can’t see what their portal does for attorneys.
I believe they made a huge mistake in naming the product how they did, because my first assumption was that they came out with a product that will CREATE an AI-generated Transcript. I was relieved to learn that my initial reaction to their new product announcement was all wrong. Sometimes I’m very happy to be wrong.
It’s definitely creating a buzz in the industry today!
In response to my inquiry, Steno explained how their new product could help increase demand for our certified transcripts.
Summarizing and analyzing deposition content has been something that court reporters and agencies have steered away from intentionally for over 150 years. It crosses the ethical line of remaining neutral and unbiased for court reporters to participate in something like this. I’m sure the Big Box agencies would have done something like this a decade ago, if there wasn’t a hesitation about crossing that ethical line that defines the very core of their business.
Had Steno Agency spun off another company that handles tech software tools for attorneys and not have it attached to court reporting, I think that may have been a safer play. But they have to decide who and what they are. Are they a court reporting agency? Or are they a software innovator? As a software provider for the legal industry, are they really that innovative? I mean, CoverCrow launched in April 2019 with a full dashboard for freelancers, six years before Steno Agency launched a dashboard for their freelancers, and it has only a fraction of the tools that CoverCrow offers.
Looking at AI tools for attorneys, there’s a glut of software on the market now offering this. Steno Agency made the top of the search list. Kuddos for the great SEO strategy!
I mean, that’s just the first two pages in Google search results. The list goes on and on and on. What makes one so different than another or more innovative? They’re all using the same generative AI engine.
And who are using these software tools to summarize legal proceedings? Attorneys, who then give it to their Insurance companies. And what does it look like in a court trial where insurance companies heavily rely on AI summary services and are not reading transcripts or interrogatories? Well, I just finished a bad faith trial that was a result of an insurance company who relied on summaries to value a case. The valuation was wrong because it missed critical pieces of information of injuries that were revealed in interrogatories and the deposition that never made it into the summaries. The insurance company had a $100,000 policy limit that they failed to negotiate a settlement on, the case went to trial, and the injured driver (not the insured) was awarded $3 million. So who is responsible to pay the $3 million? The insured driver who was only insured up to $100k? Or the insurance company who read AI summaries, instead of reading the interrogatories or the court reporters transcripts of the depositions of the injured? Or the law firm who used the AI software tools to produce the summaries for the insurance company that was used to value the case? Well, the jury said the insurance company and the law firm have to pay the $3 million, and not the insureds.
Here’s what the expert witness had to say about using summaries in litigation at the jury trial. (names have been changed to protect all involved.)
Q Were you able to determine if Tanya Rory ever reviewed the medical records that had been gathered by Bando and Terry in response to their subpoenas? A She did not. Q And were you able to determine if Tanya Rory ever looked at the — Ms. Merry’s responses to interrogatories that she had provided to the Bando and Terry firm? A I don’t think so. Q And were you able to determine if the adjuster, Ms. Rory, ever looked at the responses to the request of production of documents that Ms. Merry provided to Bando and Terry? A No. Q So just taking those items that I just mentioned, five, do you have any — do you have an opinion as to whether or not Ms. Rory was acting reasonably in performing her job as a claim adjuster? A Honestly, when I reviewed this, I was shocked. An adjuster’s job is to review all of these things. The only thing I saw in this file were summaries that were written by Mr. Bando, who I’m sure everybody knows was the attorney that was hired that was working with — with Ms. Rory in defending the Ferraris. And she never requested or was given the medical records to look and see what was in them. She did not look at the responses to discovery to make her own determinations. One of the most important parts of certainly the deposition of your client, and that was not read. She did summarize these things, but she summarized them from a summary. She received the summary from Mr. Bando’s office and she summarized on a few different dates — I think it was March 4th and September 17th were the two bigger dates of the summaries. Q Why, in your view, is it insufficient for her to have just relied upon the summaries that were provided to her by Bando and Terry? A Sure. Because she has the job to evaluate the case. Mr. Bando can evaluate it, if — if they ask him, but it’s the insurance company that has the money. Mr. Bando doesn’t have any money. It’s up to the adjuster to review the case, look at everything possible, and make a determination as to the value of that case. And if you simply rely on someone else’s opinion, without looking at them yourself, I don’t think you’re doing a proper job, not just for Ms. Merry, but for the Franklins, and, frankly, for — for your own company. You’re hired to, not just write things down and ask questions, you need to be proactive. I think that’s one of the things that was missing mostly in this file. There was nothing proactive that I saw of — of how the adjustment was attempted.
I wonder if the next step for the law firm and the insurance company could be to sue the sofware provider of these summaries because they missed a critical piece of information needed to valuate the claim – – the injuries. And possibly, by extension, the court reporter who was working for the company that provided the summary using those transcripts, who was hired by them? I dunno? It’s a possibility. I’ve seen fringe companies get sued in cases like asbestos, medical malpractice, etc. They use a blanket approach and sue everybody and let them all settle out or litigate out of it, which are equally costly. As a court reporter, I don’t want to be drawn into this fight with AI transcript summaries in any way. This has me concerned. So concerned, in fact, that I choose not to do any freelance work with agencies that have chosen to cross that questionably ethical line of providing AI summaries of deposition transcripts to attorneys and ultimately insurance companies.
Luckily, for the AI Software provider of the summaries, it was never asked in this trial how the summaries were made – by human or AI software. So they’re safe for now. But as AI summaries continue to propagate the legal landscape, it’s only a matter of time before the finger of blame gets pointed in that direction.
I’ve long believed it’s problematic for a third-party nonprofit organization to require a license in order to work in a state, yet this practice is common and not widely questioned.
In the 1980s, the National Society of Professional Engineers (PE) faced a similar issue: too many people were calling themselves engineers. To address this, the PE implemented several strategies:
Title protection for professional engineers (PE).
State certification in all 50 states.
Enforceable laws prohibiting anyone without a license from claiming the title or practicing as a PE.
Publishing a “Responsible Charge Statement,” among other measures.
These steps were instrumental in the success of the engineering industry. Many engineering firms have thrived, keeping up with wage inflation, with some companies earning millions annually. This is a model that stenographers could have followed—and arguably should have—if a similar strategy had been adopted.
Instead, the National Court Reporters Association (NCRA) introduced its own certification, but only succeeded in getting 8 states to mandate it and 13 more to make it an optional requirement alongside their own state licensing. Unfortunately, this left 27 states without any form of licensing protection. This gap allowed the digital transcription movement to exploit the lack of regulation, starting with states like Florida, where they’ve completely dominated the market. Meanwhile, stenographers are left struggling with fewer opportunities.
The view that the NCRA’s actions (or lack thereof) have contributed to the decline of our industry isn’t popular, but it’s one worth considering. What the NCRA should have done was abandon its certification program and instead advocate for a standardized “CSR” (Certified Stenographic Reporter) license across all states. Had this happened, along with title protection and a Responsible Charge Statement in each state, we would have been much stronger, and the rise of digital transcription would have faced far more resistance.
While it’s likely illegal to require certification from a single monopolistic organization—something the PE didn’t attempt to do—this issue has yet to be addressed in court. The NCRA could push for a state license, but it cannot require a license from a third-party monopoly. This opens the door for potential antitrust lawsuits. Interestingly, it seems Christopher Day is in talks with someone who may be preparing to challenge the current system.
If this issue were to come to light, the response would be massive. Reporters who have spent years and significant amounts of money on certification exams, CEUs, and conferences would be up in arms. Such a challenge could drastically shake up our industry, and we’d see plenty of backlash from those invested in the current setup.
A possible solution to this issue would be for the NCRA to collaborate with state governments, professional organizations, and individual stenographers to establish a universally recognized, standardized “CSR” (Certified Stenographic Reporter) license across all states. This unified approach would ensure consistency in qualifications, title protection, and professional standards, strengthening the profession and making it more difficult for digital transcription methods to replace us. By working toward state-mandated CSR licenses and implementing a uniform “Responsible Charge Statement,” the NCRA could help solidify the role of human stenographers, offering greater legal and professional protection nationwide. This proactive, collaborative effort would not only restore the credibility of our profession but also secure its future by defending it against further encroachment. Rather than perpetuating cycles of infighting and divisiveness, we should come together as one force, advocating for a solution that benefits everyone. By setting aside differences, we can demonstrate the power of unity in protecting and growing the stenographic profession for years to come.
We’ve all seen the glossy stories of steno success—the instant breakthroughs, the effortless achievements. But let’s get real for a moment: success isn’t all red carpets and champagne. It’s time we discussed the unglamorous side of achieving steno student success, the gritty details often overlooked.
First, let’s debunk the myth of overnight success. Behind every “sudden” breakthrough usually lies years of unseen hard work, numerous failures, and relentless persistence. Steno success is less about a single moment of glory and more about the accumulation of consistent effort over time.
The Daily Grind
Achieving steno success often means early mornings, late nights, and sacrificed weekends. It involves showing up even when you don’t feel like it, enduring the monotony of practice, the frustration of trial and error, and maintaining discipline when results aren’t immediate.
Here’s a truth bomb: successful stenos fail—a lot. But they don’t let it stop them. Each setback is a lesson, and each rejection is a redirection. The path to steno success is paved with failures that most people never see.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
Pursuing your goals can sometimes be a lonely journey. While others are out having fun, you might be burning the midnight oil. It can mean missing out on social events, dealing with skepticism from others, and battling self-doubt in solitude.
Steno success isn’t a steady climb; it’s a rollercoaster of highs and lows. There are moments of exhilaration and periods of crushing self-doubt. Managing these emotional fluctuations is part of the unglamorous work that goes on behind the scenes.
The Sacrifice Equation
Every steno success requires sacrifice. It might mean putting certain aspects of your life on hold, stepping out of your comfort zone, or making tough choices. The question isn’t whether you’ll have to sacrifice, but whether what you’re gaining is worth what you’re giving up.
Not everyone will understand or support your journey. Dealing with skepticism, criticism, and sometimes even sabotage from others is part of the package. Developing a thick skin and staying true to your vision is crucial.
Remember, for every 1,000 practice steno strokes at goal speed, you can progress 10 wpm in speed. It’s mathematical. Put in the time and put in the steno strokes.
The Constant Evolution
Success isn’t a destination; it’s an ongoing process. Even after achieving your goals, there’s pressure to maintain your success, to keep evolving, and to set new benchmarks. The work doesn’t stop—it just changes form.
So why am I telling you all this? Not to discourage you, but to prepare and inspire you. Knowing the real deal behind success stories can actually be empowering. It means that success isn’t about being special or lucky—it’s about being persistent, resilient, and willing to do the unglamorous work.
The next time you see a steno student success story, remember the iceberg principle—what you see is just the tip. Underneath is a mountain of hard work, setbacks, doubts, and perseverance. And that’s the beauty of it—because it means steno success is within your reach too, if you’re willing to embrace the unglamorous side of the journey.
So roll up your sleeves. Get ready to sweat, stumble, doubt, and persevere. Because that’s what real steno student success looks like—and it’s beautiful in all its unglamorous glory.
A lot of bloggers have a “lone wolf” mindset, but I’ve never been one of them. Over all of my years of blogging and consuming blogs, one of the top things I have always confidently said is that bloggers need other bloggers. I have said it before, and I’ll say it again and again… Bloggers need other bloggers! Collaboration is one of the greatest ways bloggers can help build one another up. The aphorism “a rising tide lifts all boats” is associated with the idea that improvements in the general economy will benefit all participants in that economy.
StenoImperium is an anonymous blog designed to ensure that its thought-provoking ideas are evaluated solely on their own merits, without bias or prejudice towards the identity of the author. By remaining anonymous, the blog encourages readers to engage deeply with the content and the ideas presented, fostering an open-minded and unbiased discourse. StenoImperium is dedicated to highlighting the pivotal role of the stenographer as more than just the the guardian of the record, but as the Responsible Charge of the verbatim record. It will explore every facet of this responsibility, unearthing and confronting any threats to the integrity of the record.
StenoImperium is NOT authored by Christopher Day and has no affiliation with him or his blog called “Stenonymous.” They are distinctly separate blogs. However, in the interest of helping his blog succeed, StenoImperium’s author has made efforts to collaborate by doing things that bloggers in the outside world do, such as guest posting, commenting, and engaging with the Stenonymous content, featuring him in our blog posts, served as one of his informants, and shared his posts extensively, contributing to his growth to thousands of followers on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
I’ve shared his blog, leading some to mistakenly believe I wrote it, just because I shared it. Similarly, he shared my blog, and someone thought he authored it. One time, I even shared a Facebook post from an agency, and a reporter assumed I worked for that agency (I’ve never worked for an agency). It’s strange how quickly people draw erroneous inferences and make assumptions on social media.
Over the years, I’ve had limited ocassion to interact professionally with Mr. Day. I met him once in person, in passing, by chance, at the Las Vegas NCRA convention. We did a TikTok duet once, ad hoc. I’ve talked to him on the phone a couple of times. We’ve FB messaged back and forth dozens of times over maybe a decade, infrequently. We also had a Zoom call once, but he was on a train using his phone, resulting in poor visual and audio quality. In addition to living 3,000 miles apart and having significant differences in age (at least two decades), you couldn’t find two individuals who are more polar opposites on almost everything, from personality types (He’s Phlegmatic and I’m Choleric) to Star Signs to Politics to Religion, and just about everything in between. Our shared career and interest in protecting the future of stenography connects us, though we often have differing views on how to achieve that goal. We have been, at most, professional acquaintances, through his blog, and I’ve never considered him more than that. His thoughts are NOT my thoughts and vice versa. His blog is NOT my blog. Two different bloggers with two distinctly separate blogs.
I believe that if someone in our community claimed Christopher Day is the author of StenoImperium, it was an innocent, yet ignorant mistake, as I’ve seen such mix-ups happen several times. (See, I did it again, hyperlinked back to his blog with a reference to something he said, on the word “claimed” in blue font above.)
I have no intention of damaging his brand or causing him to feel defensive. I don’t believe he could have been referring to me with any of his insinuations in his latest blog post. On the contrary, I’ve significantly contributed to the success of his brand over the years by sharing his content and engaging on multiple platforms. I’ve leveraged my influence and helped him widen his social media reach to help his blog flourish over the years.
Here are some facts about StenoImperium:
STENOimperium is ONE word.
StenoImperium will NEVER solicit money from its readers.
StenoImperium does NOT operate to gain metrics or followers.
I’ll add this to the bottom of every blog post from now on, Chris.
Did you know that if you put 100 black ants and 100 red ants in a jar, nothing will happen? But if you shake the jar hard, the ants start killing each other. The red ants consider the black ants their enemies, and the black ants consider the red ants their enemies. The true enemy is the one shaking the jar. The same thing happens in human society. So, before we attack each other, we should think about who is shaking the jar!
Credit: Kurt Vonnegut
The hands around the jar are multitudinous, but include the big boxes that are going digital, the attorneys who steal our transcripts, judges who choose ER and are ousting officials, long-time steno allies cannibalizing steno products for digital products, insurance companies who are commoditizing stenos, and the list goes on. But incoming NCRA President, Keith Lemons, stepped on an ant hill when he disbanded the NCRA Strong Committee.
An anonymous blog by the name of WUNCRA is circulating a petition which “seeks the voluntary resignation of incoming president Keith Lemons for choosing to disband NCRA Strong at a time when additional advocacy is needed, not less.”
Keith Lemons’ prickly demeanor is not sitting well with the 95% female population of court reporters who want answers. He has a reputation for having a typical modus operandi that will quash and block any opinion that he disagrees with. See for yourself one of his exchanges, where he’s seen minimizing the disbanding of the Strong Committee as simply “morphing” into another committee called the Government Relations Team (GRT) .
I was surprised to learn that Keith Lemons is not even a working court reporter.
What’s interesting is when you go to the NCRA’s “Meet the Team” page, it doesn’t even list the President, who is a court reporter and is elected by the members every year. You have to go to the “Leadership” and then “Board of Directors” page, kind of buried.
Keith is a retired freelancer, former firm owner, and former official reporter. Apparently, he’s qualified, although not currently a reporter. Retired reporters are eligible to serve as a President of the NCRA. “Once a reporter, always a reporter” is what I always say.
I guess if you don’t like Keith as a candidate for the Presidency, you have the nominating committee to blame; right? But who were the members of the Nominating Committee that nominated Keith Lemons? In a cursory search for the answer to that question, I found this list. This is just a screenshot of the Nominating Committee list that was pulled directly from the NCRA’s website today (7/24/2024), but I’m being informed by readers who are coming forward with information that this is not the Nominating Committee who were privy to discussions about, nor did they nominate Keith Lemons:
These are NOT the Nomination Committee members who voted for Keith Lemons. I’ve had two members come forward to provide information that this list of committee members were never informed of Keith’s nomination and never discussed it. See the “Addendum” below for more information.
The duties of a President of the NCRA includes verbs such as presides, liaises, appoints, chairs, informs, consults, collaborates, communicates, cooperates, develops, delegates, ensures, and serves. It appears, though, from the job description, that he cannot arbitrarily disband a committee and appoint a new one without the approval of the board. Did the board vote for the Steno Strong committee to be disbanded? When? Who voted yay on that?
Language straight off the NCRA.org website
What can we do? What recourse do we have if we perceive foul play? File a complaint!
Who did Keith Lemons piss off when he disbanded the Strong committee? These ladies, for beginners. The list reads like the Who’s Who of the court reporting world. Not any of which I would want to make enemies with.
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” ~ Shakespeare
Interesting fact: The notorious Christopher Day, the Stenonymous blogger, was also on the Strong Committee at one point in time. (By the way, Christopher Day has absolutely NOTHING to do with the StenoImperium blog. Please don’t get the two blogs confused.)
ADDENDUM:
As an addendum, I am going to include a screenshot of a comment from two readers who commented on the Nominating Committee that I shared from the NCRA website:
The list of committee members was copied and pasted from the NCRA website this morning. I don’t know who the prior year NomCom is for 2023-2024 who would have selected Keith Lemons. So I was NOT incorrect that it is the Nominating Committee who is supposed to make the recommendation of the next president-elect for the NCRA, but I was incorrect that it is the “CURRENT” NomCom, on which Kimberly Farkas serves. It is the immediate past NomCom, whose members are unknown to us, that nominated Keith Lemons. It’s helpful to know that there is a contest period of 60 days. When does the 60-day clock begin to run?
The information about the NomCom on the NCRA website is light. It doesn’t give the information that Kimberly articulated above. This is all there is, and when you click “Learn More,” you get a list of the nominating committee names, which I’ve shared the screenshot above.
So to clarify, there will not be a vote for the incoming president at the upcoming NCRA convention. Keith Lemons is already locked in as the President-elect. So it goes back to my other suggestion, that if members choose, they can complain about violation of the policies and proceedures or bylaws, if you find that any violation occurred. Or you can continue with the WUNCRA petition to seek to get his attention and ask him to voluntarily resign. But I would hope that there be a plan in place for an immediate and competent replacement.
Here is the second comment from a reader who appears on that list and has provided information that as a NomCom member on this list, he was NOT privy to discussing nor voting for President-Elect Keith Lemons.
It pains me to see the backstabbing of court reporting professionals in our industry. Having been personally affected by a disgusting mob several months ago, I’m painfully familiar with the sting of having a target on my back. It seems that once a reporter steps up to volunteer in our profession or to blow a whistle on unethical behavior or actions or business practices, the target on their back emerges, and the gossip and gangstalking begin. I don’t know if it’s because it’s a 96% female industry, and women fight using below-the-belt tactics, such as gossip, which destroys reputations and is impossible to address the accuser and defend, but I haven’t seen the whisper assaults in the other male-dominated industries I’ve worked in. I’ve seen really competent and professional and capable leaders make the choice to step down, step away, and end their volunteer service to our court reporting profession after being emotionally abused and attacked by their peers in THIS profession.
I have to ask: Is there another responsible way of handling the malcontent? Can we give Keith a chance? Have the Strong Committee members asked to serve on the new committee? I’ve urged Keith, personally, to be as forthcoming as possible with communicating his plans to the steno world and not wait for his “timing.” I expressed that I believed it was a mistake to let the malconent boil over. I was blocked. Can others reach out to him and urge him to communicate his plans and not leave our community in the dark? Can we get him to the so-called “table” to discuss his plans for the future committee? Keith has an impressive 40 years of experience and service to this industry. We owe him more than a petition asking him to resign. We do deserve answers though too. There are two sides, with two sets of expectations, and we need to get to the bottom of each and come up with a solution that works for our profession. Further dividing the profession at a time like this is not wise. I see that there is an obvious breakdown in communication, but we must be persuasive and persistent in our efforts to lead the resolution efforts.
I urge you to put down your swords and rocks, cast aside your opinions, refrain from gossip, follow the processes and proceedures the organization has laid out in civilized, professional societies to resolve disputes in an orderly and public manner using the complaint form so the organization can address complaints publicly, and not in secret in the dark. Give it time.
As more comments flow in, I will post them and address them. Here is an email from the NCRA with the correct link. Click on the picture and it will take you to the link. I received the response from the NCRA within 3 hours of my request – an impressive response time.
So here is the information I was looking for, the nomination committee and slate of officers for 2023-2024. NCRA did communicate this to all members through their web platform in a timely manner, with all the information one could want – who, what, when, where, how, deadlines, links, etc. All out in the open – total transparency.
We have to really read between the lines to get the full story here. It says the NomCom “announces” the slate and includes “nominations.” That’s the same template language they’ve used in past releases. But there’s one word missing from the announcement when Keith Lemons nomination to President-Elect was announced – “pleased.” That’s a huge distinction. Could it be that the behind-the-scenes political discord is rearing its ugly head in their public announcement with the omission of that one little adjective which changes the meaning completely and gives us some insight? Does is give us a clue?
Here’s another comment from a reader, Allison Lewis Kimmel:
I would say to Allison Lewis Kimmel, in response to her comment, that I am not “slinging mud” at any of the nominating committee members. I, personally do not taken a position on the WUNCRA petition and am not a member of it. I just found out about it yesterday. I’m just posting their petition, which I have not signed. I think that posting a screen shot of the NCRA’s website with the Nominating Committee is not mudslinging. Making a suggestion that the WUNCRA committee find a better resolution than circulating a petition to get him to voluntarily resign, which will most likely not happen, is not mudslinging. I’m about getting results, and I’m focusing on that. If you want to effectuate change, you have to do it through the proper channels. It seems like finding out the nominating process would be a good start and finding out who voted him in and get answers from them, if WUNCRA takes issue with Keith being the next president. But the Strong Committee members are upset and WUNCRA is upset. I am not, as I’m in the dark about all the politics that this matter has dredged up, and I don’t know what happened. I received the petition, and I want to know what’s happening. I’m making an observation that as times get tougher in our profession, the infighting seems to be getting more heated.
I’m a busy working reporter. I’m a blogger. I’m not an investigative journalist. I’m not a professional journalist. I’m not paid to write and investigate facts. I take things I see and write about it, on a blog. If you want facts, go to a legitimate news source. A blog, my blog, is not a news source. This is an opinion, op-ed, blog. I find out about things going on in our profession and then go on a journey to find out more about it and share what I’m learning along the way. You can come with me and see what I find out, see what others are sharing with me about it, see how I’m synthesizing the information to formulate possible avenues to solve problems, and enjoy the discussion and thought-provoking questions along the way. You can tell me I’m wrong, I’m stupid, you disagree, you would have done it differently – and you’re probably right. Or maybe you’ll have an ah-ha! moment and go write a Facebook post about it.
BREAKING INFO
This gets more interesting as the inside information develops and fills in the big gaping holes from the bystander bleachers I seem to find myself in on this issue, watching it unfold along with the general audience in our small community. It seems that even the 2023-2024 Nominating Committee didn’t nominate Keith Lemons to President-Elect. See what my inside source had to say:
Turns out that little adjective was insightful. There WAS a lot of drama behind the scenes over the whole thing. But lips of the committee members are tightly sealed.
With the NCRA Convention approaching rapidly, 6 days from now, maybe you’ll consider getting there early to attend the business meeting, because it’s sure to be a hoot. You might be able to glean a lot more about this all from being there in person rather than behind your phone or keyboard reading a blog.
What can you do if you don’t like the leadership or the direction our organization is going? Get involved. Volunteer. Be a part of the change. Be the change you wish to see in our world!
Ever notice how some people seem to radiate confidence effortlessly? Here’s a little secret: it’s not magic, and it’s definitely not something they were born with. Confidence is a skill—one that you can learn, develop, and master. But here’s the catch: like any skill, confidence requires practice. It’s a muscle that needs regular exercise to stay in shape. So, whether you’re already feeling pretty good about yourself or looking to take your self-assurance to the next level, we have the proven expertise and tested strategies to boost your confidence and propel your steno career to new heights. Want to unlock the secrets of unshakeable confidence? I will reveal five game-changing habits that successful steno leaders swear by!
Kickstart your confidence journey with these five game-changing habits that will help you build and maintain unshakable confidence:
Embrace The Yes-and-then-figure-it-out Mindset: Say yes to opportunities, then figure out how to make it happen. This is how you grow and discover your true potential. New court reporters often get thrown to the wolves in a trial-by-fire exercise, mostly unintentional. You may find yourself in a depo where you are totally unprepared, such as in an asbestos case with 40 attorneys in the room. First step: breathe! You can get through this! Remember your sign changes trick that experienced reporters posted about on Facebook where you double stroke their name or identifying characteristic. Most of the time, only two attorneys will be talking and you’ll realize at the end that you psyched yourself out for nothing. You can call your mentor after the proceeding to figure out how to do all those appearances. Remember to introduce yourself, get a business card from everyone, and ask who they represent, and then get every word! If you need to stop and ask them to slow down or to repeat something, just do that, as you would normally do in a regular, easy depo. Act as if you’ve done it a hundred times, and keep telling yourself “You got this!”
Show Up, Even When It’s Scary: Courage isn’t about feeling fearless; it’s about taking action despite your fears. Showing up is half the battle. The more you do the tough stuff, the easier it gets. The first time I reported a high-profile assignment with celebrities where the audience was packed wall to wall and the media was there was nerve-wracking and intimidating. My hands were even shaking when I started writing, and I felt like everyone was watching me. I kept my focus on my laptop, watching my realtime that was being broadcast to the judge and several attorneys. The nerves dissipated after a few minutes, and I was able to perform like it was any other day on the record. Now I look forward to those high-profile trials! You’ll be able to do any assignment that comes your way with finesse!
Focus On Progress, Not Perfection: Small improvements are more important than flawless execution—baby steps forward are still steps in the right direction. When turning in my first YesLaw appeal electronically, as a primary reporter, with 20 volumes, it was rejected 3 times before it was perfect. But now I know all the little things to look for on the next appeal. Another area to focus on for small improvements is your realtime writing. It seems like a lifelong pursuit to have 100% perfect realtime. With each job, I work on a list of case-specific briefs and then I work on fixing one or two problem areas of my writing. I’ll put a word list in front of me, alphabetized, with the bfriefs, and I’ll include the two things I’m working on at the top of the page and I highlight them. For example, I had a couple of conflicts left to resolve, such as online/on line and weekend/week end. Every time those came up during the day, I would focus on writing it correctly. If I didn’t write it correctly, and I realized it after the fact, I would write it at the end of the paragraph when there was a pause in the proceedings; that way you are creating finger-brain muscle memory. Training your finger-brain muscle memory can happen any time during the day, not just as it is happening in realtime. Catch your brain making the mistake and correct it as soon as you are able to and write it correctly. You can erase it later. My writing is almost completely conflict-free now, after over a decade’s work at trying to resolve them all. Sure, I could have done it in a month, but it’s not a race.
Reframe Failure As A Stepping Stone To Success: Failures are valuable learning experiences—every setback offers insights that bring you closer to success. Not many reporters pass the RPR or CSR on their first try. The fact is, only 10% who try actually succeed at passing these tests. I passed the CSR on my second go. After taking the RPR numerous times over 10 years, the NCRA finally eliminated the open time limit. I took the CRR over six times and failed. I finally started hypnotherapy to address my test anxiety, and found that it also improved my performance anxiety, such as when a jury is behind me watching me or when I’m writing realtime to attorneys and judges. The importance of failure in achieving success is highlighted by its role in providing valuable learning opportunities and building resilience and perseverance. The psychology of failure reveals that it is not simply a setback or a negative outcome, but rather a crucial stepping stone towards personal development. Failure allows individuals to reflect on their actions, analyze their mistakes, and learn from them. Through failure, individuals gain insights and lessons that can be applied to future endeavors. Additionally, experiencing failure helps build resilience, as individuals learn to bounce back from setbacks and continue pursuing their goals. It also fosters perseverance, as individuals develop the determination to overcome obstacles and keep striving for success. Therefore, embracing failure as a learning opportunity is essential for personal growth and achieving success.
Never, EVER Give Up On Your Goals: All dreams face obstacles, but consistent effort will eventually break through any barrier. Do you dream of one day achieving your RDR Certification? Dreams act as a powerful motivator, fueling your purpose and igniting your passion. The journey towards achieving them is just as valuable. It builds resilience as you overcome obstacles, teaching you valuable skills and shaping you for success. It gives you opportunities to meet other reporters who are pursuing their RDR and it helps you appreciate and admire and respect the reporters who have achieved their RDR or other accomplishments. Dreams provide direction and purpose, guiding you towards a fulfilling life. The road may not be smooth, but persistence is key; it brings you closer to your goals. I hope that you will dream big!
Here are a few of my favorite inspirational quotes:
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that count.” – Winston Churchill
“Believe in yourself and all that you are. Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle.” – Christian D. Larson
“If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking for permission.” – Unknown
“Success is not how high you have climbed, but how you make a positive difference to the world.” – Roy T. Bennett
“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” – Nelson Mandela
I just learned that the New York courts plan to publish daily transcripts of the Trump trial.
This is a blatant and egregious exploitation of the court reporter’s transcript! New York court’s are using an official court reporter to capture the live verbatim testimony in that trial. Official court reporters across the country are employed by the court, given a salary and benefits, but when it comes to the production of transcripts, they are 1099 contractors, who use their own software, hardware, and subcontractors, such as scopists and proofreaders, and they sell their transcripts to attorneys, independently of the court.
Calling it a novel step and historic and comparing it to the court publishing filings and decisions by salaried judges, and case exhibits is NOT the same thing as a court reporters transcripts. Court reporters should be compensated for their work.
I would have no problem with the court offering to SELL the court reporters’ transcripts online, without taking a cut, but completely exploiting the court reporter and making it available to the public for free is unacceptable. The court reporter is NOT earning a salary for producing transcripts and the county does not pay for her equipment, licensing, subcontractors. The court does NOT own the transcript. Producing transcripts is how court reporters earn a living. It takes a tremendous amount of skill and work and time and stress for a court reporter to produce daily transcripts and it’s expensive to hire the support of subcontractors to help make it happen. This is highly exploitative of New York’s highly skilled workforce!
I received a great question in a comment earlier this morning and I’ve been thinking about it a lot as I went about my busy day. I wanted to give it its own post and then expand on it as well.
Kim, Thank you for your GREAT question! And congratulations and welcome to the wonderful court reporting profession. Webster’s defines “stenography” as using shorthand to make a verbatim record. Voice writers use verbal shorthand cues that translate into the same Eclipse CAT software that machine writers use to make an instant verbatim record. The term “stenography” would encompass both methods of making a verbatim record, machine and voice. And there would be a third method of making a verbatim record, pen writers, but it’s my understanding that there aren’t any more pen writers working, I’d love to know if there still is one or two if anyone has any information about it, please share.
When I wrote about “fake machines,” I was referring to the fact that digital workers were given real stenograph machines to bring with them on the job by their agencies and then they pretended to type on them to make themselves look like real court reporters. So the machine isn’t fake. It’s a real machine. But the fake part was that these imposters were using them a props. So “fake” referred to the fact that they were merely a prop in the hands of someone unskilled to use it.
I believe that voice writers had a big win when the California CRB decided to allow them in CA. The decision was made years ago, but voice writers just started receiving their CSR certifications after passing the test late last year, in 2023. Good things take time.
Backstory. In September of 2017, Tori Pittman posted in my “Why I Love Court” Reporting Facebook group about voice writing and how it should be accepted everywhere. At the time, I didn’t know anything about voice writing and CA didn’t allow it, so I never bothered to research more about it. It was irrelevant to me, and reporters are busy enough pumping transcripts out. She continued to debate the merits on my group, and I just asked her politely to bring that debate to a bigger stage where she could actually impact the change that she was seeking. My group was small and the focus was different. The WILC group was created because my alma mater school told me they lost 3 students because they went to a FB vent site for court reporters. We couldn’t have our prospective students dropping out because of all the negative gripes from working reporters. We love our career, but every career has legitimate gripes. So I created a positive FB group that the schools could send their students where they weren’t in danger of dropping out, so the last thing I needed was a debate or controversy. The schools were watching. I told her that my group wasn’t the place and that I had no opinion one way or another. But I advised her that if she really wanted to change the laws in CA, she needed to start at the top, not the bottom. I openly admitted I was just a working reporter on the front lines with no power, no control, no influence, nothing. She was barking up the wrong tree. I told her the DRA and CCRA would NEVER let her idea get passed them, the gatekeepers. She should go above them to the CRB, the arbiter, pitch it to them, and let them decide. Months later, she was on the agenda, flew to CA, made her pitch and it was approved. A day later, the DRA and CCRA were on it and at the next CRB meeting it was tabled indefinitely, with all their excuses about how their voices would be distracting during a machine test, making the logistics impossible and they’d have to work out the details, which meant never. You can thank people like Stephanie Whitehead, a San Diego reporter (machine), who spent the next almost decade educating reporters up and down the state on the merits of voice writing. She helped get the first school in CA to start a voice writing program. Today, 2024, all 7 reporting schools in CA offer voice writing. She has turned the state into a fan of voice writers, and anyone who speaks a negative word is immediately shot down, and educated. I’ve had two voice writers sit out with me in court recently and we’ve educated the attorneys and judges about voice writing and how it’s just as good as machine writing (with one big difference, which I’ll get into later). Now, Los Angeles Superior Court, the largest court in the United States (and probably the word), has voice writers. I don’t know the exact amount. Since California’s population of court reporters is about 2/3 of the country’s total reporters, I can envision the entire country being accepting of voice writing in the very near future!
There were three major things that impacted my opinion of voice writers. First, Tori Pittman told me that they had saved the jobs of machine officials in Georgia! They could not find enough machine stenographers to fill the positions and the plan was to eliminate all of their jobs and replace them with electronic recording devices. By accepting and then allowing voice writers, they were able to come in and fill the jobs that were open, and they worked harmoniously together. There’s still a mix of voice and machine in Georgia, and voice has not overtaken machine. Second, I traveled the country speaking and being a vendor at 7 state conventions for the past couple of years and I would see Jennifer Thomas with her Eclipse booth at so many of them. She had her mask and was demonstrating voice writing. I’ve had numerous conversations with her over the time, always learning something new, watching her demonstrations and listening to her conversations and picking her brain with my own questions. She is an amazing voice writer and trainer. I watched her do exactly what I do to make a verbatim record on the same CAT software and I could not hear a word through her mask – not a sound. And finally, the Navy has used voice writers exclusively for over 60 years. That needs no further elaboration.
But I will say that with the shorter amount of time that it takes to get reporters working using voice versus machine (one year vs. three, on average), it’s appealing. And a lot of voice students are also learning steno with the goal to use voice to start working and then continue with their steno machine skills until they pass the CSR again using a steno machine. I also know several stenographers who went back to school to learn voice and now how a CSR for voice and machine. I think it’s a good backup in case your hands or back give out on you. You’d be able to continue working without the retraining time.
Your last point, you’re absolutely right! People need to see it! I was lucky enough to travel out of my small world to see it firsthand. I’m trying to help overcome the bias with educating others in everyday conversations, bringing in voice writers to sit out with me and then letting the other official and freelance reporters know I’ve got a voice writer with me that day so drop in – and they have! I think voice writing students are doing a lot on social media right now to help showcase the method. I think machine stenographers could do more to help talk about welcoming you into our profession and dispel the fears that you will take over and we’ll lose a job. That’s still their concern. I think that because you have California reporters almost all accepting of voice writing now, you will start to see some big changes in the perception of voice writers all over the country soon. The bias will be eliminated soon. Just keep being part of bolstering the image of voice writers and keeping professional standards high.
***And full disclosure, these women – Jennifer Thompson, Tori Pittman, and Stephanie Whitehead – are pure professional acquaintances who I met and spoke to in my professional capacity. They are not friends. I’ve never had lunch with them. I don’t have their cell phone numbers. And I have never shared a phone call with them. I have the utmost respect for all 3 of these remarkable women, powerhouses in our Steno profession. Outside of our profession-focused conversations at conventions or a passing hello, I have no contact with them.
In the realm of court reporting, the dichotomy between Steno Meritocracy and Social Connections presents a perennial debate. On one hand, the profession prides itself on a meritocratic ethos, where success is ostensibly determined by skill, dedication, and proficiency in stenography. However, the importance of social connections cannot be understated. Networking and fostering relationships within the community can open doors to opportunities, mentorship, and support.
Loneliness poses a significant challenge within the court reporting sector, extending beyond our professional realm to a broader societal concern affecting middle-aged women across the nation. Dr. Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General, highlighted the alarming prevalence of America’s “loneliness epidemic” in 2023, underscoring its correlation with heightened risks of health ailments like cardiovascular disease and depression. Given the solitary nature of the court reporting profession, its susceptibility to this issue is particularly pronounced.
Court reporters, whether operating officially or as freelancers, along with CART providers and Captioners, all possess a common characteristic: exclusivity. As stenographers are entrusted with creating the official record, only one can fulfill this role. Consequently, they often find themselves working solo, traveling to job sites. In the legal sphere, court reporters compile transcripts, frequently dedicating evenings and weekends to this task when not physically present on a job. Such a schedule often entails extensive solitary hours spent preparing transcripts well into the late night and early morning.
Loneliness is a painful emotion that arises when a person perceives that he or she is alone, or is being shunned by and isolated from other people. It can stem from working in a virtual or geographically dispersed team, or from being in a team of one. Individuals experiencing loneliness often exhibit decreased commitment, creativity, collaboration, and attentiveness, leading to a decline in both the quality and quantity of their work. Additionally, loneliness has been recognized as a contributing factor to workplace burnout.
Stenographers endure feelings of loneliness to a significantly greater extent compared to the average middle-aged American. With the average age of court reporters in the U.S. hovering around 51 or 55, it’s apparent that a substantial portion of the approximately 27,000 stenographers are likely grappling with loneliness.
I once came across a claim suggesting that the suicide rate among court reporters surpassed that of dentists. Intrigued, I attempted to verify this assertion but couldn’t find any evidence to support it. However, from time to time, I encounter reports of court reporter suicides. With the proliferation of Facebook groups among court reporters, such narratives are not uncommon to stumble upon.
Why are stenographers lonelier than average Americans in Middle Age?
Cultural norms, such as an emphasis on individualism, heightened social media usage, dwindling social ties, and escalating political polarization, can exacerbate the divide among stenographers, fostering feelings of isolation. Middle-aged adults often grapple with weakened family bonds and lack the social safety nets enjoyed by the average “employed” populace, such as family leave, unemployment protection, and childcare support.
The court reporting profession places a significant amount of emphasis on individual achievement, prioritizing economic market competition, choice, and the notion of a meritocracy that rewards talent, ability, and excellence. Esteeming high achievers on a pedestal, this culture witnessed a surge in reporters obtaining credentials like RPR, RMR, RDR, CRR, during and after the pandemic. However, this emphasis on individual achievement may lead to a disconnect from others, framing the world as an individualistic competition and sidelining the importance of fostering healthy social connections.
In the realm of court reporting, an unnecessary air of competitiveness can prevail despite abundant work opportunities due to high demand. Instances of court reporters poaching clients from agencies can breed suspicion and excessive client protection measures. Such actions are deemed unethical, as they undermine the hard-earned relationships of agencies. While some may disregard ethical considerations, it’s worth noting that karma has its way of catching up with such behavior.
To address professional isolation and foster a nurturing work environment, it’s crucial to emphasize communication and camaraderie within our court reporter community. This entails organizing frequent gatherings, fostering informal social gatherings, and facilitating opportunities for open dialogue. By encouraging reporters to openly express their experiences and emotions, be it related to work or personal matters, we can cultivate stronger bonds and cultivate an environment of inclusivity and support. Here are a few more suggestions to consider.
Embrace Volunteering: By actively participating in volunteer initiatives with both your state and national associations, you not only contribute to meaningful causes but also cultivate a profound sense of purpose and fulfillment. Moreover, volunteering offers invaluable opportunities for forging deep connections and fostering a sense of community with like-minded individuals.
Be a Mentor: Offer your availability for students seeking to accumulate apprentice hours or commit to long-term mentoring relationships. Reach out to local court reporting schools, state court reporting associations, the NCRA, or Project Steno to connect with students. Additionally, students can utilize NCRA’s ProLink platform to locate reporters in their vicinity. Another resource is CoverCrow, which now offers a free mentor/mentee student matching feature. Court reporters can create a profile on this platform, allowing students nationwide to find and contact mentors in their area.
Speak at Court Reporting Colleges: Contact court reporting colleges and offer to speak to the students. You can do this remotely now. One time, I was driving home from an all-day assignment, and I pulled off the freeway into a parking lot where I was able to connect via Zoom remotely using my iPhone to give a scheduled presentation to students for an hour. It doesn’t require much preparation; just speak about what you do for a living.
Engage in Career Days: Maintain active involvement in promoting the court reporting profession by participating in career day events across various educational institutions, including colleges, high schools, and elementary schools. These occasions offer chances to expand your network and foster meaningful social connections. Utilize the resources provided by the NCRA, such as handouts and demonstrative materials, to enhance your presentation and engage students effectively.
Speak at Bar Associations & Law Schools: Law schools no longer offer courses on making a record as electives, leaving it to court reporters to fill this educational gap for both future and practicing attorneys. You can seek approval for Mandatory Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) credits and conduct presentations at local bar associations. Additionally, engaging in networking activities at law schools and bar associations can also be beneficial in spreading awareness and knowledge on this important aspect of legal proceedings.
Participate in State & National Association Conventions: Few experiences match the energy and excitement of joining your state or national convention and engaging with fellow court reporters. There’s no one who gets a court reporter like another court reporter. The camaraderie among peers is unparalleled, offering invaluable networking opportunities and fostering lasting friendships that can uplift your spirits for weeks on end.
Help Your Fellow Court Reporters: Many court reporters are deeply engrossed in their own pursuits, often overlooking the struggles of their peers. It’s essential to pause amidst the rush, perhaps during your commute to a job site, and make at least one phone call daily to connect with another reporter and offer support. Consider scheduling a lunch meeting or extending a friendly greeting when you encounter a fellow stenographer with a recognizable roller bag. Don’t hesitate to initiate these interactions; a simple hello can go a long way in fostering camaraderie.
The most effective strategy is to invest time in getting to know and deeply understand your fellow court reporters. By doing so, you’ll be better equipped to identify when someone is feeling disconnected or excluded. Keep an eye out for any shifts in their behavior or body language. If you notice them appearing downcast, withdrawing from interactions, or experiencing a sudden decline in production, it’s evident that there’s an issue that needs attention.
Certainly, finding time for social connections can be challenging for court reporters, especially when they’re grappling with transcript backlogs and the demands of daily life. This may involve juggling additional jobs or dedicating free time to caring for children or elderly family members, given the soaring costs of caregiving. Social safety nets can help provide some financial support and stability, which, in turn, might also make it easier for people to take the time to build and nurture long-term relationships.
Balancing these two dynamics, Steno Meritocracy and Social Connections, is essential for court reporters seeking advancement in their careers. While meritocracy underscores the significance of individual achievement, cultivating social connections can offer invaluable support and growth opportunities. Ultimately, finding the right equilibrium between steno prowess and social acumen is key to thriving in the competitive landscape of court reporting.
In the age of technological advancement, traditional professions have undergone significant transformations, and the field of stenography is no exception. However, alongside legitimate advancements, a concerning trend has emerged – the infiltration of imposters masquerading as court reporters. These individuals, armed with fake steno machines and minimal skills, undermine the integrity of the profession, posing a threat to the accuracy and reliability of court transcripts.
Stenography, the art of capturing spoken words in real-time using shorthand symbols, has long been an essential component of legal proceedings. Court reporters, trained professionals adept at stenographic techniques, play a crucial role in ensuring the verbatim record of courtroom proceedings. Their transcripts serve as vital documentation for appeals, legal research, and historical records.
With the rise of digital technology, the field of stenography has undergone significant transformation. Traditional stenograph equipment has evolved and advanced remarkably, including highly advanced Computer-Aided Transcription (CAT) software and state-of-the-art Steno Machine hardware. However, amidst these advancements, there are still concerning efforts to replace traditional stenographers using fraudulent and deceptive marketing tactics, and instead, push basic electronic recording devices as “sophisticated digital solutions,” reminiscent of an era over a century ago when steno machines were non-existent. Despite claims of improving efficiency and accessibility, these purported advancements actually quadruple the time required to create a record. Moreover, they create opportunities for unscrupulous individuals to exploit the system for high profits and personal gain.
Imposters in the stenography industry often operate under the guise of court reporters, sometimes going so far as to even leverage fake machines and business cards, and have an absence of any proficiency in shorthand. They are even boldly identifying themselves as “court reporters,” even in states with title protection laws against identifying as one without a license. These individuals capitalize on the demand for court reporting services while lacking the necessary skills and qualifications. Instead of accurately transcribing proceedings, they resort to pressing buttons on audio recording devices or using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) software that is incapable of capturing the nuances and intricacies of speech.
The ramifications of this phenomenon are extensive. Transcripts produced by imposters are marred by numerous errors, omissions, and inaccuracies, which significantly compromise the integrity of legal proceedings. Such inaccuracies have the potential to disrupt the course of justice, resulting in misunderstandings, lost appeals, and even miscarriages of justice. Furthermore, they cast doubt on the credibility of the entire stenography profession, tarnishing the reputation of authentic court reporters. Most notably, the consequences can extend to resulting in subsequent legal malpractice lawsuits against attorneys who inadvertently engage a “digital court reporter,” only to find that their depo transcripts will not be admitted by judges due to lack of professional certification.
The rise of imposters highlights systemic vulnerabilities within the stenography industry. Insufficient regulation and oversight create loopholes that imposters exploit for personal gain. Without stringent licensing requirements and standardized training programs, it becomes challenging to distinguish between authentic court reporters and fraudulent imposters. Additionally, budget constraints in the legal sector may tempt courts to opt for cheaper, unverified non-stenography services, inadvertently perpetuating the problem.
Addressing the issue of court reporter imposters in the legal industry demands a multifaceted approach. First and foremost, there is a need for enhanced regulation and enforcement measures to weed out fraudulent practitioners. Implementing rigorous certification processes, conducting regular audits, and imposing severe penalties for violations can deter imposters and safeguard the integrity of court reporting.
Furthermore, education and awareness initiatives are crucial for empowering stakeholders to identify and report suspicious behavior. Legal professionals, judges, and court administrators must be vigilant in vetting stenography services, verifying credentials, and scrutinizing the quality of transcripts, looking for the “CSR” license number on the reporter’s certificate, and even verifying the license number through the state Court Reporters Board website. By fostering a culture of accountability and transparency, the stenography community can collectively combat the proliferation of imposters.
In conclusion, the infiltration of imposters in the stenography industry poses a significant threat to the accuracy and reliability of court transcripts. These individuals, equipped with fake machines and an absence of skills, jeopardize the integrity of legal proceedings and undermine the credibility of legitimate court reporters. Addressing this issue requires concerted efforts from regulatory bodies, legal professionals, and technology experts to uphold the standards of the profession and preserve the integrity of the justice system.
In the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, advancements are continually pushing the boundaries of what was once thought possible. One such groundbreaking development is the integration of stenographer transcripts into the training data of robots. Traditionally associated with courtrooms and legal proceedings, stenographers are now playing a pivotal role in teaching robots how to understand and process human language more accurately than ever before.
Stenographers, highly skilled professionals trained in the art of shorthand writing, have long been relied upon to transcribe spoken language with unparalleled speed and accuracy. Their expertise in capturing spoken dialogue verbatim is now being leveraged to enhance the capabilities of AI systems, particularly in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. By feeding stenographer transcripts into machine learning algorithms, robots are gaining access to a vast repository of human language data, allowing them to refine their comprehension and communication skills.
One of the key challenges in training AI models is the availability of high-quality, diverse datasets. Stenographer transcripts offer a unique solution to this problem. Unlike curated datasets, which may be limited in scope or subject matter, stenographer transcripts capture the richness and complexity of real-world conversations across various domains. From legal proceedings and corporate meetings to medical consultations and academic lectures, these transcripts encompass a wide range of linguistic nuances and contextual cues that are invaluable for AI learning.
Moreover, stenographer transcripts provide a level of granularity that is often missing from conventional text corpora. By preserving the cadence, intonation, and emotion inherent in spoken language, these transcripts offer a more nuanced understanding of human communication. This nuanced understanding is crucial for robots, particularly in tasks that require empathy, sentiment analysis, or interpreting subtle cues in conversation.
The integration of stenographer transcripts into AI training pipelines is not without its challenges. One significant hurdle is the sheer volume of data involved. Stenographers can transcribe hundreds of words per minute, resulting in massive datasets that require careful processing and annotation. Additionally, ensuring the accuracy and reliability of stenographer transcripts is essential, as errors or inconsistencies can adversely affect the performance of AI models.
To address these challenges, researchers are developing novel techniques for preprocessing and cleaning stenographer transcripts, such as automated error detection and correction algorithms. Furthermore, advancements in natural language understanding and speech recognition technologies are enabling robots to parse and analyze large volumes of text more efficiently, accelerating the training process.
The implications of robots learning from stenographer transcripts are far-reaching. In legal settings, AI-powered assistants equipped with stenographer-trained models can aid lawyers in reviewing case documents, conducting legal research, and preparing for trials. In healthcare, virtual assistants trained on medical stenographer transcripts can assist physicians in documenting patient encounters, retrieving relevant medical information, and providing personalized health recommendations.
Beyond specific applications, the broader impact of this technology lies in its potential to democratize access to AI. By leveraging existing resources—such as stenographer transcripts—organizations and researchers can democratize AI development, making advanced NLP capabilities more accessible to a wider range of applications and industries.
However, as with any technological advancement, ethical considerations must be taken into account. Privacy concerns surrounding the use of sensitive or confidential information contained within stenographer transcripts must be addressed through robust data protection measures and regulatory frameworks.
In conclusion, the integration of stenographer transcripts into AI training represents a significant milestone in the evolution of natural language processing and machine learning. By tapping into the wealth of linguistic data captured by stenographers, robots are poised to achieve unprecedented levels of language understanding and communication prowess. As this technology continues to mature, its impact on society is likely to be profound, ushering in a new era of human-machine collaboration and innovation.
In the age of rapid technological advancement, concerns about automation and artificial intelligence (AI) displacing human workers have become increasingly prevalent. However, amidst these discussions, there remains a profession that seems resistant to the threat of automation: stenographers, otherwise known as court reporters. Despite the advancements in speech recognition technology and AI, there are several reasons why automated systems are unlikely to fully replace stenographers in the legal sector.
First and foremost, stenographers, serving as officers of the court, hold the crucial role of the Responsible Charge. They offer an eyewitness account of proceedings and bear the responsibility for crafting the transcript from inception to completion. This involves administering the oath at the outset and concluding by affixing their wet ink signature to the certificate. In their capacity as the Responsible Charge, court reporters frequently enlist the assistance of scopists and proofreaders to aid in transcript production. They oversee the work of these subcontractors and subsequently ensure the accuracy of the transcript by meticulously reviewing and compiling it. With this responsibility, court reporters assume ultimate liability for any potential errors, necessitating errors and omissions insurance coverage to safeguard against potential litigation.
Secondly, the complexity of legal proceedings demands a level of accuracy and contextual understanding that current AI and ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) technologies struggle to achieve. Legal terminology, nuanced language, accents, and dialects present significant challenges for automated transcription systems. Stenographers, trained professionals skilled in shorthand writing and legal terminology, possess the ability to accurately capture proceedings in real-time, ensuring an exact record of court proceedings.
Moreover, stenographers offer more than just transcription; they provide a human touch to the legal process. They can interpret non-verbal cues, such as tone, emphasis, and emotional nuances, which are crucial for understanding the context of statements made during trials or depositions. This human element is invaluable in legal settings, where the nuances of language and behavior can have profound implications for the outcome of a case.
Additionally, stenographers are adaptable and versatile professionals who can quickly adjust to various courtroom environments and challenges. They can navigate interruptions, overlapping speech, and technical difficulties with ease, ensuring uninterrupted transcription of proceedings. In contrast, ASR systems often struggle with background noise, multiple speakers, and technical glitches, leading to inaccuracies and incomplete transcripts.
Furthermore, stenographers offer a level of confidentiality and security that automated systems may struggle to match. Confidentiality is paramount in legal proceedings, where sensitive information is often discussed. Stenographers are bound by strict codes of ethics and confidentiality agreements, ensuring that the information they transcribe remains secure and protected. In contrast, the use of AI and ASR systems raises concerns about data privacy and security, as these systems may store and analyze sensitive information without adequate safeguards in place.
Another critical factor is the human element of trust. Judges, attorneys, and clients often prefer the presence of a human stenographer, whom they can trust to accurately capture and document proceedings. Human stenographers provide reassurance and confidence in the accuracy and reliability of the transcript, which is essential for the integrity of the legal process.
Furthermore, the cost-effectiveness of automated systems is often overestimated. While AI and ASR technologies may seem initially cheaper than hiring a human stenographer, the hidden costs associated with inaccuracies, technical issues, and the need for human oversight can quickly add up. In contrast, the expertise and reliability of human stenographers justify their cost in ensuring accurate and reliable transcription.
In conclusion, while robots, AI, and ASR technologies have made significant advancements in various fields, they are unlikely to fully replace stenographers or court reporters in the legal sector. The complexity of legal proceedings, the need for accuracy and context, the human element, confidentiality concerns, and the importance of trust all contribute to the continued relevance of human stenographers in the legal profession. As technology evolves, stenographers may incorporate automation tools to enhance their efficiency, but the indispensable role of human judgment and expertise in legal transcription ensures their continued relevance in the face of technological advancement.
In thinking about optimism, we encounter a compelling crossroad: the intersection of optimism and realism in court reporting. It’s here, at this juncture, that we often find ourselves wrestling with the question: Can we be both optimistic and realistic about our future, or are these perspectives at odds with one another?
Some would suggest that optimism and realism are mutually exclusive — that to be optimistic, one must ignore the harsh truths of reality, or conversely, to be realistic means dampening our hopes for the future. Yet, this dichotomy misses the richness of combining the two.
There is an imminent threat of skills obsolescence in the court reporting industry today. The effort to find alternative solutions started in the wake of the predicted shortage of court reporters by the Ducker Worldwide study in 2013-14, and led to an onslought of digital recorders and ASR technologies that are hell bent on replacing skilled workers.
What nobody could have predicted, however, was a worldwide pandemic that put millions of workers out of a job. That led them to the next step: Upskilling. 70% of American workers believe that it is critical to be certified in a technology or trade skill, while one in three workers (30%) believe it is important to get a two-year or four-year degree. This is a very different mantra than the one we’ve heard for generations – go to college and get a bachelor’s degree to be successful. We are getting the word out that there are other lucrative paths to success. As a result, our court reporting schools are overflowing with students and our number of new RPR’s and CSR’s across the country is soaring.
What is realistic optimism?
What if we could harness the power of both? Realistic optimism is the ability to balance out negative and positive things in situations, circumstances and people. It is the courage to explore opportunities, where others are blocked by risk and failure, with the belief that the future will be better than the past.
Realistic optimism isn’t about wishful thinking or blind hope. It’s about grounding our optimism in the realities of our current situation while still aiming for positive outcomes. It’s acknowledging the challenges we face and choosing to believe in our capacity to overcome them.
This balanced perspective empowers us to prepare for various outcomes, not just the ones we wish for. It encourages us to take proactive steps, grounded in reality, toward our optimistic visions of a strong future. We can embrace that positive change is possible and we can be a part of that by sharing stories of our successes, for example, the increasing number of students enrolled in a court reporting programs across the country.
Learned Optimism
Is it possible to learn optimism? Optimistic realism is not a predisposition that we are born with, but rather a competence that not only can be — but should be — developed. Research has shown that the practical use of this skill results in a change of our perception of reality and the quality of our thoughts, both of which eventually affect our physical health. It turns out that:
• Optimists are less likely to develop infectious diseases than pessimists
• Optimists maintain a healthier lifestyle than pessimists
• There is evidence that optimists live longer than pessimists
Studies have shown that positive emotions lead to higher motivation and perseverance, satisfactory quality of interpersonal relations and more frequent functioning at the optimal level, which in turn translates into better personal and professional results. On the other hand, pessimism can generate anxiety, which leads to lower engagement, distracted attention and poorer results.
As leaders, thinkers, and dreamers, our challenge is to cultivate this nuanced approach. How do we maintain our optimism without losing sight of the ground beneath our feet? How can we leverage realism to bolster, not hinder, our optimistic endeavors?
I invite you to reflect on these questions as we navigate the complexities of leadership and personal growth in our court reporting profession. How have you balanced optimism and realism in your own experiences? Share your insights and let’s learn from each other’s journeys.
Engaging with these concepts is more than an intellectual exercise; it’s a practical guide to living and leading effectively. I encourage you to join the conversation and contribute your perspective at your local court reporting association meetings and on the various court reporter Facebook groups.
Together, let’s redefine what it means to be both optimistic and realistic, embracing the strength found in the harmony of these viewpoints.
Skills obsolescence is always a threat in every industry, but usually it’s where continual advances in technology are revolutionizing the industry. In the court reporting industry, where “digital recorders” are being called “revolutionary,” it’s actually the opposite. There is no advanced technology being used by “digital recorders” and the ASR software is not as advanced as the technology that real stenographers use. In fact, digital recording and transcribing methods would take them back about 100 years in time. It is nothing more than a bold and fraudulent marketing attempt by corporate profiteers. For this reason, I am optimistic that the skilled tradespeople, the gold standard stenographers will prevail in this attempt at market disruption and skills obsolescence.
We do not know what the future holds.
There is no illusion of predictability in our steno world. We do not know what our world will look like in the coming months or years. We just do not know it. But one needs to have a plan and act despite these objective limitations. When we face the dilemma of what will become the basis for our decisions and actions — a pessimistic or optimistic vision of the future — it is worth remembering that we do not have to function in this dichotomy. There is still realistic optimism, which takes into account all the circumstances of the crisis and gives us hope for the future.
Here’s to a week filled with thoughtful reflections and balanced perspectives. Stay positive. We’re winning!
The legal services industry, like many others, is experiencing a seismic shift in response to the digital age. Traditional practices are being disrupted, and nowhere is this transformation more apparent than in the field of court reporting. Presently, court reporters, skilled individuals trained to capture the spoken word and transcribe legal proceedings, are indispensable fixtures in courtrooms and legal proceedings. However, today, a new contender has emerged on the scene: digital audio recording and transcription services.
This article delves into the phenomenon of corporate market cannibalization within the court reporting industry, a term that refers to established entities consuming their own traditional market by adopting and promoting innovative, often digital, solutions that render their own services redundant. As we journey through this attempted digital transformation, we will discuss the disadvantages of this shift, including the false-marketing of cost savings and enhanced accessibility, and the disastrous mismanagement of transcriptionists in maintaining quality and accuracy in the court reporting industry.
While this shift presents various challenges and potential pitfalls, it is essential to critically examine its implications for the industry. We’ll explore the evolution of court reporting, the use of digital technology, and the rapid and growing trend of replacing court reporters with digital audio recording, videographers, and transcriptionists.
The article will also discuss the disastrous outcome of this shift on the American Judicial system, as well as the possible extinction of human stenographers and the impact that would have on the protection of the record. This transition is fraught with legal and ethical challenges, raising questions about privacy, data security, and potential errors in transcripts. To guide our exploration, we’ll provide real-world case studies and a comprehensive FAQ section to address common queries about the future of court reporting in the digital age.
The winds of change are blowing through the court reporting industry, and it’s crucial to understand the dynamics of this revolution, the implications for stakeholders, and the path forward in this shifting landscape.
There is nothing new about corporate cannibalization. It’s been occurring for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, in many industries. Especially prevalent in the technology world is Product cannibalism, where a company launches a new product into the market when it already has an existing product, so the new product ends up competing with their existing product. We see this a lot with printers. Companies must continually introduce new products to keep from losing future business to competitors. It’s a necessary evil.
There are two types of transitions, otherwise known as cannibalism. A constructive transition, or constructive cannibalism, and destructive cannibalism. Constructive cannibalism results in greater overall top-line revenue and bottom-line profit, whereas, destructive transitions results in the older-generation sales declining faster than the new-generation growth.
Our court reporting agencies are concerned that if they’re slow to adopt and innovate, their competitors will do it instead, so we are seeing a mass adoption of digital recorders in our industry. Politics in our industry is taking sides with the legacy service providers putting up a fight and boycotting any agency who adopts digital recording. The courts are taking the side of the legacy reporters and are rejecting transcripts that are not certified by a legacy, professional shorthand reporter.
The Evolution of Court Reporting Court reporting has a rich history that dates back centuries. Traditionally, it involved the presence of a skilled human court reporter who meticulously recorded every spoken word and action during legal proceedings. These professionals were trained to be accurate, impartial, and efficient in their work.
In the early days, court reporters relied on shorthand, a method of writing quickly in a specialized script, to capture spoken words. This process required immense skill and concentration. The transcribed records were vital for legal proceedings, serving as the official documentation of cases and trials.
As time went on, technology began to play a more prominent role in court reporting. The introduction of stenography machines in the late 19th century revolutionized the field. Stenographers used these machines to record proceedings phonetically, allowing for faster transcription. This technological leap significantly increased the efficiency and accuracy of court reporting.
Fast forward to the late 20th century, and the court reporting profession saw another transformation with the advent of computer-aided transcription (CAT) software. This software allowed court reporters to type directly into a stenotype machine, which translated their keystrokes into readable text in real-time. This innovation improved the speed at which transcripts could be produced and made it easier to edit and format the text.
In early 2000, the CAT software companies added a feature allowing court reporters to audio record proceedings where they could scope (edit) their transcripts that were synced to the audio recording using hot keys or hyper keys to rapidly navigate through the transcript and listen to audio at any given point, enabling them to instantly fix errors and make transcripts 100% accurate. Then the hardware manufacturers added a new feature to the stenographic machines, allowing them to record and playback right from the stenographic machine. So court reporters could unplug their machines from their laptop and go into chambers, never losing a recording of the proceedings. The steno machines make its own recording of the proceedings, so now there’s two independent audio recordings: one on the laptop and one on the machine writer. So court reporters could have five backups of every proceeding, and six if you add the instantaneous backup of all files to the cloud. All of this improved the security and protection of the record, ensuring nothing would be lost in case of a catastrophic machine failure, and it improved the accuracy from the 96.5% passing test rate without audio aides, to be able to achieve 100% accuracy on every transcript.
In 2003, Stenograph released the first paperless machine, an Elan Mira, then in 2009, a Diamante, which featured a color flat-panel display, two SD cards, two USB ports, microphone and headset jacks for AudioSync, and optional Bluetooth or WiFi realtime translation. How is that for high tech. Unfortunately, Hollywood is still obsessed with our paper writers. And some digital recorder companies show pictures of typewriters in their ads, instead of steno machines, going back in time even further. The 2003 Elan Mira is still more advanced and reflective of the “digital era” than the electronic recording hoax being shoved down the throats of the legal industry in 2024. The perpetrators of this new “digital recording” takeover would take us back in time to the 1800’s, but they think it would make them rich, so who cares what laws they’re breaking.
While these advancements enhanced the efficiency of court reporting, they were kept quiet by the professionals who used these tools, because the audio was deemed a work product, not to be delivered into the hands of the public. The printed transcript with the reporters’ certificate was the end product and what was admissible in court, not the audio recording. If a reporter were to hand over a recording, it would be necessary to listen to the entire audio and remove any off-the-record conversations that may have occurred. Many reporters never listen to the entire audio file; they just used it to spot check areas for names or troublesome areas for punctuation, if they even listen to it at all. Most use the audio as a backup only and never need to use the backup file. Court reporters aren’t trained to use audio editing software that would be used to edit the audio to remove off-the-record discussions. This could add hours and hours to an already long day of sitting in court or at depos and then creating transcripts at night or on weekends. It would also require additional hours of training on audio editing software. And it would increase the cost, which the market does not wish to bear.
Court reporters also personally invest in high-end equipment as their cost of doing business. They have high-quality, high-gain, noise canceling, multi-directional recording microphones and high-end noise-canceling headphones equipment where they could hear a pin drop.
This concept that we’re entering some kind of new digital age with an emergence of digital audio recording technology is laughable. It’s been around and utilized in the court reporting profession for several decades by highly skilled and certified professionals. What is new is that courts have been installing electronic recording equipment in lower courts, such as traffic, for the last 20 years so that they could save the cost of having court reporters in those departments. The courts spend millions on the recording equipment that has to be renewed every several years, costing millions more. Courts would save millions by employing court reporters in all departments to do the recording and archiving of all court recordings that they do anyway.
Maybe the fact that court reporters kept this capability a highly-guarded trade secret was a disservice to the courts who made decisions to record proceedings themselves and investing in all the equipment, and then training personnel to do the recordings, and IT to build the software to archive it all, and buying servers to archive it. Then they send the audio out to third parties to have it transcribed by uncertified, inexperienced, low-wage individuals, often two or more individuals on the same transcript, who are located outside the U.S. It could have saved the court billions over the decades that they’ve been doing it themselves, collectively, nationwide, to just let the official reporters foot the bill as they have been doing all along, unnoticed and unappreciated by the court administrators.
Another new development is the push by big box agencies in our industry to position themselves as the responsible charge for the record, “training anyone off the street,” as Anir Dutta, CEO of Stenograph, described it, to record their legal proceedings, and hiring cheap transcriptionists to produce the transcript, and cutting out the largest cost of services, the court reporters themselves. They’re using Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) software to produce the transcript from audio recordings, and then hiring scopists to clean it up using Microsoft Word software to edit the transcript. This move by the big boxes has opened Pandora’s box to vultures, outliers, and outsiders to come into our industry like the Wild West and Gold Rush phenomenon where everyone is wanting to get rich quick by recording legal proceedings themselves and charging what court reporters charge.
Our long-time trusted CAT software and machine hardware vendors are getting in on it too, creating ASR software for these new untrained, uncertified, persons off the street so they can simply set up the microphone and hit record or start a file and the software does all the transcribing for them, with a less-than-80% accuracy rate. Believing they can replace court reporters with their imperfect speech recognition technology, and then just hire scopists and proofreaders, like reporters do, to polish it and complete it, they’ve gone all in with years of R&D in the hopes of striking gold and being on the forefront of what they believe to be revolutionary technology.
What these ignorant money-grabbers fail to understand is that they are taking us backwards by about 60 years in time. ASR software is not ready for the big leagues of the legal industry. ASR has about a less-than-80% accuracy rate, not including punctuation. When court reporters hand a file to their scopists, the file is already 99.5% accurate including punctuation. The scopist spends about an hour for every 20-30 pages even with a 99.5% translation rate. For a scopist to do 20 pages in a Word document, without the hyper keys, on a transcript with an 80% translation rate, it would take quadruple the amount of time it takes a scopist that works with a skilled professional. They’re not making it more efficient; it’s the opposite. They’re taking a highly efficient system of creating a transcript and turning into a nightmare. Nobody in their right mind would take that work.
The big box agencies have been peddling their snake oil for years now, long enough to be awakened to their pyramid-scheme-like collapse that is coming. Big boxes are sending emails to the court reporters they tried to replace behind their backs, begging them to help transcribe their growing mountain of recorded proceedings, asking them to refer their scopists, inviting them to enticing presentations only to pull a bait-and-switch on them asking for their help with accomplishing their mission to convert everyone to their new high-profit swindle.
In the following sections, we’ll explore the impact of this digital revolution on court reporting and the consequences it has for the profession and the legal industry as a whole.
The Digital Disruptors in Legal Transcription
The spiel from the outliers peddling their digital solution will tell you something like this:
It is not profound and it is not a revolution. Like I said, court reporters have been using digital audio recording for decades using the most efficient method, a steno machine and CAT software, to make transcripts. What is revolutionary is that the agencies are wanting to oust court reporters, take the 50-70% of the profit for themselves, replace them with unskilled workers they are recruiting “off the street,” and taking over our responsibility as the Responsible Charge who oversee the chain of custody from beginning to end. That is the revolution that is happening. It is profoundly greedy and bold! It is also against the law in 28 states that require certification. It is all about money and profits, and cares nothing about the integrity of the record.
Their marketing brochures and websites also describe it like this:
“Specialized audio recording equipment” is nothing better than the recording equipment that court reporters have been using and investing in for decades. Professional Court Reporters spend $800 on the Martel Electronics, high-gain microphones that are wireless and used for sidebar conferences, the $300 USB high-gain microphone that reduces ambient noise and you can hear a pin drop, and the $400 noise-canceling headphones. The one thing that reporters don’t do, and don’t do it for a reason, is mic up everybody in the room and create an 8-track recording where you can turn up one speaker’s recording and lower another’s so that a transcriber could get all the speakers who are talking at once. It may seem like a dream to an anal-retentive, obsessive compulsive transcriber, but that’s not how to make an accurate transcript. Proceedings should be heard by everyone in the room, and the reporter is there to make a record of what happened in the room and control the conversations so that everything is taking place one at a time where everyone can be heard. A judge can’t be expected to make a decision on something if they weren’t able to hear what is being said because an eruption of cross-talk, yet to a court of appeal reading it later, it would look like the judge were able to hear and understand all speakers clearly if the speakers were all mic’d up and had their own separate tracks that could be transcribed clearly. Court reporters, as the responsible charge, are the witnesses to what happened live in that room, and the record will be as close to what the judge heard at the time, which is why court reporter sits the closest to the judge and the witness. We should not be creating a record of two proceedings that are taking place, one that can be heard by everyone, and one that can be heard on playback with volume lowering and raising controls or whispers that no one in the room could hear.
A professional court reporter in the room is able to stop the cross-talk and ask for repeats and request that they speak one at a time to make a good record. In a courtroom, if there is cross-talk happening, the judge and jury aren’t hearing everything that all the speakers are hearing. Most likely, they are hearing the loudest speaker. Official reporters usually focus on and writes what the judge says when there are multiple speakers and are unsuccessful in attempts to interrupt. The Court Reporters Board has punished reporters who fill in transcripts from the audio recording that they did not take down stenographically on their machine.
If a judge and jury couldn’t hear it, then why would someone create a transcript that would appear to the appellate court as though it was a conversation that everyone could hear, instead of all mayhem breaking out. It’s the judge and attorney’s obligation to make the record, but they often neglect to say something that would make it clear in the record that a verbal fight just broke out and voices were raised and there were multiple speakers. On appeal, it would look like a conversation where everybody was heard with equal opportunity to be heard, and heard by all in the courtroom. The same goes for whispers, if the court reporter, judge, and jury didn’t hear an under-the breath snide remark, then it shouldn’t go in the record. Another reporter was punished by the CRB for adding in an “F” bomb from the videographers audio that the reporter didn’t hear at the time, but was told to put it in the transcript by one of the attorneys that would benefit from having it in the transcript.
These digital outliers entering the legal services market have no idea how to make a record in legal proceedings. Their ignorance shows abundantly in their assertion that their simply recording proceedings is superior. That’s just not how it’s done!
Calling Digital Recording the “Digital Age” is laughable. Again, professional court reporters were one of the first to use computers in the early 80’s. Court reporters have been doing remote proceedings for over two decades and taught the entire nation of attorneys how to do remote depos using Zoom and other remote platforms. And court reporters have been using digital audio recording equipment for decades. It is not a “significant enhancement.” It’s actually a step backwards by about 40 years.
The “advanced software” and “algorithms” they’re talking about is Speech-to-Text recognition software. And it does not transcribe audio recordings efficiently. Have you ever used Siri or Alexa? Then you’ll know how inefficient it is. How many times have I yelled at Alexa to turn the air conditioning on, only to end up having to walk over and do it manually. Yeah, it’s like that. It’s inaccurate. An 80% translation rate in court reporting is abysmal. It’s like sending a student at 160 words per minute into a deposition where everyone is talking at 300 words per minute. Their translation rate will be probably better than 80% that ASR can accomplish. It actually SLOWS down the transcription process.
When reporters are requested to produce a transcript that has been videotaped, they usually charge more. Why? Because now they have to listen to the entire audio when they are scoping and editing their transcript to be sure they have every “okay,” “and,” “all right,” “uh-huh,” perfectly. It takes LONGER when you have to compare what’s on their steno-created transcript to what they hear in their audio. And the ASR-generated transcript will take four to 8 times longer. It is less efficient. You will be able to produce half the amount of transcripts that a stenographer could do. If an agency is just sending digital recorders to record things, and everybody orders it and wants it expedited, guess what? You’re probably going to be waiting a long time to get your transcript with the backlog and the inefficiency.
This “cost-effective” spiel is another lie that digital outliers are propagating. One would think that replacing a highly-skilled reporter with one they can “pull off the street” making minimum wage would cut costs, but it doesn’t. Agencies are sending digital recorders and charging the attorneys the same fees that they would have charged had they sent a court reporter. And because it takes longer to produce a transcript using slower and inferior methods, it takes more people to create it, and even at minimum wage, it’s going to cost more. And because agencies are commoditizing it and offering lower and lower rates, they can’t even use Americans to do the work. They have to send the transcribing work out of the country to the Philippines or Africa to get rates cheap enough. But the truth is, the agencies are motivated to keep more of the profits for themselves by cutting out the largest cost in the chain, the stenographer. A stenographers’ cut consists of anywhere from 50% to 70% of the job. The large agencies are backed by private equity companies and investors who have advised them to cut the largest cost in order to reap more profits for the shareholders. Agencies are not passing the savings on to the attorneys; they’re keeping the invoices exactly the same and pocketing the profits.
Professional court reporters and their agencies are already digitally storing their transcripts and audio recordings that are easily uploaded, stored, shared, and retrieved electronically by courts and attorneys. Nothing new or revolutionary here. There’s no issue with accessibility in the existing model. For the past two decades, court reporters have been technologically savvy enough to do all of this. A huge advantage with court reporters doing this is that a decentralized model provides for the highest security and protection of the record. A reporter has up to 7 back-up methods for the transcript, and then they send it to the agency, which has their own repository, and uploads their steno notes directly with the court, where they have their archive for all the transcripts. When you go with one of these digital companies, you’ve got ONE server storing all the transcripts. And the revolving door of the digital recorders they hire would make it impossible to find them if the digital company lost the file.
Professional court reporters already do this and have been doing it for decades. Next.
To be clear, the demand for stenographers is stronger than ever, and according the the US Bureau of Labor Statistics will grow by 3% by 2032. There are a lot of agencies who are offering digital solutions, out of a pure profit motive, but most local court reporting agencies are sticking with a strictly stenographic service model. There are a ton of outlier companies that have popped up with no background, knowledge, or experience in this industry and who don’t even know the lingo. It’s like the wild wild West or the Gold Rush where everyone is seeing green, wants to get in, make their millions, and then exit as fast as they can.
Professional Court Reporters find themselves victims of the corporate greed of their largest industry allies – their large agencies and vendors – manufacturers of their machines and CAT software. They are also in jeopardy of the judges and attorneys who are being marketed to by these irresponsible outliers and propositioned to buy their snake oil and replace us by recording equipment. It’s one of the biggest scams. It’s the biggest fraud to ever hit the legal community. It’s a bigger fraud than Elizabeth Holmes who defrauded investors of $700 million by claiming to have revolutionized blood testing. When the truth finally comes out, it will be noted as one of the Biggest Disappointments of the 21st Century!
In the following section, we will dispel myths and delve into the disadvantages of using digital audio recording and transcription services, shedding light on the reasons behind the growing unpopularity of these as viable solutions in the legal world.
The traditional method of court reporting has just as much long-term viability as it always has. In the 1980’s, court reporters entering school were told that they would be replaced by machines. Those reporters are now in their 44th year of reporting. In 1993, Los Angeles Superior Court tried to record proceedings, against the law, and the California Court Reporters Association sued the court and won. It was appealed, then cross appealed, and the court reporters were victorious in the end.
Digital solutions do not present a cost savings to attorneys. The court reporting agencies who are sending digital reporters are invoicing the attorneys the exact same fees as they would had they sent a traditional stenographer. What they may save in sending an untrained person to record the proceedings, they’re having to pay more on the back end with transcription services, scoping, proofreading, and the ASR software they’re using to create an inferior product. Courts are having to spend millions of dollars on audio equipment. The stenographers’ maintenance of their specialized equipment is built into their fees and is a cost of their doing business.
Court reporter rates have not increased since the 1980’s. In fact, in a lot of cases, their fees have dipped below what they were charging in the 1980’s. Court reporters haven’t had a rate increase in over 50 years. In 1970, the statutory page rate in California was $3.00/pg. In 2021, that statutory page rate was still $3.00/pg. If you plug that $3.00/pg figure into an inflation wage calculator, that $3.00/pg from 1970 should be $18.00/pg in 2024.
Traditional court reporters have enjoyed enhanced accessibility of their transcripts for decades. Court Reporters have been uploading their transcripts to the court system for two decades and they’ve been uploading them to agency archives for over three decades. They’re easily stored, shared, and retrieved electronically. This is not a differentiator.
The real-time transcription that is captured by Automatic Speech Recognition software is only about 80% accurate and is not ready for the legal industry. It’s almost completely unusable.
There is absolutely no improvement in searchability between a digitally created transcript and a traditional court-reporter-created transcript. Court reporters’ transcripts have been searchable for at least three decades.
The term “corporate cannibalism” refers to the phenomenon where established entities within an industry adopt and promote innovative, often digital, solutions that ultimately render their own traditional services redundant. This trend is particularly evident in the court reporting industry as it transitions from human court reporters to digital audio recording and transcription services.
The introduction of digital audio recording and transcription services is, in essence, an example of corporate cannibalism. Companies within the legal tech sector have realized the potential cost savings and efficiency gains associated with digital solutions and have actively promoted these alternatives. While it is a rational response to changing technological landscapes, this shift has significant consequences.
1. Job Displacement: Perhaps the most immediate and visible impact of this corporate cannibalism is job displacement. Human court reporters, who have been central to the legal process for generations, are finding their roles challenged. As digital imposters gain prominence, the demand for stenographers and court reporters decreases, leading to potential job losses and industry disruption. Veritext has allegedly given a national corporate edict to all its offices to ensure that 50% of its business is sending digital recorders. Court reporters all over the country are complaining on Facebook that their job was canceled and the agency sent a digital recorder instead, and that there is less work now than ever in their careers.
2. Implications for the Industry: The transition from traditional court reporting to digital solutions raises questions about the long-term implications for the industry. Will it be possible to maintain the same standards of accuracy and reliability with digital transcription? What impact will this shift have on the legal record’s integrity and trustworthiness? I can assure you that a decline in the work that traditional court reporters are getting because they are being replaced by digital recorders could lead to an abrupt extinction of traditional court reporters. The vendors will stop servicing their CAT software and machines, stop producing new machines, stop developing new advanced features. Court reporters are complaining that Stenograph, the industry’s largest supplier of CAT software and steno machines, has already stopped rolling out new features and customer service response times are suffering.
3. Legal and Ethical Concerns: The shift to digital solutions also raises legal and ethical concerns. Privacy, data security, and the potential for errors in transcripts are pressing issues. The legal profession must navigate these challenges and establish regulatory guidelines for the digital transcription industry to ensure that standards are maintained. It’s my opinion that unless you have a licensed individual acting as the responsible charge of the record, it will be impossible to ensure an accurate record that is secure.
4. Market Disruption: The adoption of digital solutions has caused significant market disruption. Long-standing court reporting firms have had to adapt to this changing landscape. Some have successfully integrated digital transcription services into their offerings, while others have faced challenges in doing so.
Corporate cannibalism in the court reporting industry reflects the broader trend of digital disruption in many sectors. The legal industry is grappling with a fundamental transformation, and it’s crucial to strike a balance between leveraging the benefits of digital technology and preserving the quality, accuracy, and ethical standards of legal documents.
In the following sections, we will delve deeper into the legal and ethical challenges posed by the digital shift in court reporting and consider the potential future of this evolving industry.
Legal and Ethical Challenges
The digital transformation of the court reporting industry brings with it a host of legal and ethical challenges that require careful consideration.
1. Privacy Concerns: In a legal environment, privacy is paramount. The use of digital audio recording and transcription services raises concerns about the security and confidentiality of recorded legal proceedings. Access to sensitive information must be strictly controlled to prevent breaches and ensure that the privacy of those involved is maintained.
2. Data Security: Legal transcripts often contain sensitive information. Digital storage and transmission of this data make it vulnerable to cyber threats. Ensuring robust data security measures, including encryption and secure storage, is imperative to protect the integrity of the legal record and prevent unauthorized access.
3. Transcript Accuracy: While digital transcription services are efficient, they are not immune to errors. Ensuring the accuracy of transcripts is a legal and ethical imperative. Legal professionals must have confidence in the veracity of the records they rely on for case preparation and decision-making. Human oversight and quality control are crucial to achieving this.
4. Admissibility in Court: Legal professionals must grapple with the admissibility of digitally transcribed records in court. The acceptance of digital transcripts as official records varies across jurisdictions. Legal standards must adapt to recognize the authenticity and integrity of digital records.
5. Ethical Considerations: Legal ethics are a cornerstone of the profession. Transcriptionists must adhere to ethical standards, ensuring impartiality, accuracy, and the protection of attorney-client privilege. The use of automated transcription technology also raises questions about transparency in disclosure of the use of such tools.
6. Accountability: In the event of errors or disputes, accountability becomes a challenge. Determining responsibility for transcription errors or data breaches can be complex in a digital environment. Clear protocols for accountability and dispute resolution are essential.
Navigating these legal and ethical challenges is crucial to ensuring the continued integrity of the legal record. The legal profession must evolve its practices and standards to accommodate the digital age while upholding the principles of privacy, accuracy, and accountability.
In the subsequent sections, we will examine real-world case studies that shed light on the impact of the digital shift on the American Judicial system and the potential consequences of the widespread adoption of digital transcription services.
Pushed to the Brink of Destruction
“I love you this much” that I’m now willing to cannibalize you and go with something that’s more profitable.
An interesting case study of product cannibalism is in the beverage industry. Diet Coke’s sister brand, Coke Zero Sugar, is pushing Diet Coke to the brink of destruction. In August, 2023, Coca-Cola stopped selling Coke Zero in the US, replacing it with a beverage with a different recipe, design, and name: Coke Zero Sugar.
While people immediately freaked out when the change was announced, the adjustments are already paying off. After the new recipe rolled out in the US, unit case volume doubled compared to the prior quarter.
Meanwhile, Diet Coke’s sales slump continues as the weakest link in the company’s cola lineup. The brand’s sales by volume declined in the mid single digits last quarter. And, executives said that Coke Zero Sugar’s success is cannibalizing Diet Coke and Coca-Cola Classic sales in certain markets.
Increasingly, Diet Coke doesn’t fit health-conscious customers’ needs. While Coke Zero Sugar saw a sales bump by very clearly advertising that it doesn’t contain sugar, many customers remain suspicious of Diet Coke’s use of artificial ingredients.
However, Coca-Cola is paralyzed from significantly altering Diet Coke, in the way it tweaked Coke Zero, due to its dedicated – albeit shrinking – fan base.
“I don’t think we’re likely to change Diet Coke,” CEO James Quincey said in a call with reporters Wednesday. “It has a large following.”
Sound familiar, court reporters? The only thing saving Diet Coke is their large, dedicated following, but shrinking. So if it shrinks enough, they’ll be able to kill Diet Coke altogether in the near future. “Don’t think” and “likely” doesn’t give me confidence in Diet Coke’s future. Quincey could have said, “We’re never changing Diet Coke!” But his statement is non-committal.
It reminds me of some of the exact statements by the CEO’s in the court reporting industry, promising reporters that court reporters will always have a job. Then they talk about retraining, which means they plan to move the highly-skilled stenographers into relegated tasks of signing their certs on transcripts that were produced by someone in Africa.
The one thing that hasn’t killed off court reporters yet is our dedicated, loyal fan base of judges and lawyers. Court reporters should cater to this fan base right now. Court reporters are so busy recruiting new court reporters because of the fraudulent shortage propaganda that they’re not out there getting in front of the judges and attorneys trying to show and impart their value to them in meaningful ways, off the record.
Court reporting schools are overflowing, and soon there will be a glut of reporters like the industry saw in the 1980’s, which will lead to further stagnant rates, if not declining, for the highly-skilled tradesmen. Not only are agencies proliferating this over-inflated shortage narrative, but they’re inflating the prices they’re charging for court reporting services, even though they’re negotiating down the already 50-year-old rates to reporters. It’s a one-two punch to the industry. The agencies are pitting the attorneys and judges, our loyal fan base, against court reporters and the attorneys are mad as hell as they’ve pushed what the market will bear to the breaking point.
Market cannibalization is generally disadvantageous to a company. It does not provide any increased profits. Instead, it leads to a decrease in revenues, translating to a future decline in earnings. Market cannibalization creates competition within a company’s own products in the market. Due to this, the company suffers from a decreased market share.
However, in this case, in the court reporting industry, it’s highly advantageous to companies (court reporting agencies) to embrace digital recording, because it does provide increase profits, to the tune of 50% more profits. That’s huge. And it’s not resulting in decreased market share at all. They’re just shifting their existing customers to the new way of doing things and training them well.
In the case of Stenograph and other manufacturers of CAT and steno machine products, it’s about mitigating the diminishing numbers if they believe the fraudulent shortage narrative. It allows them to capture a market outside of their base of legacy court reporters. If they can “recruit anyone off the street,” as Anir Dutta, CEO of Stenograph has been shown in videos to say, then it allows them to capture new sales of their new product, MaxScribe, and open up a new market. Dutta, by the way, has also held a seat as the president of the STTI, Speech to Text Institute, which created the fraudulent marketing materials showing an overinflated shortage prediction that is not based on fact. Dutta, also, by the way, helped Kodak get rid of their physical film product and go all digital, during his time as a sales representative for Kodak.
No wonder Silicon Valley investors are all abuzz right now over their court reporting investments. This product cannibalization boon is probably like nothing any of these SV investors have ever seen before in any other industry – technology, food, beverages. Usually, you’re losing revenues and marketshare when you introduce a competing product. But not in court reporting.
With the one-two punch strategy of promoting a false shortage narrative and then inflating prices, these big box court reporting agencies are able to easily sell their new solution to overcome the “shortage crisis” and help curb the overinflated pricing court reporters are charging. They’re the savior of their own manufactured crisis! Brilliant!
How To Avoid Cannibalization in Court Reporting
The good news for court reporters is (1), that legacy court reporters have an undying fan base, and (2), that there is a way to combat cannibalization.
Enterprises usually invest significant financial and human resources when developing and launching a new product – and these costs should also be taken into account. They also incur expenditure when marketing and promoting it to the target audience. Factoring these costs into the calculations may show a negative impact on the bottom line. In the case of the court reporting industry, if the enterprises are gaining 50% profits, that’s a lot to help offset their efforts. It’s basically paying for itself. But for how long? Marketing to their existing customer base costs them very little extra with email blasts and using their existing outside sales reps and conducting trainings to attorneys. Marketing to attorneys outside of their customer base gets into the millions, so that becomes more expensive. However, their competitor big box agencies are also training their own existing customer base, which altogether could be about 50% market share.
The cost of recruiting and training digital court recorders is huge for the big boxes, especially when the turnover rate is exponential.
Then there’s the cost of legislation. This plan fails if they fail to get legislation passed in the 25 states that require certification of transcripts. They are trying, and failing, so far in CA with SB 662, and Illinois, and others. Yet, Veritext, US Legal, Planet Depos, and others, are hiring “Digital Court Reporters” in all states, even in CA, where that title enjoys title protection. They’re sent cease-and-desist letter by the CRB only to be caught violating that law again weeks later. The COO of Veritext pretty much shared that they are doing about $10 million in CA in digital recording business already, and that was years ago. Their plan, if they cannot get legislation passed, is to do it anyway, because, well, the “shortage crisis” and all. Then they can say, well, we’ve been doing it forever already and it’s working great. Kind of like how marijuana was so pervasive, even judges were smoking it, so why not just legalize it and decriminalize it.
Apple is a prime market cannibalization example. Every time a new iPhone is introduced, the price of older models falls on the market. For instance, when it announced the iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max, it lowered the price of the iPhone 8 and XR by $150. It even had to discontinue the iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, XS and XS max. Although the discontinued iPhones may still be available, people would have to buy them used or through unofficial channels, at much lower prices.
The effect of price cannibalization on older iPhones shows that companies need to be flexible and adaptable when it comes to new products. Not all companies can be like Apple and discontinue older models whenever they launch a new product. They need to be very careful about cannibalization on their product launches. Adaptability is key to the success of new product launches for businesses that already have an established presence in the market. This is the reason the big box court reporting agencies are keeping court reporter around, for now. They can’t just discontinue the older model vintage court reporter until their new digital imposter product has completely taken hold.
It is vital to confront cannibalization concerns head-on instead of getting needlessly defensive.
Take calculated risks, monitor the prices of competing products, factoring in price cannibalization, and be flexible to make changes on the go – that’s the secret to reaping long-term benefits.
Also, leverage existing customers and up-sell new products in a way that is in line with the business goals.
Take Calculated Risks. What are some risks court reporters could take? Hmmm, scratching head emoji. There’s one that comes to mind that reporters have been saying on Facebook for years. Stop working for the big box agencies who are cannibalizing their legacy court reporters. Stop buying CAT software and Writers from companies who are cannibalizing their legacy court reporters. What could a move like this do? It would cut into their existing market share immediately. These enterprises are counting on not having any affect on their market share in order to pay for the costs of launching their new product. If reporters were to cut off the funds that the BB agencies are using to launch their digital alternative product, then they won’t have money for legislation, marketing, training, etc. These enterprises are counting on having 50% of their business come from legacy reporters. What if their base of legacy reporters were to suddenly disappear unexpectedly? Then they would lose that 50% that they’re expecting to continue forward with their plan. It’s different than a physical product like Apple’s where Apple actually owns the product being discontinued and can control the pricing and availability of their own product. The big box agencies don’t own court reporters, who are independent contractors, yet they are calculating their risks as if court reporters working for them are a sure thing. So far, the big box agencies’ base of loyal independent contractors are keeping their plan in motion for them, unwittingly at the demise of the legacy IC’s. What if… this is a real possibility here. If their legacy court reporters were to stop working for them right now, like right this very second, and 50% of their traditional business were to suddenly go away unexpectedly (Right? because they were counting on that 50% being there so they could still be known as a “court reporting” company), then what would happen to their plan to cannibalize legacy court reporters? If that were to happen and court reporters were willing to take a big risk in order to stop this proliferation of digital court recording, I promise you, the Big Box agencies would become just “Transcription Companies” and would no longer be able to call themselves a court reporting agency. Court reporters could cast them out of the court reporting industry altogether and leave them to their newly created niche industry and easily differentiate their services. This could put court reporters at a huge advantage in being able to fight against it. I just laid out how cannibalization works. I just showed you how they need their legacy reporters to stay in business and fund their evil plan. Do reporters, after reading this article, still want to work for them?
Pricing. Court reporters could start keeping a database of the rates the agencies are billing attorneys and what they’re charging for digital services. Start asking attorneys for invoices, start researching public court documents for “motions to tax costs” sections of the court database, find out everything you can about costs in your market. What are other reporters charging – to agencies and to attorneys. Having pricing transparency is a tactic used in states like Texas. Legislating pricing transparency, forcing agencies to publish their pricing and share invoices with court reporters and court reporters’ fees also being transparent so attorneys and judges can see the real numbers would a very effective strategy. It would also destroy the myth that digital court recorders are cost effective. Legislating full disclosure about using digitals isn’t a bad idea while we’re on the legislating topic.
Leverage Fan Base. Court reporters must keep their fans loyal by continually reminding them of their value. Court reporters should be attending bar association meetings, publishing articles in law publications, visiting law schools and giving classes on making a record to law students, speaking at bar association meetings and judicial counsel meetings and anywhere judges attend. Court reporters must be seen and heard and accessible to their fans, the end users of their products, the ones who will keep legacy court reporters working in the profession forever.
Channel Dominance. Court reporters must look to the transportation revolution of the 1800’s for examples of gaining advantage. National parks, such as Mount Rushmore, that built roads to it, enjoyed the tourism revenues that helped sustain the local economy. Court reporters could build their own road. Dominate it. Get off the current distribution channel controlled by those with an agenda to cannibalize their legacy court reporters. A road such as this has been built for court reporters; it’s time court reporters take it for a drive and demand that everyone use that road alone to access their services. If court reporters can control and own their own road, they can control their own fate.
Cut your losses and walk away. Some reporters enjoy seniority from the years working for one big box agency, so walking away from their agency is understandably not a welcome option. Also, court reporters have paid over $5k for their CAT software and $7k for their steno writer and then hundreds of dollars a year for their maintenance & support contracts are also understandably not easy to part ways with. So in a lifetime of reporting, their investment and training and decades of working with one CAT software vendor and steno machine vendor, their all-in investment can be valued at over $20k. It’s understandable that walking away from that kind of investment and starting over learning a new software and having to buy a new machine just to save the court reporting profession is a risky thing to do, especially when you can’t count on all the other court reporters to do the same thing. I mean, why be the only idiot taking all the risk and now you’re left with no seniority and having to fork over tons of money for new equipment, when nobody else walked away with you. And, not to mention the fact that most reporters work 48 years in this profession and as of 2014, the average age of reporters was over 56 years old. Many reporters are just hanging on, status quo, until retirement, rather than taking a risk at this stage in their lives and career. But strategy number 5, cutting your losses and walking away from these companies is a very powerful strategy to combat cannibalism. You are faced with being out of a career in the short future, so what do you have to lose? If the reporters that are left in the industry, without these above examples of those that probably won’t take the risk, can be a sufficient size in number, even 10% of the population of court reporters, then it could make a significant impact on stopping these cannibalizers.
The Future of Court Reporting
The future of court reporting stands at a crossroads, marked by the collision of tradition and the emergence of radical corporate greed. As digital audio recording and transcription services gain prominence, the landscape of the court reporting industry is evolving rapidly. The path ahead presents a series of potential scenarios and questions.
1. The Coexistence of Human and Digital Transcription: One possible future is the coexistence of human court reporters and digital transcription services. While digital solutions offer speed and cost-effectiveness, human transcriptionists provide expertise, context, and quality assurance. In this scenario, the legal profession may strike a balance that leverages the strengths of both approaches.
In my humble opinion, the ONLY solution where coexistence is possible is with Advantage Software’s CAT Software Eclipse, using their new Boost feature. They are the only CAT software company that is actually making it possible for ASR and traditional stenographers to coexist.
2. Legal and Ethical Standards: Legal and ethical standards in the court reporting industry will likely adapt to accommodate digital technology. This includes establishing guidelines for the admissibility of digital transcripts, data security protocols, and ethical standards for transcriptionists using automated tools. There is proposed legislation in CA with SB 662 to pass legislation that allows digital recording in all civil courtrooms, but it’s been repeatedly defeated. But legalizing digital audio recording and digital technology cannot happen in its current state, where ASR software tools do not have good enough translation rates to be used without a traditional human stenographer. Again, the only possible solution is to have stenographers use Eclipse with the Boost feature. We must continue to uphold laws that prohibit digital transcripts that are created by uncertified, unprofessional, unskilled, and unaccountable workers.
3. Technological Advancements: The future may bring continued advancements in transcription technology, including improved accuracy and real-time capabilities. These advancements could further enhance the efficiency of legal proceedings and the accessibility of legal records.
The future is here now. Again, Advantage Software has been working for the past five years at advancements in their CAT software, Eclipse Boost, that improves real-time capabilities of all reporters. These enhancements do improve the efficiency of transcript production and real-time feed accuracy.
4. Job Displacement and Reskilling: The court reporting profession may undergo significant shifts, with some job displacement but also opportunities for reskilling. The Big Box Agencies and Stenograph may want stenographers and court reporters to make the transition to roles that involve overseeing or quality-checking automated transcription processes, but that will never happen. Traditional stenographers would rather walk away from the career than be relegated to button pushers.
5. The Role of Legal Professionals: Legal professionals, including attorneys and judges, will need to adapt to the digital age, familiarizing themselves with digital transcripts and the tools used in the transcription process. Training and education may become vital components of legal practice.
My advice to attorneys, judges, and paralegals, fight against digitalization with every ounce of courage you can muster. Insist that only human stenographers report your proceedings. Insist that your transcripts are produced by professional, certified shorthand reporters. Do not accept digital transcripts as evidence. Digitally recorded proceedings with outsourced transcription to unskilled, low-wage workers is creating a slave workforce.
6. Technological Integration: Court reporting firms that give in to the changing landscape and incorporate digital transcription services into their offerings are being met by resistance of their traditional human resources. This integration may require partnerships with technology providers and investments in software and infrastructure. The future of court reporting is likely to be shaped by a delicate interplay between technology and tradition. The legal industry must navigate the complexities of privacy, data security, and accountability while preserving the quality and integrity of legal records. The coming years will test the adaptability and resilience of the court reporting profession as it continues to serve the legal needs of society in the digital age. There will be a great divide coming in the court reporting profession between agencies who adopted to digital button pushers and those who remained faithful to their human assets. Longstanding court reporting agencies will become “Transcription” companies, unable to recruit human shorthand reporters.
Case Studies
Examining real-world case studies provides valuable insights into the impact of the digital shift on the American Judicial system and the court reporting industry. Here are a few illustrative examples:
1. The Digital Transition of California Courts: The California court system has undergone a significant transformation by embracing digital audio recording and transcription services. This transition allegedly has led to increased accessibility of legal records and a reduction in costs. However, it has also raised concerns about the quality and accuracy of transcripts, as well as data security and privacy. In civil proceedings, the courts don’t pay for the court reporters, saving tens of millions, but then they purchase millions of dollars worth of recording equipment and servers to hold all the audio files, and the IT staff to maintain it.
The courts in California are breaking the law by electronically recording felony and civil matters. SB 662 was proposed and backed by the Judicial Counsel and judges all over California, yet it never got off the assembly floor, yet judges in LA County are not deterred from electronically recording civil proceedings.
2. The Role of Human Transcriptionists in High-Profile Cases: In high-profile cases, human transcriptionists have played a pivotal role in ensuring the accuracy and reliability of transcripts. Their contextual understanding and linguistic expertise are particularly critical in cases with complex legal terminology and nuances.
In the Alex Murdaugh murder trial in 2023, Circuit Court Judge Clifton B. Newman and Defense Attorney Dick Harpootlian discuss “how bad” the rough draft provided of the record by a digital firm was, calling it a “deficit product.”
3. Challenges in Rural Jurisdictions: In rural jurisdictions with limited access to advanced technology and skilled transcriptionists, the adoption of digital solutions presents unique challenges. Ensuring equal access to legal records and maintaining the quality of transcripts in these areas is a matter of concern. In the aftermath of Covid, court reporters have been appearing remotely and covering court and depo proceedings with relative ease all over the country.
These case studies exemplify the complexities and nuances of the digital transition in court reporting. They highlight the advantages and challenges faced by different jurisdictions and the evolving role of human transcriptionists in high-stakes legal cases.
Conclusion
The court reporting industry is undergoing a profound transformation, driven by greed. The corporate cannibalism of traditional services by digital audio recording and transcription solutions is a threat to justice in the legal industry. This shift has brought with it a wave of change with challenges that demand careful consideration.
The lack of advantages of digital audio recording and transcription services are evident, including a non-existent cost savings, bogus claim of enhanced accessibility, and real-time capabilities that are a “deficit product.” The only benefit that has made digital solutions increasingly attractive to agencies is the immediate gain of 70% profit margins. The shift to digital transcription is fraught with legal and ethical concerns about privacy, data security, and transcript accuracy. Job displacement in the court reporting profession raises questions about the industry’s future.
Real-world case studies have illuminated the impact of the digital shift on the American Judicial system and the court reporting industry. These cases demonstrate the complexities of implementing digital solutions in diverse legal environments.
As the future unfolds, it presents a spectrum of possibilities, including the coexistence of human and digital transcription, adaptations to legal and ethical standards, and continued technological advancements. The role of legal professionals, industry practices, and the resilience of the court reporting profession will all shape the way forward.
In this dynamic landscape, the court reporting industry faces a dual challenge: fighting the advancement of digital technology while keeping the number of human stenographers growing. Finding the delicate balance between tradition and innovation is essential as the legal profession navigates the road ahead.
As we conclude our exploration of corporate cannibalism in the court reporting industry, we leave the future of court reporting to be shaped by the ongoing interplay of technology, tradition, and the unwavering commitment to the principles of accuracy, integrity, and privacy.
If you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening in the stenographic court reporting industry in the past decade, then you are about to be hit by the proverbial bus that threatens to destroy the stenographic court reporting profession, but more like an atomic bomb extinction-level event.
Yes, I’m being an alarmist, because nothing else stenographers have done in the past decade seems to be working to have judges and attorneys wake the fuck up!
We are at Defcon Level 1, to use the military term to indicate how close we are to an extinction-level event, unless something is done soon to stop it.
Much of what’s transpired in the past decade has been memorialized by prolific blogger, Stenonymous, who gives an concise timeline of a lot of the significant events.
“Only skilled court reporters can be trusted to create a reliable record of trial court proceedings.”
In 2012, there was a layoff of more than 80 official court reporters in Los Angeles County Superior Court and the privatization of court reporters in civil courtrooms began. The justification for this move was nothing less than a budge shortfall of $20 million. The first county’s move had a domino effect on the other 58 counties in California over the next decade.
Family law courtrooms were included in the departure of official court reporters in 2013, but shortly thereafter reneged after backlash from the legal community resulting in legislation to compel courts to staff family law courts with stenographers. But in 2023, Family Law courtrooms were once again left without a guaranteed official court reporter. Official court reporters were assigned on some days, but not others, and private court reporters would show up, hired by the attorneys, only to find that there was an official court reporter covering that day. The complete lack of communication contributed to the freelance reporters avoiding family law courtroom jobs, if at all possible. I’ll get back to more on this a little later, because this becomes pivotal in the storyline.
In 2013-2014, Ducker Worldwide was commissioned by the National Court Reporters Association, and their Court Reporting Industry Outlook 2013-2014 was published. Jim Cudahy is Executive Director of NCRA at this point and instrumental in getting the shortage forecasted. California’s shortage of court reporters was forecasted to be 5x to 20x worse than the rest of the country. The study predicted a shortage of 5,500 reporters nationwide by 2018. In California, where they were expected to experience a third of the shortage, it meant that by 2018, if the prediction were to come to fruition, would mean that the over 7,100 court reporters in CA in 2012, would be reduced to only 2,900 court reporters in California by 2018. THAT NEVER HAPPENED! It was like the big 1999 Y2K dud! And in 2024, a decade after the study, and six years after the shortage doomsday prediction, California still has over 6,580 active, licensed stenographic (and now voice) court reporters working in our state. CA lost roughly 900 reporters in that decade, but gained over 700 reporters, resulting in an almost equilibrium state to the pre-study days.
Let’s talk about the motivation of some of the players for a second. After Jim Cudahy left the NCRA, court reporter Kathy Di Lorenzo was appointed President of the NCRA. Her acceptance speech hinted at a “method agnostic” future for the reporting profession, which got her ostracized and shunned in the reporting circles. Kathy, most likely motivated by revenge, joined forces with Jim and was one of the leaders who started and chaired the STTI, Speech to Text Institute. Joining them were a host of industry leaders, including our 800-pound gorilla vendor of our stenograph machines, Stenograph, itself, and a host of the largest agencies in the country and the leading disruptors like For the Record, Verbit, vTestify, and more.
These leaders considered themselves pioneers and visionaries, and expected this new path to pave their way to riches. They conspired and colluded and plotted of ways to have their new “method agnostic” approach accepted. Once met with resistance, they went underground and took back channels, carving their own path through the jungles in the dead of night.
One of the most egregious things they (collectively) did was take the Ducker study, which was inherently flawed from the beginning, and used it to falsify their projections of an exaggerated shortage beyond 2018.
The Ducker Worldwide Court Reporting Industry Outlook flawed research methodology only consisted of 120 interviews, and none of those interviewees included an actual court reporter. Their prediction of a shortage never came true, as I could have told them it wouldn’t in 2014. For one thing, reporters don’t simply retire at 65 like the rest of the workforce. The average reporter works for an average of 48-plus years, which pushes the age of retirement out to 70-78. There are 100 active CSR licensees in California that have been working between 53-66 years. So their prediction could be 10 or more years off, pushing their shortage prediction to 2028. Those ten extra years bought us all just the right amount of time to recruit and replenish our numbers, which we have done in spades.
Here are snippets taken from a PowerPoint presentation given on July 19, 2021 by Kathy DiLorenzo of PlanetDepos to court reporters they were trying to recruit to do the transcription for them after they hired digital reporters to appear at their deposition and recorded the proceedings. PlanetDepos learned that their supply of “Digital Reporters” that they recruited “off the street,” were not going to cut it and they needed stenographic court reporters. The turnover rate of their new digital recorder employees was reportedly over 320% according to one source, which is probably why we’re constantly seeing ads recruiting “digital reporters” all over the country. They have to keep recruiting and training them because it’s a revolving door.
Planet Depos simply took the Ducker predicted shortage number of 5,500 reporters by 2018, and just drew the red down-curve line down the graph in a consistent downward line and then made up the figures of 11,345 and 23,100 by 2023. It’s now 2024, and their projected numbers were never realized. The Ducker study was wrong and Planet Depos fake trajectory graph was wrong. Their math never added up. It was invented, fabricated, concocted, made-up, complete fiction to fit their sales narrative to drive their plan forward.
The starting point for their graph, the 60,000 reporters in a made-up 1993 Court Reporter Census is a completely fabricated number. There’s no evidence of a 1993 Court Reporter Census being done. There were never, ever 60,000 court reporters working in the United States at any time. According to the NCRA’s website on their history, in 1960, there were only 7,000 reporters employed in the U.S., using over 40 systems of shorthand writing, including pen writers. It is impossible to gauge the number of actual working court reporters in the United States because only 28 states have licensing requirements. We know how many official court reporter jobs there are in Federal and state courts without a licensing board. But that’s the best we can do. The estimates from the various sources are all over the place. No one has ever attempted a national court reporter census. To go from 7,000 court reporters in the US in 1960 to 60,000 reporters 30 years later in 1993 is preposterous! It contradicts even their own assertion that recruiting efforts to stem a 2018 shortage would be impossible.
Pricewaterhouse Coopers even gets it wrong:
This next PlanetDepos chart is a complete work of fiction with no basis in reality. It was all a marketing hoax.
The STTI block also participated in propaganda using fake numbers of a projected shortage that was not based on any research or science.
According to the U.S. Labor Department, employment of court reporters and simultaneous captioners is projected to show little or no change from 2021-2031.6 But even the Bureau of Labor Statistics gets it wrong, and cites the number of court reporters in 2022 as 21,300. Then the USLD forecasts that there will be 21,900 court reporters by 2032, a 3% increase.
The red line is more accurate:
I have no information that the number of court reporter in the U.S. ever exceeded 32,000, but to illustrate the ridiculousness of the 60,000 number, I drew it as high as this chart went.
Here, let’s do the 60,000 number that Planet Depo used. Now you can see why they used it. It would help them to draw a more dramatic fictitious line downwards, because the more realistic representation would be a very undramatic horizontal line across the page with little downward change.
In California, the Court Reporters Board’s database of licensed CSR’s only dates back to 1952. The oldest active license was issued in 1958 and expires in June of 2024. California has been losing approximately 50 active licensees per year. There are approximately 1,000 active reporters in CA who have been working for more than 48 years. If we lost all of those active licensees, we would still not be close to the shortage that the Ducker study predicted for California alone.
On December 19, 2022, the NCRA Steno Strong committee members published an article in the Journal of Court Reporting with a catchy title, that finally called the report out of date and inaccurate and cited a lot of actions that were taken to overcome the predicted shortage since its publication.
This action, however, is too little too late. The damage has been done. A decade of the proliferation of digital “recorders,” even in states where it is illegal, has not stopped them. The purveyors have been so emboldened that they’ve even made it mandated company policy to have digital recorders 50% of their business in every office, in every state, nationwide. Nobody – not the state CRBs, the DOJ, the State Attorney General’s office – NOBODY, will do a thing to stop them. After the CA CRB issues a violation letter to agencies, not even a week after receiving the letter, the agencies are caught publishing job ads for “Digital Court Reporters” again in states that have title protection, yet nothing is done to punish them. Here’s just one of many examples.
Court reporters are the superheroes in this story – vigilant and working voluntarily after a full day as a court reporter, to take actions such as writing articles, visiting their state politicians, advocating, educating, and filing lawsuits. A court reporter/attorney husband team has sued StoryCloud and put them out of business and then helped TX fight other litigation. Jo Ann Byles Holmgren and Dennis Matthew Holmgren have given speeches at national and state conventions all over the country talking about their winning efforts.
Even with these efforts – the recruiting, the overflowing schools, the articles, the lawsuits, the blogs, the social media darlings – it’s not enough. There are things all of us can do now that would have a huge impact on the ability for court reporters to survive. The NCRA needs to publish a “Responsible Charge Statement” that clearly defines the court reporter’s role in being responsible for the chain of custody and keeps the court reporter in charge of transcript production, and not the agencies, as the big agencies are trying to do. There needs to be a law in CA that takes away the ability for a notary to swear in a witness in legal proceedings, a law like Texas has had for a long time. An initiative to bring a lawsuit that would seek to define the term “Deposition Officer” and how the only one that term could possibly be a reference to is a certified court reporter needs to happen. Efforts need to be made to get all states to have CSR licensing requirements. Currently, there are only 28 states that have certification requirements. Reciprocity between states to license more CSRs to help meet the demand needs to happen. All state certifications need to be standardized and use the same acronym. The focus should be on getting all states to require licensing of CSR’s and standardizing on one.
Most importantly, the CA CCRA and LACCA associations need to revive their 1993 lawsuit against Los Angeles County and sue them again. LASC has installed recording devices in all civil courtrooms in advance of legislation that allows them to do so. They are already recording in one beta civil courtroom. The clerk staff has already been trained to use it. More on that in a little bit. We need a writ of mandate to stop them again like the one we got in 1993! Where are our CA leaders?
What’s at stake if more aggressive measures against the fraud and proliferation of digital recording aren’t taken in our industry? The players behind the movement are those behind STTI and now STAR, and they have money and are with the biggest players in our industry, and they are backed by private equity funds and Silicon Valley investors. These players have been attempting to get laws changed in states that have weak and inadequate representation, laws that would allow their plan to prevail, to allow digital recording. Stenographers have countered these moves successfully like a joint whack-a-mole effort. They keep popping up.
In California last year, SB 662 popped up on the legislation, a move that would allow CA courts to record all civil proceedings. The backers of this, however, was not the STTI/STAR conglomeration, but the judges, judicial council, and lawyers. But the fraudulent STTI numbers were used to help make their decision and they were given a presentation by For The Record. Getting back to the start of my story about the layoffs of official reporters and privatization of civil, what has happened in the last decade is that the pricing of private court reporter fees in court has been going up and up and up. At a certain point, it reached the point that the market will no longer bear. The court reporters are getting blamed for gouging attorneys, but the reporters are held to statutory rates in court. The per diems are not statutory, and those have gone way up. When reporters were first laid off, they were charging a half-day per diem of $250 and a full day per diem of $500. Now those rates are $750/$1,600 and higher. But that’s what reporters are charging. Agencies are adding their margins on top of that and attorneys are getting billed $1,250/$2,300 from the agencies.
Here is an example of a court reporter’s invoice to the agency and then that agency’s invoice for the very same copy order to the non-client attorney on a court trial. You can see that the reporter billed for 209 pages of a copy order at statutory rates, but the agency charged for 255 pages, 46 more pages that include a condensed mini. The agency billed the attorney $1,929.05. That’s $1,711.69 more than the reporter’s invoice for the same copy order. The one line item on the reporter’s invoice turned into six line items for the same thing on the agency’s invoice to the attorney. The statutory rate on a copy order is $1.04/pg, which is what the reporter invoiced, but this agency charged $1.56, taking a $0.52 cut of the invoice, which they’re not allowed to do according to Government Code 69950 and 69954.
It is this gouging of attorneys by agencies that has California lawyers so upset with court reporters that they are quietly planning to bring SB 662, proposed by Senator Rubio, back to the CA legislature for a vote in early 2024. The Judicial Council in CA also supports SB 662, citing the unavailability of court reporters, and they say they will ensure every effort will be made to find an available court reporter first, yet they have no tangible plan to do that. The fact is, the 79 laid-off reporters successfully covered all the civil proceedings in LA County for years, but now the list has grown to over 400 freelance court reporters who want to cover civil courtrooms in Los Angeles County. The number of licensed court reporters is only down by 500 in California since 2012, from 7,100 in 2012, to 6,580 in 2024 – not a shortage at all.
Yet, the judges are so confident that SB 662 will pass in 2024 that the County of Los Angeles has already installed recording equipment in all of their civil courtrooms in Los Angeles County and have already preliminarily trained all of their civil clerks how to use the equipment. They have a beta civil courtroom that is already using their recording equipment, whether or not a live stenographer is present to report the proceedings verbatim. In 2018, LA County Superior Court installed recording equipment in 78 misdemeanor courtrooms. The plan to roll it out in civil courtrooms has been in the works for many years, but now the judiciary has the backing and support of the attorneys. The Los Angeles Superior Court is flagrantly violating Government Code 69957.
In its planning to replace stenographers with electronic recording equipment in all civil courtrooms in Los Angeles County, a report was prepared for the California Trial Court Consortium (CTCC) whose membership includes all courts in California with 38 judges or fewer. In that report, the fraudulent STTI chart was cited to exaggerate the shortage of court reporters forecasted, in order to persuade the Judicial Council to approve the purchase of electronic recording equipment. It is a fraud being perpetrated on the Judicial Council, judges, the Superior Court, attorneys, and the public.
This graph that was created by the Speech to Text Institute and is completely fraudulent and was not based on a real math, a study, or scientific research was included in the CTCC report that was used to make the decision to purchase and install electronic recording equipment in all of the Los Angeles Superior Court civil courtrooms in 2022-2023. The numbers were plotted on the graph by simply drawing the line on a made-up downward trajectory.
This graph of supply and demand has no basis in reality, yet it appears in the report on page 5 and is used as a basis for their decision to install electronic recording equipment in all the Los Angeles County civil courtrooms in 2023. The basis for these numbers was taken from a flawed 2013 Ducker Worldwide study where only 120 people were interviewed. No court reporter participated in this study – not one. The numbers in this STTI chart, beyond 2013, are made-up projections that have no basis in reality, it’s not real math, and it’s not based on a scientific study. The Ducker prediction of the 2018 shortage was never realized and was completely false. This is pure fraud by the Speech to Text Institute. FRAUD!!!
The Los Angeles Superior Court has made a decision to purchase For The Record electronic recording equipment and installed it in all their civil courtrooms based on a FRAUDULENT graph put out by the STTI. It is a fraud on our largest court system in the world. The California Trial Court Consortium has been played! And the Judicial Council is supporting the passage of SB 662 based on this fraudulent information published by the STTI. The STTI, Speech To Text Institute, no longer exists. Their website was taken down after being named in a lawsuit and after being accused of this FRAUD by Stenonymous and many others in the court reporting community. Anir Dutta, current president of Stenograph, and the former president of STTI has announced that he has nothing to do with them any longer, distancing himself from their fraud, which he helped perpetrate for about five years.
Another thing that has attorneys so upset with Southern California court reporters and has made it very easy for them to cling to the proposed SB 662 is the reporters’ refusal to comply with their “SoCal Stip.” The stipulation has been around for at least 40 years. No one seems to be able to remember how long. But I spoke with the late Judge Chavez of the Los Angeles Superior Court before the pandemic who took the bench in the 1980’s and he had no knowledge of the SoCal Stip, so it possibly post-dates his appointment to the bench.
In 2015, the movement for reporters to not follow the stipulation heated up, and within 16 months, the reporters practically eradicated the SoCal Stip. Reporters utilized the gray rock strategy and refused to comply with the stip and said simply that they were going by code, never explaining that if the reporter is a party to the stipulation, then they could be disciplined by the CRB for not complying with the law. And further clarified that if the reporter says nothing when the attorneys stipulate, then the reporter is a party to the stipulation and their silence is an agreement to their stipulation; a reporter must refuse to participate in their stipulation at the time of the stipulation, instructed the CRB. I believe that had reporters just told the attorneys their license could be on the line, the attorneys would have understood. But attorneys didn’t like a lowly court reporter telling them they could not stipulate to anything they wanted. Reporters created a very powerful enemy, basically 200,000 attorneys in California, who are now all for digital recording in the state.
Electronic Recording Court Proceedings is NOT a Viable Alternative to Live Stenographers
What most of the outside world doesn’t realize is that court reporters rely on scopists and proofreaders to help produce massive amounts of pages per week so that they can keep appearing in person. For every hour of reporting on a machine, it takes two hours of scoping and proofreading to produce a transcript, but some can do it in half the time. Court reporters do the work themselves for the first few years of reporting, but once they start getting cleaner translation rates and can do realtime, they are thrown into demanding work where daily transcripts are ordered. Heavy-hitter reporters produce around 1,000 to 1,500 pages per week, and work five days a week on the machine from 9 to 5, then work in the evenings and weekends on transcripts, even with a team of scopists and proofreaders. Some trial reporters doing dailies will work until 10:00 p.m. and then get up at 5:00 a.m. to complete their daily transcripts.
There is a shortage of really good, reliable scopists and proofreaders for court reporters to hire and keep on their team doing their work. There’s few training programs out there for proofreaders and scopists. Proofreaders can generally make $0.60 – $1.00 per page doing daily transcripts and scopists make $2.50 – $3.60 doing daily transcripts and realteam. Realteam allows a scopist to log into the court reporter’s CAT software (Computer Aided Transcription) and edit live, while the court reporter is writing on their machine, so that by the end of the day, the transcript has been completely scoped and can be delivered as a final almost instantaneously. Once the scopist is done with a chunk, they can send it to a proofreader who trails behind them. The court reporter pays for the scopists and proofreaders. The agency does not share in that burden. The court reporter oversees all of the work to ensure it is done properly and the court reporter puts it all together and has eyes on every single word on every page and approves it once the scopists and proofreaders are done. Scopists and proofreaders have been increasing their rates every year, while court reporters have not raised rates in almost 50 years, yet reporters continue to pay their subcontractors, leaving less and less for the court reporter.
There are now a plethora of speech-to-text software options on the market, Stenograph being the largest provider. It is the new plan to create a transcript using the speech-to-text software and then have scopists or proofreaders clean it up and create a final, and completely cut out the stenographers. They are recruiting scopists and proofreaders from the stenographers’ already small pool of subcontractors to do their transcript work. This hurts stenographers by competing for their pool of limited resources. Stenographers will not be able to work on their machines all week taking the demanding work, if they don’t have the support team to help them. It’s impossible for a stenographer to keep up with the workload single-handedly. There are stenographers who can do it single-handedly, but they need to take more time off between trials to recuperate. It leads to burnout and injuries, such as carpal tunnel and tendonitis, back pains, vein issues in the legs, and heart attacks and strokes from the stress, and other ailments. There’s even a Facebook group dedicated to the job-related health issues from which court reporters suffer. It also will lead to court reporter fees going up; if they have to reduce the amount of work they take a week, they can’t suffer earning less, so prices will naturally go up.
In Massachusetts, the entire court system transitioned to electronic recording. They are having their existing official court reporters work on transcribing proceedings from the audio recordings, where they listen to the audio and write it on their steno machines to create a transcript. It is not by choice that the reporters are doing this, but they have pensions on the line and health benefits, so they chose not to quit, but ride out their remaining time. They will do it until they can retire, which is fast approaching, given that the average age of court reporters is 55 and court reporters work for an average of 38 years. Massachusetts is a ticking time bomb.
“Once you’ve got missing or incomplete transcripts, you might as well kiss your appeal goodbye.”
There are freelance court reporters who will transcribe from audio. They get the audio file and write the proceedings on their steno machine, which is still the fastest way to transcribe. Most realtime reporters have a translation rate, including punctuation, of around 99.5%. The speech-to-text software has a translation rate of around 80%, but that’s not including punctuation, and it drops to less than 60% with heavy accents. If it takes an hour of scoping for every hour in court to create a steno-machine generated transcript at 99.5% translation rate, guess how long it takes to scope an AI-generated transcript at 80% translation rate? I’m told it could be upwards of six hours. The alternative is what they’ve been doing since before steno machines were invented, typewriters. Now they have foot pedals to assist with rewinding and playing the audio so they could keep their fingers on the typewriter to go faster. Most typists doing legal proceedings can type as fast as 120 words per minute. That’s about 3-4 minutes per page, with the average page containing 300 words. A full day of 200 pages is 800 minutes or 13 hours.
There are numerous problems with the plan to use scopists and proofreaders on speech-to-text AI-generated transcripts and eliminating stenographers. One, frankly, scopists and proofreaders aren’t good enough to replace stenographers. They have no formal schooling, they have no certifications or licenses, and they are just not good enough to replace stenographers. Two, scopists and proofreaders cannot act as the responsible charge. Usually, several of each are used and the transcript is broken up and sent out to multiple contractors. They were not present at the original proceeding, and they cannot attest to the accuracy, completeness, and genuineness of the recording. The chain of custody is completely broken when an audio recording is made and then sent out to multiple contractors. Three, there’s an even larger shortage of scopists and proofreaders than there are court reporters. It’s an even smaller pool of resources with a wider spectrum of capabilities, meaning even fewer of the good ones out there to work with. And four, it takes even longer to train a scopist and proofreader to get them to a level of competence than it does a stenographer. The average stenographer takes an average of 3 years to complete school. To gain sufficient competence as a scopist and proofreader, it takes a minimum of five years of experience. But there’s no oversight body to even determine what acceptable standards of competency is for scopists and proofreaders. It’s left for every individual court reporter to determine what’s acceptable of the scopists and proofreaders working for them by reviewing their work personally.
The other bad plan is to take the speech-to-text generated content, copy it and paste it into a Word document and then use transcriptionists who use a QWERTY keyboard. It takes longer to edit the document than it would if they were to just type it from scratch using their foot pedals and the original audio recording. They would have to play the recording and then compare it to the text, then correct words that are mistranslated, add the punctuation, and then add words it didn’t get, replay the audio in spots that were garbled or where people were talking over one another, and use their mouse to navigate through the Word document. It would take longer than the 13 hours it would take a typist to create it from scratch. You still have the issue of transcriptionists lacking any education, certification, and accountability. You have absolutely nobody who was present for the hearing who is involved in or overseeing the creating of the end-product transcript.
And because the amount of hourly pay would drop to below minimum wage pay in just about every single state in the U.S., you’re going to have to hire these resources from overseas. In California, the minimum wage just rose to $20.00/hour. A fast typist at 120 wmp, typing one page in four minutes, would produce 15 pages an hour. At $1.00/pg, that’s not enough to meet the minimum wage requirements for the fastest typist.
It is inarguably going to take longer to acquire transcripts that are electronically recorded than those that are stenographically produced. Official court stenographers are bound to strict turnaround deadlines for transcripts and appeals. If they don’t produce transcripts, they can be put in jail until the transcript is produced, and it has happened more than once. But for the most part, stenographers meet their deadlines. There is no jurisdiction over the transcriptionists, scopists, and proofreaders who are just assigned to pieces of the transcript, and may reside in countries other than the U.S. Stenonymous has blogged about a situation where it took two months to get a court transcript. I’ve heard of it taking a year to get a transcript on appeal that was electronically recorded. There will be a backlog of transcript orders from electronically-recorded court proceedings because the pool of transcriptionists is already at a breaking point now, without courts moving to ER.
I believe courts are expecting stenographers to transition to working on electronic recordings of court proceedings, but I believe they are very wrong about that. Court reporters would rather change careers or exit happily into retirement than take down audio recordings of court proceedings on their steno machines and produce transcripts that way. Court reporters are exiting the field at retirement without having recruited or trained their incoming replacements. There is no book that contains all of the information that court reporters learn on the job as they go along, having the benefit of consulting with their more senior peers throughout their careers. That book, if it existed, would take 30 years to compile and complete and would be larger than the Oxford English dictionary.
The shortage of stenographers will be massively eclipsed by a shortage of transcriptionists if courts all over the country allow electronic recording in all civil courtrooms. It would be a tsunami of destruction of justice and democracy and freedom in America. Without a record, there can be no meaningful appellate review, nor oversight of the judiciary, especially when the judiciary is the keeper of the record.
One of the justifications to use electronic recordings is cost savings, but that’s inaccurate. In addition, electronic recordings jeopardize the accuracy of the record because they are pone to flaws and errors, could violate privacy laws, and may violate the court’s compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Stenography is one of the great secret societies on par with the Oracle at Delphi or the Cult of Mithras, Freemasons, and The Knights Templar. (I jest, of course) It’s the best kept secret of which not much is known by the outside world. Not much is known about the inner workings of this exclusive cult. All applicants must pass a complex rite of passage – achieve 200 wpm at 96.5% accuracy – before they were considered fully vested members or syndexioi, “sealed by a handshake.” The crusader-like charge to protect the record is a uniting bond. Like the Freemasons, stenographers rose from apprentices to journeymen to master masons of their craft, in secret, individually. Stenography definitely meets the International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies and Fraternal Orders criteria to be defined as a secret society, in that it is exclusive, it claims to own special secrets, and shows a strong inclination to favor its members. Stenographers would never, ever divulge its secrets to outsiders – the digital recorders, QWERTY transcriptionists, and other interlopers threatening its existence. The extinction of stenographers would mean the extinction of a vast body of knowledge on the creation of the verbatim record.
Is a world without bees possible? Albert Einstein is arguably attributed as having said, “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.”
If attorneys are unhappy with the rising costs of court reporters (through their agencies) now, just wait until they help to make us more scarce by allowing the use of electronic recording and digital recorders through legislative means. Just like if bees became extinct, we’d still have coffee, but it would be rare and become expensive.
So I will then ask, can the legal world live without Stenographers? Probably, yes, but justice would suffer tremendously. The turnaround times would suffer, the translation rates of realtime feeds would diminish, the accuracy of transcripts would diminish, and the cost of transcripts would surge. Judicial oversight would suffer. The unquestionable authenticity and credibility of transcripts would become extinct; there would be no way that survives without the protector of the record. But worst of all, there is no coming back. There will not be a return of stenographers once it reaches extinction. That is a certainty.
Existing law establishes the Court Reporters Board of California to license and regulate shorthand reporters. Existing law establishes that a person who holds a valid certificate as a shorthand reporter shall be known as a “certified shorthand reporter,” and prohibits any other person, except as specified, from using that title or any words or symbols that indicate or tend to indicate that they are a certified shorthand reporter. A violation of the provisions regulating shorthand reporters is a misdemeanor. Existing law requires an individual to have satisfactorily passed an examination, as prescribed by the board, in order to be certified as a shorthand reporter.
8023 and 2023 the Business and Professions Code.
It was reported to the Court Reporters Board on Monday, October 9th, 2023 that “US Legal is flagrantly advertising for “digital court reporters” in CA. Are we to believe that once they hire them, they don’t actually have them go out and work as digital court reporters?”
The following screenshots of the US Legal ads in California were allegedly submitted along with the complaint.
The Court Reporters Board found US Legal to be in violation of the law and issued a letter informing them of their violation on October 19, 2023 and asked them to cease and desist from using the term “digital court reporter.”
While apparently a win for certified shorthand reporters in the state, it doesn’t stop them from just changing the title used in their ads to something like what other agencies are doing and getting away with.
Another agency, Planet Depos, was reported back in March of 2023 for job ads using the term “Digital Technologist” in California. On the Planet Depos website, they clearly have only stenographic court reporters or digital recorders. One can only conclude that although they are calling it something different, it is, in fact, a digital reporter position that they are recruiting and hiring, and we all know, working, in CA.
What good does title protection do for our industry if it doesn’t stop them from performing our duties under another unprotected job title?
Only those with CSR licenses should get to use the court reporter and certified shorthand reporter title. This ensures public safety and keeps liability issues at bay. Plus, it preserves the integrity of the record by:
Upholding high professional standards for creating and protecting the verbatim record
Preventing service devaluation through supply and demand
Court reporting is an important and learned profession. As members of this profession, court reporters are expected to exhibit the highest standards of honesty and integrity. Court reporting has a direct and vital impact on the quality of life for all people. Accordingly, the services provided by court reporters require honesty, impartiality, fairness, and equity, and must be dedicated to the protection of the public health, safety, and welfare. Court reporters must perform under a standard of professional behavior that requires adherence to the highest principles of ethical conduct.
Want to call yourself a court reporter? Then you need that CSR license, plain and simple. No license, no title.
If you see a violation of the use of the “court reporter” title protection, please report it to the California Court Reporters Board using this complaint form.
Aside from the period falling outside of the quotes, the missing comma pair, and the missing Oxford comma, which I’ll forgive, this post today touches on something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. We need a TV show or movie that would draw thousands to the profession of shorthand reporting. There have been other shows that have led to an increase in those fields portrayed in movies, such as Jodi Foster’s role in Silence of the Lambs, which led to lots of women entering the field of forensic psychiatry, including one of my sister’s best friends in high school.
Over the years, and in my head, I’ve drafted multiple scripts for TV shows with steno leading ladies and men, from comedies to dramas, from hourlong to half-hour long episodes. I concocted one that would be like a Sex in the City meets Allie McBeal that I was going to title “Steno in the City” until that trademark was assumed by the very talented Shaunise Day My multiple-hour commutes to the city for depositions and court work were usually filled with new plot twists or characters or storylines, lots of them lost due to the lack of paper and pen at the time.
I am quite sure I’m not the first or the only court reporter who has ever spent time daydreaming of the possibilities that the big screen could hold for our industry.
There have been lots of court reporters who have graced the big screen and the little boob tubes over the decades, playing the part of the court reporter in courtroom and deposition scenes. Actress Kate Hudson brought lots of attention to our profession in the motion picture Alex & Emma (2003), in which she played a stubborn stenographer.
But there is a court reporter who is living the real-life dream and is representing our profession in Hollywood right now. She’s even been nominated twice (not once, but TWO times) and won an Emmy Award! You all have probably heard of her by now, our very own, Whitney Kumar! She’s been traveling the country talking to court reporter associations, regaling us with tales of wardrobe, makeup, hair, and how she got the part on the Judy Justice show!
Whitney’s regular role as the real human court reporter in Seasons 1, 2, and now 3 on Judy Justice has shown a side of court reporting never seen before. She is able to read back the record in realtime for Judge Judy, unscripted. She’s taped 255 episodes between 2021 – 2023, and just wrapped up her 3rd season.
The cameras pan in on her flawless unedited relatime that is her own work. It’s not made-up Hollywood CGI effects; it’s really her own talent and skill as a court reporter that the audience is getting a taste of on their screens in millions of homes. Her professional demeanor, impeccable wardrobe, and model good looks is our profession’s dream come true for having any possibility of the “Scully Effect” happening, which would drive hundreds of prospective stenographers to our court reporting schools and give our profession hope of a bright future.
Judy Justice came in as the number one original program on IMDb TV for its first season, with more than 25 million streaming hours viewed towards the end of that season. According to the New York Post, the first season generated more than 75 million hours watched between both the US and the UK as a whole.
The X-Files began airing in 1993, and after a few seasons, people began noticing a phenomenon called “The Scully Effect.” The “Effect” referred to the large number of female X-Files viewers who were inspired by Scully to enter so-called STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
I’m wondering if the same phenomenon is happening currently in the Stenographic Shorthand Reporting field. After a few seasons of X-Files it happened. I’m wondering if after 3 seasons of Judy Justice it’s happening in court reporting.
West Valley College’s new instructor, Ana Fatima Costa, posted recently that “Since fall semester began two weeks ago, with triple the amount of students in now three classes—Internship, Codes & Procedures, and CSR Exam Review…” This court reporting college’s enrollment has tripled! We’re seeing this upward trend in colleges all across the country with rising enrollments, thanks to the multitudinous efforts of the likes of the NCRA AtoZ program, Project Steno, schools, court reporters, and associations all over the country who have ramped up efforts to recruit prospective student to the profession.
Court Reporters have been making efforts to increase the spotlight on our career for the last decade and ongoing. Cassandra Caldarella’s article “10 Reasons I love my career as a Court Reporter” has been printed by court reporting schools all over the country and put into their packets for prospective students since 2018. And Caldarella’s 2015 Lifehacker article “What I do as a Court Reporter” was reposted by hundreds of career sites, including Monster.com and was viewed by over 8 million people.
NCRA’s A to Z program’s first graduate started the program in the Spring of 2017. Project Steno launched on December 7, 2017, five-plus years after the Ducker Report was published which predicted the dire shortage of court reporters.
If the “Scully Effect” was documented as happening after only a few seasons, we’re talking about only 3 years. The above-mentioned activities have been ongoing for more than five or six years with no such tripling effects in school enrollment. It’s only in the last 3 years, after the Judy Justice show aired, that our schools are flourishing, and exponentially.
There was a survey conducted by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media that gathered data from women who entered STEM fields where they were asked if they knew about the show X-Files and if that influenced them to enter the field.
Their findings proved what was dubbed as The Scully Effect to be real! But how is it that someone playing a character who works in STEM can inspire so many people to go into those fields, for real?
Maxwell’s 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, the Law of the Picture says it best: “People do what they see.” When we see someone who looks like us doing something, we realize that it’s possible for us as well. Now there’s science behind this phenomenon.
The Court Reporting industry ought to commission a study, a survey, that validates the hypothesis that this “Scully Effect” is happening now in our profession, which I suggest that more women and men are becoming interested in court reporting because of Whitney Kumar, and her role as Judy Justice’s stenographer throughout the show’s 3 seasons. Maybe schools can employ a survey such as the one that the Geena Davis Institute conducted and feed it back to one source to curate the data – such as the Steno Strong committee. (hint, hint, nudge, nudge)
Re-imagining and portraying our image as a valued professional is crucial! One of the reasons for the shortage of court reporters is because we’re the best kept secret. High school counselors have long stopped telling students about our profession because of their false belief that we would be replaced by electronic recording, which will never happen. Who better than to give the public a new image with a fresh face than the vibrant, young, sexy, gorgeous, smart, business woman, Whitney Kumar? What little girl wouldn’t want to grow up to be just like her?
While law schools are overflowing with students interested in a legal profession, and those students can’t find jobs after graduating because of the glut of lawyers entering the profession, many of whom believe that court reporters are glorified notetakers, because they only know what they’ve seen portrayed in the law shows that lured them into law schools: the portrayal of boring, elderly, librarian, conservative ladies who sit with antiquated steno machines with paper overflowing that never say a word. The disparity in their belief versus the reality – for example that court reporters often make more than attorneys and judges and are the most important person in the room at legal proceedings because they hold power greater than a judge – that of producing the transcript that can overturn a judge’s decision – is reflected in the phrase, “you can’t be what you can’t see.” For many law students, it’s hard to envision themselves as a court reporter because they believe the role is beneath them. They don’t know what we do, and they don’t know our value, our worth, and the dollars we make for our special skillset.
How does The Scully Effect solve the shortage of Court Reporters?
Ordinary people don’t normally see court reporters in their daily lives. They’re in courtrooms or out in law offices doing their work, and normal people are off doing whatever it is they do. But on TV, those two paths cross. People are given an inside —even if a little dramatized—peek to a world that’s often off limits to them. And in that moment, new realities open up.
Kudos to Whitney Kumar for conjuring the “Scully Effect” in court reporting! I know it’s happening! I challenge someone, anyone to prove me wrong! But I believe that Whitney’s Scully Effect could be bigger, a LOT bigger! What can we do to help bolster this Scully Effect in our industry? If the survey found that 50% of the women in STEM industries had seen the show and were influenced to pursue a STEM career, and that 24% of the entire population in those industries had come from the Scully Effect, then let’s take 24% of our industry, with an estimated 27,000, that would be 6,480 reporters in the future that will have found our profession because of Whitney Kumar on Judy Justice. The attrition rate in STEM fields is about 48 percent versus a the 90 percent attrition rate in court reporting school, so we can adjust that number to roughly 3,240. The simplified point being, we have a ways to go to match the numbers in the Scully Effect from the X-Files show.
Here are some additional actions taken in the U.S. that worked to increase the amount of women entering STEM fields:
It makes me wonder if Judge Judy Sheindlin, the highest paid woman on American television ($440m) would consider donating $1 Million to Fund Court Reporting education for Women.
I know our industry has a lot of published authors out there, including Jason Meadors, Diane Kilpatrick, and others. Any possibility of collaborating on a Book Series for Young Girls that can close the gap in Steno?
We need a national, unified effort to attend high school career fairs to educate about the steno career on a regular basis.
Whitney, traveling the country to talk at court reporter conventions in our own industry, was preaching to the choir, so to speak, and getting reporters all over the country fired up and excited about being court reporters. It was great for our morale! Time to bring her appearances to an outside audience, to the next generation of court reporters, to prospective court reporting students. We need to expand her reach, introduce her to a new audience to share with them the best kept secret! What are your thoughts, ideas, suggestions to how we can capitalize on her Scully Effect to help our profession replenish our ranks and thrive and survive?
A spin-off from Judy Justice, with the Stenographer as a lead character!
My ultimate vision for Whitney Kumar and an explosive Scully Effect would be a spin-off into her own show, highlighting her as the lead character, navigating the legal waters as an agency owner, a twin, with a team of court reporters who work for her and are her friends and client attorneys in her spectacular life. Her real life is more exciting than other reality shows that need fabricated plot lines to bolster their lead characters. There’s enough material to go on and on for 9 or 10 or 25 seasons! Surely, there has got to be a way to pitch this to the Judy Justice team to have them help make this a reality!
What are some of your ideas to bolster this emerging Scully Effect in court reporting?
The big box firms like Veritext and our industry vendors who provide us with CAT software and steno machines are absolutely NOT going to abandon their Digital Recorder plan. But they NEED us. They need us more than we need them. I thought they needed us because there are laws in 25 states that prohibit transcript production by anybody other than a CSR. In CA, it’s actually a misdemeanor to attempt to admit an uncertified transcript into evidence.
A Due Process Clause is found in both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, which prohibit the deprivation of “life, liberty, or property” by the federal and state governments, respectively, without due process of law.[1][2][3]
But after talking with Veritext’s COO, Andy Fredericks, who thinks they can just stipulate away the laws. Veritext is having notaries produce transcripts. Not even CSR’s. Notaries. Not even sure if the notary produced the transcript. There’s a good chance the transcript was produced offshore and then their in-house notary just “certified” the transcript for them. This is why the SoCal Stip movement should have been educating attys that they need a judge’s ruling in order to order us to follow their stipulation. They’re bypassing due process and just going around the laws in 25 states, with impunity!
I just talked to an attorney and explained what’s happening to him and he said, “Oh, that’s why the court reporters were all creating a stink about the SoCal Stip.” See! They get it! It’s not that they would have now just added getting a judge’s ruling on their stip so they could still stip and steal our product, but when they see the bigger picture of how this is all working against them, they’re sincerely outraged and will fight WITH us! We need attorneys on our side fighting against what’s happening!
To put this in perspective. If Veritext is a $20,000,000 (20 million) company, and digital makes up 10% of their business, that’s $2 Million dollars!!! That’s HUGE! That’s MUCH bigger than I thought! That was shocking news to me last week. If USL is another $20 million company, and also has 10% digital, that’s another $2 million. That’s now possibly $4 mil. And the STTI has an agency training that is teaching all agencies across the US to go digital. So what if digital is now 10% of the entire court reporting business. If it’s purported to be $1.2 billion, that’s $120,000,000. Yes, 120 MILLION dollars. That’s a HUGE market opportunity. It’s like a Gold Rush. Don’t think that you’re going to get them to support steno with Gold Rush dollar signs in their vision. That’s just for 10% of the market. Now look at the entire $1.2 BILLION market opportunity. If they can capture ALL of the business by doing digital themselves – recruit, train, employ, offer benefits, only pay 10% of what they would normally pay reporters (50%) – they are looking at $1.2 BILLION!!!!! This is bigger than any money made in the Gold Rush! To put this into perspective, the output of gold rose from $5 million in 1848 to $40 million in 1849 and $55 million in 1851.
But we now know that Veritext’s shareholders have mandated each office must be doing 50% digital! So it blows these numbers based on 10% out of the water! This is much, much bigger than the Gold Rush!
If stenographers are to survive, we must envision a world WITH digital. We must be at the forefront, steering our own industry ship, otherwise, it will overcome us. We must demand that these notaries and “digital recorders” are getting the same schooling, taking the same tests, getting certified if they want to be in the same league and call themselves a court reporter. Christopher Day is turning the tables and putting some effort into recruiting their digital recorders, convincing them to become legitimate and become stenographers or voice writers.
We need to establish our position as gold-standard court reporters, at the top of the market where we will command top tier pricing. ER, Digital, and lesser options may command the bottom market rates and services for the lower dollar-value cases and will probably make up the majority in the future. We need to ensure our place at the top of a hierarchical structure, or else they will succeed in attempting to create what’s called a holacracy where digital and ER are on the same par with highly skilled court reporters. We cannot let that happen.
There’s a saying called “Wag the Dog,” and it was the name of a great movie with Dustin Hoffman. Does the dog wag its tail? Or does the tail wag the dog? We can’t keep letting non-stenographers drive our industry and determine our value. Entities such as attorneys, insurance companies, large agencies backed by venture capital, and other non-licensed, non-certified reporters who are profit-driven should NOT be driving our industry. Am I right? I’d like you all to visualize our profession and see us at the top of a hierarchical structure. I ask that you all reach higher than you’ve ever imagined, because it’s within our grasp and it’s how we’ll thrive.
ANNIHILATION
The point is simply this: Court Reporting is facing an existential crisis on several fronts.
The truth is that stenographers will become extinct if we don’t start valuing them appropriately. Annihilation is one of the very real possibilities we are facing. Yes, Annihilation. The extinction of court reporters. If we lose too many of our numbers, we will lose our software vendors, our hardware vendors because our numbers are simply not sustainable for their ongoing business model. We may be able to continue on with our existing equipment for 20 years, but we will have absolutely no support for it if anything goes wrong and there will be no more replacements offered. Once we reach that point, there’s no coming back.
Hostage negotiators NEVER tell themselves it’s gonna be fine. Hostage negotiators take the worst possible scenario and act like that is the reality they are dealing with, because if they don’t do everything they can, people WILL die. They accept the reality of that outcome and are brutally honest about it.
I’m going to be brutally honest with you. If we don’t walk out of here today accepting the reality of our possible extinction and utter annihilation and start taking drastic actions, doing things we’re uncomfortable with – if we don’t start getting others to value our skills, say no, and be honest about the consequences of not doing enough, it will be too late.
We have a very small window of time to change the course of our history, a future where stenography is the gold standard, our numbers are strong, we are highly valued, and we command top-tier pricing. That future is possible and its within our reach and our power to achieve.
We have the ultimate advantage in this negotiation! We have LEVERAGE! We have laws in place in 25 states, for now. We have more than 27,000 stenographers throughout the country. If every one of us start controlling the narrative and demonstrating our value, we could win! Now, who wants to win?
Court reporters are not commodities. I’m going to repeat this: We are the highly skilled gold standard that the legal industry cannot live without! If they want us to be around in the future, we’d better learn to say “no,” we’d better learn our value, we’d better start to tell the truth about having court reporters available in the future, and we’d better start doing this before it’s too late.
A petition by stenographers is seeking to change that. There are over 28,000 stenographers currently employed in the United States. 90.2% of all stenographers are women, while 9.8% are men. There is a worsening crisis of a shortage of court reporters in the United States.
Simply put, a stenographer is someone who types what people say. A stenographer is a person trained to type or write in shorthand methods, enabling them to write as quickly as people speak. Stenographers can create lasting documentation of court and deposition proceedings. Also called Court Reporters, they are officers of the court with the authority to administer an oath.
Without court reporters, justice in America as we know it would come to a screeching halt, and be replaced with a tyrannical rule of government where the government would own the recordings and those with power and wealth can control the record. An example of the coming injustice is seen in the Waukesha Parade Massacre case of Darrell Brooks, where court recordings were conveniently lost, when it became clear that the court could have been culpable in the wrongful death and massacre of 6 people and injuring 62 others.
The fact is that stenographers are capable of making more money than Judges, Doctors, Lawyers, Neurosurgeons, and the CEO’s of companies and equity firms that are, out of envy and greed, trying to keep women from earning a high income.
Where courts have previously relegated their official court reporters to part-time status with no benefits, they’re now offering huge incentives to attract them.
In 2019, Mattel’s Barbie Career of the Year was the Barbie Judge Doll.
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“The company chose a judge as its Career of the Year doll after learning that only 33% of sitting US state judges are women, Lisa McKnight, senior vice president and global brand general manager of Barbie, told USA TODAY.”
“Judge Barbie is available in a variety of different skin tones and hairstyles. She comes with a customary black robe and a lacy collar that looks strikingly similar to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s.”
Even the infamous “Judge Judy,” Judge Judy Sheindlin, insisted on having a human Court Reporter (aka Stenographer) on the cast of her new show, Judy Justice. Whitney Kumar was not only cast as the stenographer on the show, she is a real, live, certified California Certified Shorthand Reporter. Judge Judy wanted “more elements to work with” and saw an opportunity with adding a court reporter who would share her realtime output screen with the world and readback testimony upon the Judge’s request, as many as three times per show, just as a judge would do in the real world. A stenographer is such a valuable role in every courtroom, ensuring the protection of the record and ultimately justice in America.
Judges always say, “The court reporter is the most important person in the room.” If that is the case, then there should be a Steno Barbie. But why, you ask, is a stenographer that important? Well, simply put, our record transcends the courtroom, where a court of appeal can overturn the judge’s decision. Without a transcript, a case has no chance at winning an appeal. Successful lawyers talk about trying their case to the Court of Appeals for a reason, because if they lose in the lower court, they have one more shot at winning in the COA. The court reporter has powers beyond that of a judge, in that a judge cannot order the court reporter to change the record. The court reporter is granted special powers to protect the record, even from judges who might attempt to control and influence the record. The court reporter is the only one in the courtroom who does not have to follow the judge’s orders, and instead protect the record with their own jurisdictional powers to do so. That is what makes the court reporter the most important person in the courtroom.
Barbie’s over 200 career choices are broken down into 11 categories, but it wouldn’t be hard to place a Steno Barbie into either the Public Service or Business categories, or both, one for court officials and one for freelance deposition court reporters and CART/captioners. And then there’s the choice of which method, steno or voice, or both.
I would propose that, like the Barbie Judge with a cause, we would have the Steno Barbie partner with Project Steno to raise funds to help promote careers & training in stenographic programs.
Please sign the petition today, and be a part of a movement to protect the record and ensure justice in our American courtrooms.
An ex-Veritext employee recently shared with StenoImperium that the Shareholders of Veritext have mandated that every single Veritext office nationwide have a split of 50% digital and 50% steno! We were told that each Veritext office around the country has weekly meetings with staff and they go over their numbers, ensuring that 50 percent of their business each week is digital. Also, it is a purely profit-driven decision, compelled by the V shareholders. There is no written policy that the whistleblower knows about, but it is expressly understood that it is a requirement, and it’s looked at and discussed weekly by each employee in each office nationwide. There has to be documentation of this mandate somewhere.
A reward of $1,000 is offered for anyone who can produce a document from Veritext that discusses this shareholder requirement/mandate that 50% of their business must be digital. Anyone who wishes to come forward can reach StenoImperium through this blog.
In 2021, Andy Frederick’s, the COO of Veritext in California, shared with a court reporter that digital business accounted for 10% of their CA market share, which was $10 million at the time. This 50% mandate in CA would equal $5 million in digital business in CA, a state where using the term “court reporter” (or any iteration of the title) in legal proceedings is protected and can’t be used by anyone who is not licensed by the Court Reporters Board. For transcripts to be admitted into evidence and lodged with the court in CA, it must be certified and signed by a CA CSR. Transcripts produced by Veritext’s “notaries” are being rejected by CA judges. Also, digital recorder persons are not permitted to work in court, although they try to sneak in, only to be kicked out.
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely” is one of the proverbial sayings that seems to be proved correct by experience of people’s actual behavior.
It was coined by the English nobleman Lord Acton [John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902] in 1857, using similar ideas expressed by several of his contemporaries. It was part of a quote of his opinion expressed in a letter Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
He coined the phrase, but he didn’t invent the idea; quotations very like it had been uttered by several authors well before 1887. Primary amongst them was another English politician with no shortage of names – William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham and British Prime Minister from 1766 to 1778. Pitt said something similar in a speech to the UK House of Lords in 1770:
“Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.”
More than 2,400 years ago, the Greek philosophers Plato (c. 428–347 B.C.) and Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) wrote about tyranny and the rule of law. In a tyrannical government, the government becomes corrupt and uses its power to further its own interests, instead of working for the common good.
Like Plato and Aristotle, our nation’s founders worried about tyrannical government. In John Adams’ (1735-1826) phrasing of the problem of power, he states, “My opinion is, and always has been, that absolute power intoxicates alike despots, monarchs, aristocrats, and democrats”. Recognizing that tyranny could come from a single powerful ruler or from “mob rule,” the founders wrote into the Constitution mechanisms to prevent tyranny and promote the rule of law. They separated the powers of government into three equal branches of government: the executive (the president), the legislative (Congress), and the judicial (the Supreme Court). Each branch can check the other to prevent corruption or tyranny. Congress itself is divided into the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House, elected for two-year terms, is more likely to be swayed by the passions of the people than the Senate, elected to six-year terms. The Constitution further limits the powers of the government by listing its powers: The government may not exercise any power beyond those listed. The first 10 amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, protect people’s liberties and freedoms from government encroachment. In creating the judicial branch of government, the framers gave federal judges lifetime terms, thus ensuring that judges would base their decisions on the law and not on politics.
The judicial branch of government further separates the power of government down through the lowest level of court in courtrooms by separating the duties and powers of courtroom staff, giving the court stenographer, a unique and separate power from the judge. A court reporter does not answer to the judge and is not directly controlled by the judge. The power of a court reporter is separate and apart from the judge, and I would assert, equal to or greater than that of a judge, because a court reporter can essentially overrule a judge’s order to change the record, on their own authority given to them by the state to protect and preserve the record.
The role of a court reporter is to protect the record, and their transcripts transcend the courtroom, where that judge’s rulings in a case can then be overturned by a higher court. This is the reason why judges always say, “The court reporter is the most important person in the room.” It’s the role of the court reporter who serves as the checks and balances in our judicial system, preventing corruption, precisely as the Greeks had predicted could happen, more than 2,400 years ago. For this reason, judges and the judicial council should play no role in minimizing the role that court reporters play in our justice system; it would seem to serve a self-interested agenda. Wouldn’t it behoove a tyrannical judiciate to get rid of court reporters, who are a threat to their agenda, that being one of having absolute power?
Fast forward to our current time in history, members of our judicial system stand at the precipice of absolute corruption and are venturing to drive America into a tyrannical rule of justice.
Case in point.
The country watched as Waukesha County jury convicted Darrel Brooks on 76 charges for murdering six people and injuring more than 60 others in the Waukesha Christmas parade attack Nov. 21, 2021. But what has received very little attention since being initially reported are the missing electronic recordings of his bail hearing on Nov. 5th, when Brooks was accused of running over the mother of his child with the same SUV police said was used in the Waukesha parade crimes. The bafflingly low $1,000 bail amount, even though Brooks was at the time in violation of his bail conditions for a 2020 case where he was accused of opening fire on a family member, was the subject of media attention and they requested a court transcript, only to be told that there was never a record created of the Nov. 5 2021 bail hearing because of a failure of audio recording equipment. Hearings from two other days, before and after, were also not recorded by the court.
Just a year before this took place, Waukesha County removed court reporters from their courtrooms and replaced them with electronic recording equipment, after being warned by the Wisconsin Court Reporters Association of the dangers that ER posed to the justice system. Court Reporters are known as the Guardians of the Record because the decentralized nature of keeping of the court records with licensed professionals, is the most superior way to protect the record. It protects from natural disasters, such as floods, fires, earthquakes, and it also protects from malicious data hacks. If hackers wanted to gain access to all the county’s transcripts and corrupt, destroy, or tamper them, they couldn’t do it, because they’re not there. They are with each of the individual court reporters who are using, at a minimum, 4 sources of backups for all of their court transcripts, individually, and are protecting them to ensure they are not tampered with and changed. The court reporters are responsible for the chain of custody of the record and certify that the record of the proceeding that they reported on their steno machine is 100% accurate.
When Waukesha County adopted electronic recording equipment, guess who was put in charge of the protection of the record? The court became the custodian of the record. That is a huge conflict of interest, which becomes clear in the face of the Darrel Brooks fiasco.
Milwaukee County Chief Judge Mary Triggiano claimed the missing electronic recordings were a result of a “human error” or a “technical malfunction.” Woops! My bad! The resulting investigation has been long forgotten now. It was the fox guarding the henhouse.
What would the judgment against Waukesha County have been in the resulting civil actions for six wrongful death cases and 60 injured victims have been? Settlement awards for successful wrongful death claims have ranged from $1,000 or less to tens of millions of dollars. With 6 victims, the county could have been bankrupted with hundreds of millions of dollars in just settlements. What those victims’ families needed was that transcript of the judge’s negligence in letting him out on $1,000 bail.
I don’t believe for one second that 3 days of recordings of hearings was “human error” or a “technical malfunction.” I believe it was intentional evidence tampering by the guilty party, who happened to be in charge of the evidence, and who had everything to lose if that evidence was not destroyed.
This is Tyranny. This is absolute corruption. This is where our justice system is heading, unless we stop it, unless we fight to keep human court reporters in charge of protecting the record.
The Heroic Journey: A Stenographer’s Judicial Nemesis
The American Justice System simply cannot exist without stenographic court reporters. It’s that simple – to me, at least.
Then why are Courts across the country getting rid of their stenographic court reporters? The budgetary and shortage reasons they are claiming surely can’t be the cause behind it. Those can be overcome.
Courtrooms used to function with only a judge and a court reporter, with the court reporting handling the judge’s calendaring, minute orders, exhibit handling, jury handling. Then the case loads increased and the court reporters brought in help in the form of clerks. When the clerks’ job duties became overwhelming, they brought in bailiffs to bring order to the unruly proceedings and handle protecting the jury from tampering. But then bailiffs were replaced with low-wage courtroom assistants who took over the jury handling duties and they would call the courthouse bailiffs only as needed. When budgets got tight, the first courtroom staff to get the ax was the one with the most skills and ability to do the job of 3 people, the court reporter.
Los Angeles County, California, was the first county in California to privatize court reporters in civil courtrooms in 2012, making the litigants responsible for paying the court reporters and thereby saving $12 million by getting rid of 79 official court reporters from its roster of over 500 official court reporters. A decade later, 48 of the 58 counties in California, have privatized their civil court reporters to save money. The popular saying, “As California goes, so goes the rest of the country” rang true with many states following CA’s lead, such as Colorado, Texas, Washington, Florida, and more. Some states had already privatized their court reporting services, such as Nevada, which has done so for about 30 years.
But some states took it a step farther and removed court reporters altogether, replacing them with electronic recording equipment in all of its courtrooms, including felony criminal courtrooms, such as Massachusetts and Wisconsin. Arizona recently tried and failed.
Indiana is the most recent state to attempt to remove stenographic court reporters from its courtrooms with their Trial Rule 74 currently being proposed.
I was alerted via Facebook on January 13th and quickly shared this Indiana Court Reporter’s post with all the court reporting groups I’m on in Facebook where it immediately received nationwide attention and response.
It received the attention of a popular steno blogger, Christopher Day, of Stenonymous. And he posted an article this morning.
The Indiana Judicial Branch is seeking public comment on this matter until February 6, 2023 at 12:00 p.m. (Eastern). Follow this link above and click on “Proposed changes to Trial Rule 74” to submit your comments in their form. Let them know why it would be a mistake to adopt this language and why stenographic court reporters are important.
Here is the comment I left:
“Stenographers are the bedrock of the justice system. Stenographers are unbiased protectors of the record. Stenographers produce a verbatim record of what is said, and ensure that they get every word. Stenographers keep the record and produce a transcript when needed. When a stenographer produces a transcript, that stenographer ensures that the chain of custody has never been broken.
The Chain of Custody is an important concept in understanding the role a stenographer plays in the justice system. Chain of custody means that the stenographer witnessed each word being uttered, captured it with a live verbatim stroke on their machine, within nanoseconds, made at least three backups of that word (on their machine SD backup card, their laptop, and on the cloud), has an auditory memory of the word and also a kinesthetic memory of it (their finger placement on the steno keyboard), proofread it from beginning to end in accordance with their years of training in English grammar and punctuation, produced a transcript that is formatted according to code, and certified it, certifying that every word was said by the speakers and they witnesses it and nobody has altered anything in the transcript.
When you don’t use a stenographic (or voice) reporter, you do not have the assurance that the chain of custody was not broken and you cannot possibly be certain that every word in the transcript was spoken by that speaker or that it hasn’t been changed or altered by someone with a biased interest in the case. In fact, digitally recorded proceedings, many times, will require multiple unlicensed typists to do the work, making it difficult to track them down later, and takes longer to produce.
It takes a typist four times longer to transcribe something from audio using a QWERTY keyboard, and longer if the audio quality is poor or speaker mumbling requires multiple playbacks. And working with current 50-year old statutory court rates, it would mean that transcribers would be earning less than minimum wage. Since there are laws in the US prohibiting a person from earning less than minimum wage, it would be prohibitive of a company using US workers for the transcription work, so they would be forced to outsource those jobs overseas. The recording of legal court proceedings and having them transcribed by multiple typists in other countries for below minimum wage is creating a slave trade.
Using unlicensed transcriptionists outside of the United States creates a security risk for the data contained within those transcripts. And it makes it impossible to sue and recover damages for inaccurate transcriptions. Stenographers are required to maintain licenses and carry Errors and Omissions Insurance, and attorneys can sue a court reporter if she makes a transcription error, or complain to the board, and there are consequences, including fines and the loss of licensure. Going down the road of electronically recording audio and using transcribers takes away all accountability, responsibility, and recourse if damages ensue.
Stenographers are independent contractors when it comes to maintaining our steno notes and producing transcripts. We archive our notes individually. Having a decentralized system of archiving court records is the most secure way of protecting the record. When one company or government entity were responsible for holding all the records, that can be a recipe for disaster. It creates an easy target for hackers. It can overwhelm the servers housing the data. It creates an astronomical financial burden to store all that data in one place and maintain backups. I attended the Wild West Court Reporters Convention in Snowbird, Utah, this past summer where I was able to talk to the keynote speaker, who was incarcerated and for a murder she did not commit and then exonerated after she was able to track down the court reporter on Facebook to get the transcript of her trial. The courthouse had a flood and all her records were lost. But the court reporter still had all her stenographic notes in her garage from the trial that took place 20 years ago. A stenographer has an intrinsic and strong personal duty to protect the record for their entire lifetime, and even designates a person to leave their notes to upon their death. It’s a stark contrast to a window clerk who wasn’t there and can simply say, yup, no, we don’t have it, with no accountability or repercussions and doesn’t care one iota for the record’s existence or lack thereof.
But most importantly, absolute power corrupts absolutely. We’ve seen the recent example of Darrell Brooks who was convicted of murdering five people after his SUV rammed into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin in November of 2021. There were no records of his bail hearing where he was charged with injuring a woman at a gas station with his vehicle just a week before the Christmas parade massacre. The proceedings were recorded, but the recordings of the day before, the day after, and the day of his hearing were conveniently “missing.” The appearance of impropriety is obvious when the record is maintained by the very court that would be impuned by that evidence of erroneously letting that man out on $1,000 bail. In this Waukesha case, the court is not unbiased, IMHO. The court should not be given the responsibility of keeping records, electronic recordings or otherwise, because of the possibility of their involvement in a case of obvious error. The court should give absolutely zero appearance of impropriety at all times, but when the court is the keeper of the record, it becomes an impossibility.
In the Brooks’ case, the Wisconsin Court Reporters Association warned the courts over and over about the dangers of proceeding without stenographic court reporters. Their warnings were ignored. But the court in Wisconsin did not suffer any harm, because it controlled the record and the investigation. Otherwise, had a record been produced by an unbiased stenographic court reporter, the families of those 5 murdered victims could have brought suit against the judge who erroneously let him out on a $1,000 bail. What are wrongful death cases worth these days? It depends on the victims; right? 3 dancing nannies and a husband of one, probably wouldn’t have seen an award for more than a couple million each, based on the life expectancy tables, but the child could have brought an 8 figure judgment against the small county. The combined awards in the multiple wrongful death causes of action could have bankrupted the small Waukesha county. So good for Waukesha for getting rid of the stenographic court reporters before anything like that happened.
It is for this reason that the judicial branches of government should never, ever be allowed to make decisions regarding getting rid of stenographic court reporters. There ought to be a law against it.
If the Indiana judiciate is as corrupt as the ones in Wisconsin, then by all means, move forward expeditiously with removing stenographic court reporters!”
End the extreme shortage of court reporters. Fight the unfairness and double standards. Overcome inequality and injustice. Whoa. The Sustainable Steno Goals are important, profession-changing objectives that will require cooperation among government entities, international law organizations, and leaders in the legal industry. It seems impossible that the average person can make an impact. Should you just give up?
No! Change starts with you. Seriously. Every human on earth—even the most indifferent, laziest person among us—is part of the solution. Fortunately, there are some super easy things we can adopt into our routines that, if we all do it, will make a big difference.
Have a look at just a few of the many things you can do to make an impact!
Level 1 – Things you can do from your couch
Build your social media network to include lawyers, law firms, judges, clerks, paralegals, legal secretaries, school teachers, and school counselors, and other court reporters.
Share, don’t just like. If you see an interesting social media post about stenography, share it so people in your network see it too.
Speak up! Ask your local and national authorities to engage in initiatives that don’t harm consumers or the profession.
Report online bullies. If you notice harassment on a message board or in a chat room, flag that person.
Write articles and get them published in publications that are both within our industry and outside of our industry.
Buy equipment from industry vendors that are investing in your sustainable future, such as Eclipse, who is the only CAT software vendor who has invested entirely in the future advancement of stenography alone @advantagesoftware.
Stay informed. Follow your local industry news @stenonymous and stay in touch with the NCRA online or on social media at @ncra.org. Follow your local association news.
Tell us about your actions to achieve the sustainable steno goals by using the hashtag #sustainablestenogoals on social networks.
Sign up for industry newsletters such as @stenoimperium.
Build a community. This means you are giving more to them than you want from them.
Order a fun custom caricature of you as a court reporter to use in social media, but also support those who customize the steno image in their products.
Practice steno anywhere and get a portable Steno board so you’re always on your game!
Invest in those who are investing in you – Project Steno.
Join the National Association of Court Reporters, if you’re not already a member, so that you can vote against allowing videographers to become voting members of the NCRA.
Join your state and local court reporting associations. They need you!
Join the associations in the largest 4 states, such as @CCRA and @DRA and @NYSCRA and @FSCRA and @TEXDRA. Their states have the largest impact on the industry.
Join the associations in the 4 smallest state associations and/or states without licensure requirements, such as @MCRA and @NCCRA and @ACRA and @CCRA, because those states could be targeted first for a digital takeover.
Volunteer your time in your court reporting associations. Don’t just join. They need you!
Join other struggling state court reporting associations, even if you are not certified, just to help support them. Maybe their courts just went digital or are about to… they need your funds to help stop it.
Attend your state court reporters board meetings.
Keep up to date with pending legislation that affects our profession, not only in your state but other states as well.
Assist with writing letters to Senators in your state as well as other states who have active bills that affect our profession.
Attend the California Court Reporters Board meetings, even if you don’t live in CA. At over 7,000 active court reporters, CA has the most number court reporters in the country, yet is the only state that doesn’t allow voicewriters to become certified. Find their next meeting here: @CA-CRB
Donate an item to your state association convention to use in their fundraiser. Even if you can’t go, you can support their fundraiser by donating even a gift card to be used in their silent auction.
Mentor those of all ages who are new to the profession or who are changing paths. It’s a thoughtful, inspiring and a powerful way to guide someone towards a better future.
Visit your alma mater court reporting school and talk with the students, volunteer at events, help them organize a recruiting event, mentor their students, start a scholarship program at your alma mater with your name on it, help organize a walk/race team a local marathon.
Donate to your state association scholarship program. If they don’t have one, spearhead the creation of one by proposing it at their next board meeting and volunteer to chair or co/chair the new committee!
Stay informed. Read about freelancers in other industries and learn about their business practices. Talk to your colleagues about these issues.
Host regular court reporter networking events such as dinner, happy hour, outings in your local area.
Connect with lawyers and judges. Offer to host a table/booth at an event for judges, lawyers, and paralegals where you could educate them on the issues affecting our industry. You can approach your state association and offer to volunteer your time to find these events and staff the booth and raise the donations to cover it.
Speak at events for paralegals, attorneys, judges, and court reporters and educate them about the issues our profession is facing.
Sponsor a student to attend the state or national court reporting conventions.
Spread the word. The more ideas are spread to combat the shortage, the more people act.
Host a lunch at your local court reporting school. Many students are struggling to make it through school. Let them know we care!
Share success stories, including stories that didn’t make the headlines or the JCR! Post them in Facebook groups such as Why I Love Court Reporting, or Encouraging Court Reporting Students.
Keep up to date with the latest technologies and innovation. Sign up for Stenovate or CoverCrow to help our industry’s innovators gain more traction so they can continue developing needed solutions for our small niche.
Buy through Amazon Smile and select a steno-related charity to donate your dollars to and help your steno community’s fundraising efforts. Encourage association and organization leaders to apply for the Amazon Smile program.
Level 3 – Things you can do in your Community
Get to know your local congressman and state senators. Write them letters about supporting initiatives that help our profession and litigants. Go to their office and meet them. Call and find out their event schedule and show up at ribbon cutting ceremonies where they will be so you can meet them in person, if they won’t schedule an appointment with you.
Participate in your local High School Career Days. Host a booth talking about the court reporting profession. Bring your steno machine for a live demo. Talk to students in classrooms on career days or bring a parent to work day.
Write a press release for your local newspaper when you achieve a certification in court reporting, whether it be an NCRA cert, state cert, or realtime certification, or any other career accomplishment.
Write an article about the shortage of court reporting and how it’s affecting litigation in your area and get it published in your local newspaper. They’re always looking for content.
Shop local. Supporting our industry businesses keeps people employed and businesses open. For example, instead of buying a USB adapter from Amazon, buy it from your local steno repair shop such as @stenodoctor. Instead of buying supplies on Amazon, buy it from @Pengad.
Have free business cards printed that promote stenography and have them on you at all times. When you run into the perfect prospective court reporter, you can hand them the card that points them to the NCRA A to Z Program and Project Steno and your local court reporting program.
Wear a t-shirt with a bold steno message when you’re out in public running errands. The person standing behind you in the grocery store line may be a prospective court reporter that you could reach with a back-of-the-shirt message to them.
Bring your own custom tote bag with a steno message when you shop. Pass on the plastic bag and start carrying your own reusable totes with a message about court reporting. The more the public is aware of stenography, the better.
Get everyone involved. Gather a couple of court reporters in your area and do regular community outreach projects to reach prospective court reporters – get a booth at local events, school events, grocery stores, the swap meet. Check with your local city hall regularly for their schedule of events.
Organize & initiate, through a local school or business, an A to Z Program in your community.
Hold a fundraiser and donate to your chosen non-profit stenographic project.
Level 4 – Things you can do on the job
Be on time, which means always early! Strive to be the first one there.
Get a tumbler with a steno message to take to depositions. They can be a conversation starter about our profession.
Order some custom pens with a steno message to hand out at depositions and other jobs. You can find them as low as $0.16/pen and buy them in bulk to hand out.
Order a custom laptop skin with a message about the importance of hiring a certified professional court reporter. Get some ideas from the PYRP materials.
Order business cards that highlight you’re a “gold standard” certified stenographer.
Get your “Stenographer” lanyards from the PYRP and wear them on every job. They’re a great conversation starter.
Speak up! Ask your client and opposing counsel to engage in initiatives that will not harm litigants or the profession. Voice your support for using certified stenographers!
Have the discussion with attorneys and tell them about how Superior Court judges and District Court judges across the country are rejecting transcripts that haven’t been prepared or certified by a stenographic court reporter.
Be compassionate to everyone you encounter. You never know what they are going through.
Commit to stopping negative gossip about peers and agencies. We all need to promote the profession, and that may mean keeping quiet about the things, people, and businesses we don’t like very much. Stay positive and professional.
Don’t forget to take care of your needs first!
Eat a healthy diet and drink a lot of water.
Get enough sleep.
Do regular stretches of your shoulders, arms, neck, wrists, legs before you go on the record and on every break.
Be more active. Go for walks during lunchtime or breaks.
Make time for yourself and your friends.
Be part of increasing awareness of, and support for, mental health ailments such as depression, substance abuse, Alzheimer’s.
First African-American woman to graduate from Yale Law School, to join the New York City Bar Association, to join the New York City Law Department, and to serve as a judge in the United States!
Jane Bolin was born in Poughkeepsie, New York on April 11, 1908. She was the daughter of Gaius C. Bolin, a lawyer and the first black person to graduate from Williams College. At 16, she enrolled at Wellesley College where she was one of only two black freshmen. Bolin graduated in the top 20 of her class in 1928.
Although Bolin was strongly discouraged from applying to Yale Law School due to her race, she was admitted and graduated in 1931 as the first black woman to receive a law degree from Yale. She then went on to become the first black woman to join the New York City Bar Association in 1932.
On July 22, 1939, Mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia, appointed Bolin as a judge of the Domestic Relations Court, making Bolin the first black woman to serve as a judge in the United States. Bolin proceeded to be the only black female judge in the country for twenty years. Source
Lyda Conley
First Native American Woman to Argue a Case Before the Supreme Court
Eliza Burton “Lyda” Conley was an Wyandot-American lawyer of Native American and European descent, the first woman admitted to the Kansas Bar Association. She was notable for her campaign to prevent the sale and development of the Huron Cemetery in Kansas City, now known as the Wyandot National Burying Ground. She challenged the government in court, and in 1909 she was the first Native American woman admitted to argue a case before the Supreme Court of the United States. Source
Beth Robinson
First Openly LGBTQ Woman To Serve on a Federal Appeals Court
Beth Robinson (born March 6, 1965) is an American lawyer and judge from Vermont. She is a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and is the first openly lesbian judge to serve on any Circuit Court. Robinson served as an associate justice of the Vermont Supreme Court from 2011 to 2021.
Before joining the Vermont Supreme Court in 2011, Robinson was a civil litigator at Langrock Sperry & Wool from 1993 to 2011 focusing on employment law, workers’ compensation, contract disputes and family law and representing LGBT individuals in civil rights cases.
She served as co-counsel in Baker v. State of Vermont, in which the Vermont Supreme Court ruled the state’s ban on same-sex marriage violated state law. The 1999 decision led to the state Legislature’s enactment of Vermont’s civil union law the following year. Source
Claudia Gordon
First Deaf Black Female Attorney in the United States
Claudia Gordon is the first female African American deaf lawyer in the United States. She is also the first deaf student to graduate in 2000, from the American University (AU) Washington College of Law, in Washington, DC. At AU, Gordon specialized in disability rights law and policy. Since earning her juris doctorate from AU, Gordon has been active in working to ensure the rights of people with disabilities are respected. Claudia Gordon was born in rural Jamaica. Her mother immigrated to the South Bronx, in New York, so that she could earn a better living, and planned to reunite with her children as soon as she could. Claudia and her younger siblings were left in the care of her eldest sister, Mildred Taylor, a schoolteacher. While in her eldest sister’s care, Claudia suddenly developed severe pain in her middle ears and at age eight Claudia Gordon became deaf. Gordon graduated from Howard University in 1995 with a bachelor of arts in political science. At Howard, Gordon was a Patricia Robert Harris Public Affairs Fellow, a member of the Golden Key National Honor Society, and the Political Science Honor Society. More awards and honors came at American University, where Gordon was an Equal Justice Foundation Fellow, had the Myers Law Scholarship, and the J. Franklin Bourne Scholarship. In 2002, Gordon received the Paul G. Hearne/AAPD Leadership Award from the American Association of People with Disabilities. Source
Patsy Mink
First Asian American Woman Elected Into Congress
As a third-generation Japanese American, Patsy Mink grew up in Hawaii and graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1948. She faced sexism when she was refused the right to take the bar exam in Hawaii, due to losing her Hawaiian territorial residency when she got married. She challenged the statute and was able to pass the bar but was rejected from jobs because she was married and had a child, so she started her own practice in 1953. She made waves challenging discriminatory laws and became the first woman of color and the first Asian American woman elected into Congress when she won a seat in 1964. She served for 12 terms and later ran for the 1972 presidential election, making her the first East Asian American woman to seek a presidential nomination. Source
Victoria Kolakowski
First Openly Transgender Person to Serve as a Trial Court Judge in the United States
Judge Victoria Kolakowski became the first and only openly transgender trial judge in the United States when she was elected to the Alameda County Superior Court in November 2010. Judge Kolakowski is a former President of the International Association of LGBT Judges, and of the Earl Warren American Inn of Court chapter in Alameda County. She was an attorney for twenty-one years in Louisiana and California, serving as a sole practitioner, attorney in a small firm, as general counsel for a publicly-traded company, as a senior government utility regulatory attorney, and as an administrative law judge for two different California agencies. As a judge, she has served in both civil and criminal trial assignments. She recently completed a year as the Supervising Judge of the Collaborative Courts, with subject matter oversight over all of the treatment courts (drug, behavioral health, veterans’, etc.) in Alameda County. Source
Ollie E. Watson
First Woman to Serve as President of the National Court Reporters Association (National Shorthand Reporters Association, at the time)
While the first convention of the National Shorthand Reporters Association (later renamed the NCRA), convened in Chicago in 1899 with 156 reporters in attendance, it wouldn’t be until 1951 when its first female president, Ollie E. Watson, was elected. Rachel M. Smith was the second female president, elected in 1954. Source
Charlotte E. Ray
First African American Female Attorney in the US
The daughter of an important figure in the abolitionist movement and newspaper editor, Charlotte E. Ray was encouraged from an early age to go to college. In 1872, she became the first woman to graduate from the Howard University School of Law. That same year she was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar, becoming the first African-American woman lawyer in the United States. While details of her specific area of practice are debated, there is evidence that she was the first woman to argue a case in the District of Columbia Supreme Court. An example of her writing still exists from Gadley v. Gadley, a domestic abuse case from 1875. Despite her legal knowledge and corporate law expertise, and efforts to advertise her services in Frederick Douglass’ weekly newspaper, racial and gender biases kept her from a prosperous legal career. She later became a teacher in the Brooklyn school system.
Connie Rill
Founding President of the American Association of Electronic Reporters and Transcribers (AAERT)
The founding concepts for the American Association of Electronic Reporters and Transcribers (AAERT) began with Connie Rill (California), who in 1993 invited two associates, Steve Townsend (Arizona) and Janet Harris (Wisconsin), to explore forming an organization to represent the electronic court reporting and transcribing industry. Their efforts came to fruition in March 1994 when about 75 interested private-sector practitioners met in Las Vegas to formally inaugurate AAERT. Source
Arabella Mansfield
First Licensed Female Attorney in the US
Arabella Mansfield, also known as Belle Babb Mansfield, was the first licensed female attorney in the United States. Mansfield graduated from Iowa Wesleyan University in 1866 and taught Political Science, English and History at Simpson College. In 1868, encouraged by her husband, Mansfield took the bar exam and passed with high scores despite an Iowa law prohibiting women to practice law. After Mansfield fiercely challenged the law, the court ruled that women may not be denied the right to practice and admitted her to the Iowa State Bar in 1869. Despite the newly overturned law, Mansfield chose to dedicate her life to college teaching and activist work—specifically, the Women’s Suffrage Movement.
Deborah A. Batts
First Openly LGBTQ+ Member of the Federal Judiciary & First Black Faculty Member at Fordham University School of Law
United States District Judge Deborah A. Batts is the first openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual member of the federal judiciary.
President Clinton appointed Judge Batts to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1994. A distinguished member of the bench, she has presided over several high-profile cases, including a lawsuit against former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, who was accused of failing to inform New Yorkers of the health risks of returning to their homes after the 9/11 attacks.
In 1973, she became an associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. In 1979, she became an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York in the Criminal Division. And in 1984, Judge Batts joined the faculty at Fordham University School of Law as the first black faculty member. Source
Vivien Spitz
Female Stenographer for the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial
Vivien Spitz was the first female Official Reporter of Debates in the United States Senate and a court reporter at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. In 1946 Spitz, a court reporter from Illinois, was recruited to report verbatim proceedings at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. In 1948, after returning to the US following the trials, Spitz suffered from PTSD as a result of the horrifying testimonies from witnesses and victims of the Holocaust. She courageously persisted and went on to serve as an official shorthand reporter in the Denver District Court, then as the first female Official Reporter of Debates in the US Senate, and finally as an Official Reporter of Debates in the US House of Representatives – a job she held for ten years, under four presidents. In her retirement, Spitz received several humanitarian awards for sharing her experiences from Nuremberg with students and adults interested in medical ethics and human rights. In 2005, she published the book, Doctors from Hell, The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans.
Clara Foltz
A Suffragette who Passed the “Woman Lawyer’s Bill” in California
Clara Shortridge Foltz is most notable for becoming the first female lawyer on the West Coast. In 1877, a single mother of five children, Foltz supported her young family by giving public lectures on the Women’s Suffrage Movement. It was during this time that she began studying law in the office of a local judge. After being denied the opportunity to take the California bar exam Foltz authored the “Woman Lawyer Bill, which replaced the term “white male” with “person” permitted to practice law. In 1878, on her own education and merit, she passed the bar exam and became the first woman admitted to the California bar and thus the first female lawyer on the West Coast. Foltz tried cases in court before women were allowed to serve on juries and was a leader in the women’s voting rights movement. While she struggled for sufficient income for decades, Foltz had many more “firsts” throughout her life: she was the first woman appointed to the State Board of Corrections, the first female Notary Public, the first female clerk for the State Assembly’s Judiciary Committee, the first woman to run for Governor of California, and the first female deputy district attorney in the United States.
Constance Baker Motley
First African-American woman appointed to the federal judiciary, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s first female attorney, First African-American woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court, and First African-American woman to sit in the State Senate!
Constance Baker Motley was born on September 14, 1921 in New Haven, Connecticut. Motley attended New York University in 1943 and received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 1946. During Baker’s second year of law school, future U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice, Thurgood Marshall, hired her as a law clerk.
After graduating from Columbia, Motley became the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s (LDF) first female attorney. Motley went on to become Associate Counsel to the LDF, making her a lead attorney in many significant civil rights cases.
In 1950, Motley wrote the original complaint in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. She was also the first African-American woman to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court (Meredith v. Fair). Motley was successful in nine of the ten cases she argued before the Supreme Court.
Motley was elected to the New York State Senate in 1964, making her the first African-American woman to sit in the State Senate.
In 1966, Motley broke another glass ceiling by becoming the first African-American federal judge after her nomination to a seat on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Source
Sandra Day O’Connor
First Female Justice of the US Supreme Court
Born on a cattle ranch in El Paso, TX, Sandra Day O’Connor graduated magna cum laude with a BA in economics from Stanford University at the age of 20 and received her law degree two years later. Early on in her career, despite her academic achievements, O’Connor found it difficult to find a paying job as an attorney due to gender biases. Not one to be discouraged, she offered to work for no pay and worked her way to become a deputy district attorney in San Mateo, CA and then a civil attorney for the army in Germany. Upon her return to the US she became an assistant attorney general for Arizona in 1965 and was elected to the Arizona Senate in 1969. There she became the first woman in the United States to become majority leader. In 1975 she was elected a Superior Court Judge in Maricopa county and then to the Arizona Court of Appeals in Phoenix. In 1981 O’Connor was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to fill a vacancy in the Supreme Court. She was confirmed unanimously by the Senate and sworn in as the very first female justice, shattering the highest glass ceiling in the American legal system. During her tenure on the Court, O’Connor became known as a “swing vote” on many prominent cases, including Casey v. Planned Parenthood and Bush v. Gore.
Gloria Allred
Influential Female Attorney for Women’s Rights
A well-known champion for women’s rights, Gloria Allred began her career as a high school teacher in Philadelphia, PA. While working on her graduate degree at New York University Allred became deeply involved in the civil rights movement. She moved to Los Angeles, CA in 1966 and worked for the Los Angeles Teachers Association. After her own personal experience with assault, Allred began to pursue a law degree and committed her life to helping victims. In 1975 she was admitted to the State Bar of California and began a four decades long influential legal career. She has represented a wide variety of civil rights suits involving women’s’ rights, wrongful termination and employment discrimination, and was the first lawyer to challenge same-sex marriage laws in California. A master of the press conference, Allred is known for bringing cases against high-profile men and celebrities and managing the narrative that surrounds them for her clients.
“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
— Geo. Orwell, 1984
I’m sure that we all remember hearing that juicy rumor back in high school that you couldn’t wait to tell your best friend, who tells their best friend, and on and on. Now fast forward to your life as an adult. (Depressing… but moving on). When you think of your co-workers, you subconsciously consider some better than others; right? Are you good at what you do? Everyone lives with their own narrative, but sadly those narratives are much too often controlled by people other than you! Rewind back to high school and whether that rumor was true or not, good or bad, everyone is repeating it and talking about it. Rumors can drive narratives, and narratives control your future. So who is controlling your narrative?
The definition of a narrative: “a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious.” The definition actually includes that it can be true, OR NOT. I have seen narratives that promote a persons’ career and narratives that ruin them as well. It’s funny because the same words can be used in a positive or negative light depending on the current narrative. Let’s look at a couple popular examples.
We all know Steve Jobs and the story of his career, how he was called ridged, demanding, a micro manager, and controlling. He was even fired from his own company! How crazy is that?! All of those adjectives were made out to make Steve Jobs sound bad when times were tough and other people didn’t understand his vision. Remember that this was before Steve Jobs was a public figure and his co-workers actually created this negative narrative. Don’t let your co-workers do this to you! The reality is that all of those adjectives are what drove his company to its successes. And only once his career tragedy turning into a success did all of those same words magically became compliments! Funny how that works; isn’t it?
Now let’s look at another example, Jim Harbaugh. In this example, interestingly enough, it’s the media, not co-workers, who created the narrative. While he was the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, Harbaugh was called all the same adjectives as Steve Jobs. “He’s not a player’s coach, practices are too hard, and he doesn’t tailor to the media.” So the 49ers decided to fire Jim and list all of those reasons why. Then they hired someone with the opposite character traits of Jim, and Jim goes on to coach the Michigan Wolverines. Well, what do ya know?! Jim achieves instant success at Michigan, while the 49ers became arguably the worst team in the league overnight. Funny how that works, huh? So all of those ‘bad’ adjectives that you were using to describe Steve Jobs and Jim Harbaugh have now changed to compliments, and they were actually exactly what you needed! You simply allowed someone else’s narrative to affect your perception.
In both of these cases, and many others in life, the decision makers’ listened to a wrong narrative and let it affect their decision making. It results in more power for the narrator (the media or your co-workers) and they don’t deserve any. Don’t let the media, or your co-workers drive your narrative. Be smarter than that; drive your own narrative, and be hesitant to take others for their word.
Think about this; when you witness something for the first time without any predetermined opinion, you create the narrative for what you saw. For example, let’s say that you are taking a morning jog along the ocean by yourself. As you are running, you see a small child struggling to swim out in the water. A man swims out to try and save the young boy, but unfortunately is unsuccessful, and he swims back to shore. You are the only witness to the series of events. As people now swarm to the scene, the narrative of this man’s life and this event are in your words. What if you say that they were swimming together, and it looked like the man deliberately tried to drown the boy? Or what if you say he tried to save the boy in a heroic effort, but came up short. You are literally in control of whether this man will be in court for a murder trial, or in the local news for being a hero. The power that you have by witnessing that for the first time is unreal! Now, this is a terrible and extreme example, but it gets the point across. Perception is reality and narratives are reality in the world today.
People take what you say, in the light that you create, and that becomes the public narrative. It can be the difference of someone being a hero or being put in jail. Now enter your workplace. Think about all of your coworkers and whether they are good, bad, or just average. But think about how your perception is affected by a predetermined opinion. You were probably told by someone else whether that person is good or bad before you ever had a chance to form your own true opinion. Think about it toward everything in life. How many original opinions or narratives have you adapted, or are you just going with the flow of popular opinion? The public majority follows the popular narrative, and that is why you must control your own narrative if you want to control your future. Take control of your life!
So the moral of the story is this, don’t allow other people to control the narrative of your life! The next time you are joking around with your friends about being ‘lazy,’ ‘organized,’ or a ‘procrastinator,’ be aware that you are writing your own public narrative. They listen to your definition of yourself and it translates to their definition of you later down the road. Instead, try boosting yourself up, and before you know it, people might think more highly of you.
This is true for our court reporting industry. We must control the narrative. We must know our value and impart that value. We have to talk to the attorneys that we’re in front of every day and share our narrative. What is our court reporting narrative?
Court reporters are the checks and balances in a courtroom.
Court reporters are the Gold Standard.
Court reporters are the Responsible Charge who certify every word that is said and oversees every aspect of transcript production.
Court reporters are the most important person in the courtroom because their record transcends the courtroom and could go up to the court of appeals to overturn a lower-court’s decision.
A court reporter is independent from the court and cannot be directed to change the record or withhold the record.
A court reporter is unbiased and neutral and protects the record from being compromised.
A court reporter’s transcript is not the end product. The end product of a court reporter is a record that has captured every single word spoken, regardless of cross-talk or noise, that has reported speakers correctly, and that is free from any kind of tampering, is free from bias and influence, and is uncompromised by any interested party, and is free from any conflict of interest, and is certified by a licensed professional who is following all of the applicable laws, and is accountable with their license on the line, and is usually backed up by E&O insurance.
President Biden gave us all a rather crude lesson in supply & demand economics in his Presidential speech on January 7th, one that dropped my jaw.
Replace the words “car prices” with “court reporter rates” and “cars” with “court reporters,” and then replace the word “Americans” with “stenographers.” Now you’ll understand why I was stupefied.
In 2014, the National Court Reporters Association commissioned a study conducted by market analyst Ducker Worldwide, which predicted that the demand for court reporters would exceed the supply within five years (2018), yielding a nationwide shortage. The report said 5,500 new court reporter jobs will be available by 2018 as older workers retire and leave the field. Seventy percent of the nation’s 32,000 court reporters are older than 45, the report said.
On the heels of the 2014 Ducker study, there were three camps that formed: 1) those that sought to meet the demand more efficiently to overcome a shortage; 2) those that sought to increase the supply; 3) and those that sought to “whack” the demand, and stomp it out altogether, with their own profit-driven, inferior service (digital recording and unlicensed transcriptionists) and making the backbone of the profession (the stenographers) in our country poorer with 50-year-old stale rates.
Two notable SaaS (Software as a Service) platforms began development in 2018, Stenovate and CoverCrow, both aimed at helping to increase efficiency in order to meet demand for our services as the shortage grew more dire. Stenovate helps court reporters connect with scopists and proofreaders, allowing them to take more jobs per week and increase productivity. CoverCrow helps court reporters connect with agencies, allowing them to accept more jobs and more efficiently, and reducing the noise by setting advanced job alert filters. In June of 2021, CoverCrow launched their first integration with a CAT vendor, ProCat, to allow court reporters to get job alerts right in their Winner CAT software and automated their live check-in availability status when they open or close a CAT file and went live at the NCRA convention in July in Las Vegas. In August, 2021, NCRA launched ProLink to make it easier to find court reporters, borrowing from the CoverCrow concept. And in August, 2021, Stenograph launched Apex for their users to get agency job alerts in their CASECatalyst CAT software and other workforce features for court reporters.
Those in the camp that sought to increase our supply were non-profit organizations, such as Project Steno and NCRA’s AtoZ program. These organizations were able to garner some sizeable donations from industry partners, such as agencies and vendors and stenographers. Court Reporting schools all across the country increased their recruiting efforts as well and Mark Kislingbury opened up several new court reporting schools. Stenographers all across the globe took to social media telling their stories and sharing their positive career stories and advice. The number of Facebook groups grew. The number of reporters signing up for Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others grew exponentially. Stenographers picked up their digital pens and published articles outside our profession, such as Lifehacker, Monster, and more. Whitney Kumar signed on as Judy Justice’s new on-show stenographer, instantly becoming the most popular courtroom role model and first court reporter with a name (besides Madam Court Reporter) in TV history!
There’s always going to be sharks in the water, especially when there is money to be made, whether it’s legal and ethical or not. Court reporting is a $3 billion industry, so the stakes are high. A feeding frenzy of bottom-feeders was unleashed when DRA’s Lobbyist Ed Howard clarified a loophole in the law that allowed anyone with a CA notary to act as a deposition officer. Videographers all over began to get their notary certificates. It spread like wildfire throughout the nation, with opportunistic agencies instructed their videographers to put their cameras on the ground and just record the deposition proceedings, and then eventually instructed the videographers to identify themselves as the “court reporter,” not just merely a deposition officer anymore. It evolved into hiring another button pusher to record the proceedings so that the videographer could hide the fact that they were serving in dual roles.
Are you following so far? It gets even more nefarious. In order to get past the laws in 23 states that explicitly require that transcripts be produced by stenographic means, these agencies instructed law firms to change the notice language to stipulate to break the law and have a digital recorder audio record the deposition testimony and later have it typed up by a transcriptionist. This in in violation of the 5th and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which protects the due process rights of litigants. Such a stipulation of the attorneys needs to be ruled upon by the judge in their case. Judges in CA are refusing to admit depo transcripts attached to motions or in trial that have not been certified by a CA licensed Certified Shorthand Reporter. But since only 5% of all cases get to the trial stage, they’re taking their chances. The legal negligence cases may start against those playing Russian Roulette with their litigants’ lawsuits.
Eight years post-Ducker study, we have no idea what the actual number of active court reporters there are across the country. STTI and those in camp 3 would have you believe there’s a shortage of 33,000 reporters, a made-up number. But schools across the country have seen an influx of students. It turns out COVID has had a lot of people out of work and turning to the career they always wanted to try: court reporting. We need the NCRA to do another industry outlook study. We need the NCRA to publicly admit that the Ducker study they commissioned in 2013/14, predicting the shortage in 2018 was wrong. Those numbers were never realized. We need the NCRA to give us hope. Otherwise, greedy opportunists will continue to weaponize an outdated and inaccurate study.
“Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul,” wrote Emily Dickinson. “And sore must be the storm / That could abash the little Bird / That kept so many warm.”
Staring ahead on New Year’s Eve, at what appear to be the coming storms of 2022, this once-hopeful profession is going to have to fall back on its reserves.
Are you constantly working for hard earned dollars or are you working towards easy money?
As we grow up we’re taught, “you need to work hard.”
You need to get paid for your time.
You need to clock in.
You need to clock out.
You need to get paid for the time that you’re spending.
And that’s how your value is created.
That’s how you believe your value is measured.
And that’s how you will be rewarded in life.
Then, when we hear easy money referenced, it’s often made out to be a bad thing.
Too often we see people in society who are just grinding away in their 9-to-5 jobs.
And they actually value their own worth in, “How much time can I put in? How much work can I do?”
They don’t think nearly enough about leverage.
Most of their time is spent in the immediate day‑to‑day work.
But they should be spending more time thinking about how to make things better, and thinking about leverage.
Leveraging their time and energy by finding people to help get the results that they want, in an efficient manner, so they don’t have to be hustling every day.
Whether in work or life, most of us strive to accomplish more in less time. Wouldn’t it be nice to do in a few hours what it used to take you half a day? By concentrating and minimizing distractions, you can.
The chances are that you are not taking full advantage of the cutting-edge technology available to you. There are now several options in our market to consider.
Here are 3 ways court reporters can stop the hamster wheel spin cycle of working hard and leverage your time to work smarter.
CONTROL & MINIMIZE DISTRACTIONS
In order to work smarter, you must control your surroundings and minimize distractions. Make sure to hide that cell phone! One study found that having your phone present, even if you are not using it, can make you perform 20% worse than if it was out of sight.
One of the most impressive (and user-friendly) tools is a collaborative SaaS cloud-based software known as CoverCrow. Their platform helps you keep your job alerts lean and mean by focusing on only the jobs in which you would be interested. You set your own customized job alerts using advanced filters so you only get notices for the specific types of jobs you want to take and allows you to focus on the jobs that make more money.
It helps keep you off social media sites like Facebook altogether, which is a big black hole that sucks your time. CoverCrow allows you to check in with your live availability and current GPS location, letting agencies know that you are available for the next job and also locates jobs close to you while you’re out in the field, giving you that ability to take more jobs during the day and reduces wasted travel time. Or you can set the alerts to notify you for in-person jobs only, eliminating travel time altogether.
DELEGATE
Mastering the art of delegation is an essential skill for high-earning court reporters. Even the biggest control freaks, perfectionists, and micromanagers can find this difficult, but find ways to accomplish this. The key is understanding that the ability to delegate will make you more productive. One study even showed that CEOs who delegate experience lower levels of decision fatigue, fewer instances of burnout, and generate 33% more revenue than those with low delegation skills.
Delegate the stressful task of scheduling by using niche industry tools like CoverCrow’s auto accept feature, which can schedule lucrative jobs for you while you’re on the record so you are always the first to respond and you don’t lose that perfect next assignment.
Building a team of scopists and proofreaders and delegating your most time-consuming tasks to them can free you up to take more high-income-earning jobs and stay on the record 5 days a week. Use the latest tool for court reporters, Stenovate, to not only find and hire the right team, but also manage your entire workload right on their platform.
DOUBLE DOWN!
The newest scintillating remote-work trend for white-collar workers, in industries from tech to banking to insurance, is to double their pay. This includes freelance and official court reporters alike. Their schtick is to “work two full-time jobs.” Like Fight Club, the first rule for these folks is “don’t tell anyone” and “don’t do too much work, either.”
Dual-jobsters, from freelance to official, bragged on Facebook groups that they earned over $50k more per year by being able to take multiple remote jobs per day from the comfort of their home or courthouse office using remote platforms such as Zoom.
CoverCrow spent a good part of last year programming in all the different certification requirements all over the United States to help take the guess work out of accepting remote jobs in other states. Agencies and reporters have the assurance that they are in compliance with each state’s certification requirements when they post jobs or find jobs on the CoverCrow platform.
As you jump in to 2022, I hope you take the time to think of ways to stop the cycle of working for hard-earned dollars and create systems and put people in the right seats that have you earning easier money.
A tsunami of corporate greed and dishonesty has filled our nation’s leading providers of court reporting products and services. The big companies in the court reporting profession are like an obnoxious, gum-chewing roommate who owns a car when you don’t — just because we can’t live without them doesn’t mean that living with them is easy, especially when they’re, you know, trying to kill stenography and stuff.
You see, while the sales spiel of every moral company is to offer its community some way to make our lives better, to offer products and services that serve genuine human needs, a whole bunch of them in our niche legal industry have secretly been doing the exact opposite. These businesses need not be concerned about ethics in their pursuit of profit. Their weak view of corporate social responsibility drives their principal and overriding responsibility to shareholder profits, and their myopic view that their sole responsibility is to conduct the operations of the company in such a way as to maximize the wealth of their shareholders.
So, let’s get down to the brass tacks and discuss some of the worst examples … that we know about, anyway.
Planet Depos is one of the large international court reporting agencies that engages in a number of practices that skirt the rules and ethics of the profession.
Cost Shifting
First is cost shifting, where a court reporting agency gives their client, the lawyer who hires them, a discount and then turns around and charges the opposing counsel a much higher rate to make up for the loss. An easy way to spot this is when reporters are paid more for copy orders than for the original. Don’t fall for this.
Anti-contracting statute
Many states have anti-contracting statutes, but Planet Depos doesn’t appear to have any hesitation with skirting those. In Indiana, for example, their Code 33-41-3, bans court reporting services from entering into a contract with a person interested in the outcome of a litigation proceeding. The law was enacted during the O’Bannon administration specifically to stop national court reporting firms, but Planet Depo has gotten around the statute by enlisting the local firms on a case-by-case basis, rather than contracting with them.
Many states, such as Washington, have laws that requires court reporters to offer equal services and fees to all parties, but Planet Depos allegedly ignores those laws.
Fraudulent use of NCRA Certification logos
Kathy DiLorenzo, Planet Depo’s ambassador to reporters who is responsible for recruiting reporters all across the country, offers reporters large annual contracts to lock them in to working exclusively for Planet Depos. It’s much like an employment agreement, but calling it that would mean they’d actually have to pay employment taxes, so they just call it a contract to avoid those bothersome little details. Kathy retired from reporting after her stint as the President of the National Court Reporters Association, where, in her inaugural speech, she dared to be the first to broach the subject of being “method agnostic” and was tarred and feathered for it, and was tortured for her entire term. She was permanently emotionally scarred from the experience and confessed as much. The mere mention of it elicits a rather noticeable facial tick and twitch of her upper lip.
Wouldn’t you know, another NCRA past President now sits on the STTI board. Kathy DiLorenzo is listed as a Director. There she is right on the STTI home page of their website. Kathy assures reporters that they will always have a place in the industry, especially reporters that can do realtime and dailies. But in my humble opinion from personal observation, Kathy is on a mission to destroy the stenography industry and make sure that we all go to hell after what we did to her on the day of her inaugural speech as President of the NCRA. Who remembers the Steven King movie Carrie? Not sure if I should feel sorry for her or fear her. Probably safer to just fear her. She’s the only player of the lot of them that is in it with a personal vengeance, a woman scorned, and not pure profit motives.
Planet Depos is one of the biggest proponents of recruiting and training digital reporters, but worse, marketing and educating attorneys to use them and to change their deposition notices to get away with it in the 23 states that have laws against it.
Not only is Planet Depo’s “Digital Reporter” solution inferior, it actually contributes to exacerbating the court reporter shortage. After pouring money into recruiting and training digitals all over the country, Planet Depos realized it had a problem on its hands in the 23 states that require a licensed CSR to produce transcripts, but what’s worse is when they started to realize that, perhaps because of the shortage of certified shorthand reporters in the first place, they couldn’t find any CSR’s to produce transcripts of their audio/video recordings now after the fact. So Planet Depos hosted a Zoom seminar for court reporters on the state of the industry, which turned into a let’s-recruit-court-reporters-to-transcribe-our-audio-files presentation by building confidence in just how great their digital reporters were doing at pushing a button. Kathy and her team tried to set the stage with their phony STTI numbers that were based on a 2013/2014 Ducker Worldwide study. What’s phony about these slides and their projections are that they are not based on any current data, but they simply just took the old 2013/2014 Ducker data, that was obviously wrong in the first place, and only forecasted up to 2018, and then they drew the lines out on the graph in a downward progression to show the future up to 2023 and 2033, and voila! There you have it! An even greater shortage is predicted. All the numbers below that come after the 2013 study are completely fabricated by STTI and not substantiated by any independent study of our market.
At this reporter Zoom training, Kathy DiLorenzo then tried to convince the attendees that every stenographer who wanted a job would have one. But we needed to first help them solve the problem of our shortage by helping them with their backload of audio files that they’ve been doing without us just fine.
The obvious problem here is that transcribing audio files takes four times as long to transcribe and takes more manpower. It would require 4 people to do the job that we could do in person with only one human being. If you had a shortage of machine court reporters before they introduced their “digital reporting” solution to the world, then you’re going to have an even bigger shortage of court reporters after years of recording audio of proceedings are piling up. You can’t possibly train a transcription army of that size in all the nuances that it takes a machine stenographic reporter decades to learn in the field.
Another, more serious problem is that no self-respecting, ethical, professional and certified stenographic shorthand reporter would certify a transcript that they had no part in creating. That is, after all, what we are certifying when we sign our name, that it was taken in our presence. We are the responsible charge of the proceeding who not only was present for every word spoken, but we were at the center and in control of the entire production of the transcript and are putting our license on the line in certifying it. It means that we personally hired and oversaw the production of every aspect of creating the transcript. Court reporters hire subcontractors such as proofreaders and scopists who work under their direction and control. Court reporters have control over the transcript production at all times. Being handed a video or audio file by an agency is completely outside of our authority as the responsible charge. We have no idea who produced that video or audio, if it has been altered or compromised, and we don’t even know where the original file is housed, whether it’s some digi person in the Philippines or elsewhere. We have no idea how many hands it has been through.
The National Society of Professional Engineers went through a similar struggle in their profession when anyone could call themselves an “engineeer.” The NSPE put a stop to it by publishing a “Responsible Charge” statement on their website (which cost them nothing but brain power), they focused on getting every state to adopt a standard title of “Professional Engineer” (“PE”) and then mandating state licensing as a PE, and they criminalized anyone performing the duties of a PE without a license, and the licensing board was given the teeth and budget to prosecute offenders.
Planet Depo’s digital reporter solution is a complete failure and a danger to the entire legal industry. But they are continuing to recruit digital court reporters anyway.
This is from a Planet Depos newsletter send on December 22, 2022, where they advertise for “Digital Court Reporters” in every state. But you’ll see the April 20, 2023 newsletter now advertises for a “Deposition Officer” in California, where they were recently investigated, simply changing the title.
April 20, 2023 e-newsletter:
The California Court Reporters Board is powerless to act because of poorly written legislation that does not clearly state that it’s not only what title they use to call themselves, but it is the job they are doing that should be considered in these investigations, and does not give the CRB the power to enforce the laws,
Misleading advertising of NCRA certifications and advertising for digital court reporters to take jobs in states that don’t allow “digitals” by simply changing the job ad’s title are not all that I take issue with when it comes to Planet Depos. I saw a post on Facebook where Planet Depos was instructing their videographers on Zoom depos to call themselves the “court reporter.”
This image below was a letter from Planet Depos written in 2017 to their videographers when they were just getting started with their solution to just record a deposition with the intent of transcribing it later if it’s ever needed.
Here below is a Facebook comment about the letter by a certified stenographic shorthand reporter speculating about Planet Depos evolution of digitals. Being on the front lines, showing up in court where these fake transcripts are starting to be submitted (and getting rejected by judges), and in depositions at law offices all over the country, CSR’s see what’s happening with their own eyes, and they make friends with attorneys and paralegals and receptionists and hear what is happening in the law firms they service, and reporters (the real ones) talk to each other about what they’re seeing. Nothing is hidden.
Yes, that’s Planet Depos apparently instructing their videographer to put the camera on the floor to record the audio surreptitiously. This snippet should send a chill up the spine of every lawyer and judge in the country. This is written about a company that’s taking the law into their own hands, skirting the laws against surreptitious recordings, skirting the laws requiring a CSR in 23 states, violating the US Constitution’s 5th and 14th Amendments that offer due process protections to litigants, flagrantly casting aside all professional ethics.
Planet Depos can tell stenographers they’ll have a job as long as they want one until they’re blue in the face, but the reality is that they ARE replacing us. This type of post on Facebook is being seen more and more frequently.
Original post on a court reporters Facebook group about why her job canceled.
The response from a seasoned certified shorthand reporter.
In California, a Certified Shorthand Reporter must produce and certify a transcript in order for it to be admissible in court. A Certified Shorthand Reporter must also be present. They don’t have to be in person, with the COVID emergency orders still in place, but they must be present for the entire proceeding. Planet Depos and all the other players pushing their digital and AI solution don’t seem to be complying with the state laws in 23 states that require transcripts to be produced by certified reporters; don’t you think? They can stipulate to other means all they want, but judges, who are the ultimate arbiter, are not admitting transcripts produced by notaries or transcriptionists, and they’re also not admitting video that is not accompanied by transcripts signed by Certified Shorthand Reporters.
A post by a California Certified Shorthand Reporter who reported a civil trial as an Official Court Reporter Pro Tempore in CA.
Planet Depos can coach law firms and attorneys about stipulating to using their inferior digital transcription and video-only methods all they want. Two attorneys can stipulate to anything they want. That much is true. But the judge must rule on it. And when it gets to court in trial, in the 5% of the cases that do make it to trial, it will not be admitted by a trial judge. Attorneys are playing Russian Roulette in taking a chance their cases won’t go to trial and that a judge won’t notice that their transcripts are not produced by a licensed Certified Shorthand Reporter in 23 states that require it or that they can get the other side to agree to offer a video with no accompanying transcript and pull one over on a judge who will allow it or that they can get an official court reporter pro tem who is obtuse enough to let them talk her into certifying their video at trial. Those attorneys are opening themselves up to the possibility of a malpractice lawsuit and better hope their malpractice insurance is up to date. They better hope they win their case and their client is happy with the result of the verdict, despite their legal malpractice and negligence.
US Legal
Where do I start. Do I start with US Legal’s CSO allegedly bullying the women in our field? Or US Legal allegedly underpaying stenographers? Or with US Legal’s allegedly unreasonable rates for services. How about the fact that US Legal is allegedly misleading the world and exaggerating about the court reporter shortage with impunity?
U.S. Legal allegedly engages in cost shifting – and allegedly skirts the rules and ethics of the profession – by allegedly giving the lawyer who hires them a discount and making up for the loss by charging the opposing lawyer a much higher rate.
Or maybe we can discuss how US Legal is allegedly operating in the state of New York where it has been inactive for two decades?
But what about the $50,000 donation US Legal made to Project Steno to support the recruitment of stenographers? Isn’t that proof that they support stenographic methods?
If US Legal were legitimately changing course and embracing digital technology and method-agnostic speech-to-text technologies, then wouldn’t their $50k donation to promote recruiting stenos be “undermining” those efforts? Wouldn’t their business and employees and customers and shareholders be harmed? Let me explain why that is possibly not the case. In order for US Legal, and the others, to succeed in fundamentally transforming our legal ecosphere with their “digital reporter” solution, they still need machine stenographers; right? Why? Well, for one, there are still laws in 23 states that require that transcripts be produced by licensed certified stenographic reporters or voicewriters. But most importantly, and most overlooked, is the fact that stenographers don’t learn most of what they need to do their jobs in school. They learn it on the job. And there is no textbook in existence to teach everyone what stenographers know in order to replace us. -There is literally no one-place-you-can-go to learn the art of stenography and producing transcripts. It doesn’t exist. So until they can change the laws in 23 states, and until they can suck all that knowledge from our collective brains, they need us.
Regardless of the appearance of helping stenographers and ingratiating themselves with all things steno, the President & CEO of US Legal is on the board of directors of the Speech-to-Text Institute. That says it all.
US Legal President & CEO is on the STTI’s board
Verbit
Verbit isn’t even a company that’s in the court reporting profession. They’re the ultimate outsider with no connection to the court reporting industry. Court reporters across the country are receiving cold calls from telemarketing people at Verbit who are claiming that they have more “NCRA certified legal transcriptionists” than any company in the U.S. They are so ignorant about our industry that they don’t even know that’s not even a certification that the National Court Reporters Association offers. There’s no such thing. Verbit is perpetrating the greatest fraud ever committed in our Legal Industry, if not all of America.
Verbit is an Israeli company, but they claim to be headquartered in Manhattan, New York, which is allegedly a lie. They claim to have Unicorn Status, where they are valuated at over $1 Billion, but they have no presence in the legal industry which they claim to serve. Their plan is to replace all court reporters in the United States with their subpar automated speech recognition (ASR) software, but they’ve been calling stenographers and begging them to certify their transcripts for them. Their allegedly outright lies and false claims are destroying the image of stenographers — you know, the real court reporters, steno machine writers and voice writers, stenographers, the real guardians of the record, the Responsible Charge; don’t you think?
Verbit claims their Automated Speech Recognition solution is 90% or more accurate; however, a Stanford University studied ASR from the largest companies in the world and found that it’s only 50 to 80 percent accurate, and that’s just with the words appearing on a page. Court reporters are marked off for punctuation errors and formatting errors on tests where we must achieve an accuracy of 96.5% to pass. Realtime reporters, however, consistently write at above 99.8% accuracy. With 300 words on a page, Verbit’s ASR would only be getting 150 words correct, without punctuation. A good realtime reporter makes one mistake every 4 pages, and that could just be a punctuation error. Their claim that ASR is 90% accurate does not include punctuation, which is not included at all in ASR programs.
Automatic Speech Recognition has many well-documented problems. Dropped text due to latency and well-documented racial bias have no place in our legal system or in the captioning industry. With published proof that digital reporters in Kentucky are utilizing speech-to-text companies like Verbit for their transcription needs, privacy should also be of the utmost concern for litigators and litigants alike.
Verbit was allegedly caught putting real transcripts of legal proceedings up on their website to test and train new transcribers – transcribers who are not licensed, not sworn in, not even located in the United States. Verbit allegedly did this without any permission from any of the litigants related to the transcripts. The breach of privacy is grossly egregious in my humble opinion. It’s the kind of practice an outsider to not only the legal industry, but to the United States of America would make, and one that should not be tolerated; right?
Verbit is allegedly in bed with all of the big proponents of Digital Reporting in our industry. We found out that BlueLedge allegedly has ties to Veritext, US Legal, and even Stenograph. Verbit’s only “in” to our court reporting profession has been to partner with the defectors, our Achilles heel. These traitors of the court reporting profession were the only ones to embrace Verbit’s subpar AI technology. They’re holding onto each other like shipwrecked swimmers hoarding pieces of wood. They’re getting absolutely no support from the tried-and-true traditional Gold Standard of the mainstream Court Reporting profession.
Verbit’s partners in attempting to fundamentally change the court reporting landscape with their AI-Digital Transcription partnerships, clear as day.
Veritext
VeriTEXT is the biggest offender, in my opinion, when it comes to cost shifting practices – and allegedly skirts the rules and ethics of the profession – by giving the lawyer who hires them a discount and making up for the loss by charging the opposing lawyer a much higher rate.
But where Veritext has really screwed over reporters is with their Digital Training programs. Rather than recruiting and training new stenographers to enter the field, they have decided that it’s more profitable — 50% more, in fact — to create a whole new field that can push a record button. According to Andy Fredericks, Veritext’s Director of Operations in CA, digital court reporters now make up 10% of their business and is growing. If Veritext has an estimated annual revenues of $100 million, that would mean their digital business is already garnering $10 million for them annually, roughly, and it’s growing rapidly. The profits on their digital program is 50% higher than using stenographers who invoice for their services. Veritext is charging the same rates to their attorney clients whether they send a stenographer or a digital button pusher. And Veritext has no plans to back down from their aggressive plan to grow their digital business. What’s really egregiously wrong about this though, in my humble opinion, is the fact that Veritext is going about pushing digitals on their clients by lying about not having an available stenographer to send, when, in fact, the shortage is not as exaggerated as Veritext is claiming it to be.
Veritext is even paying their new digitals salaries and benefits, which crosses the line and violates the ethics of the profession, allegedly. There are attorneys who sit on Veritext’s board, which makes it a conflict of interest, in my humble opinion, for Veritext’s digital employees to be working on cases, whether it be trials or depos. It would also be a conflict of interest for stenographers to be working for Veritext because of its board that includes attorneys, or even worse, reporting a deposition or trial where one of the Veritext Board Member attorneys is on the case you’re reporting!
Many reporters have allegedly witnessed Veritext boldly skirting the laws that require transcripts be certified by Certified Shorthand Reporters (CSR’s) in 23 states. Veritext has created marketing materials and is hosting Zoom training sessions for attorneys and paralegals in 23 states to teach them how to skirt the laws by changing the wording on their depo notices to say that if a stenographer is not available, they will use a digital.
But Veritext goes farther in their alleged scheme to break the laws in those 23 states. They are having these digital recordings then transcribed by notaries, not Certified Shorthand Reporters as the law requires in 23 states. When asked about this, Andy Fredericks fessed up and openly, boldly admitted to me, that yes, in fact, they ARE having transcripts produced by notaries in CA, a state that requires by law that transcripts be produced by CSR’s, and he professed that he knows of “no law that prohibits attorneys from stipulating away those laws. ” But they’re also just skipping the stipulation and stating that “absent an objection,” they’re basically just going to break the law and do what they want; right? This deposition had “Ivory Hallstein,” a “Digital Reporter” and “notary” swear the deponent, record the proceedings, and then included a signed certificate of Notary Public by Ivory, page 27 at the end stating that it was transcribed from the recording, and then the transcriber’s certificate on page 28, clearly violating the law in CA.
Ivory is a notary, not a Certified Shorthand Reporter, acting as the depo officer in CA
Ivory is certifying the transcript with a Certificate of Notary Public. This does not meet the requirement that transcripts in CA must be produced by a Certified Shorthand Reporter licensed in CA.
The same depo proceeding was then transcribed by Helen Venturini, a transcriptionist, and attached her Certificate of Transcriber to the deposition transcript. This also violates the law in CA which says that a transcript must be produced by a Certified Shorthand Reporter in CA. This deposition transcript is inadmissible in a CA court.
What’s even more shocking is that Veritext is now including a “Company Certificate” on transcripts. Veritext is now the transcriptionist. Get a load of this:
Veritext attaching its own “Company Certificate” to deposition transcripts. T
Veritext’s “Company Certificate” claims that the transcript and exhibits were submitted by a court reporter, yet no court reporter was involved in this deposition whatsoever. Veritext was acting solely as a transcription company. Then their “Company Certificate” goes on to state that Veritext “complies with all federal and state regulations with respect to the provision of court reporting services,” while not actually offering any court reporting services. Veritext only provided transcription services, which is against the law in CA to have a deposition transcript produced by anyone other than a California Certified Shorthand Reporter. Veritext is claiming to be the Responsible Charge, a position only a Certified Stenographic Court Reporter should have. Veritext employs the digital notary, employs the transcriptionist, has attorneys sit on their board who are also using Veritext for their deposition and court proceedings to produce their transcripts, all of which are unethical and are a conflict of interest, in my humble opinion.
Well, Andy Fredericks of Veritext, you’re looking for the law that prohibits attorneys from stipulating away the law, but you’re looking in the wrong place. It’s unconstitutional. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States protect the Due Process rights of litigants that you are violating with impunity, out of your own mouth! All persons are to be protected of Due Process of Law. These articles act as a restraint against those that seek to change the law by its mere will, which is what Veritext is doing and is teaching attorneys and paralegals to do in an attempt to make more profits for themselves.
Sure, attorneys can freely stipulate to anything, but in order to make it so, it requires the ruling of the court! You cannot simply stipulate to break the law and then just break the law. The judge gets to decide and rule on attorneys’ stipulations when it comes to laws. Judges are the ones who make a ruling as to whether or not your transcript or video that was produced without the involvement of a Certified Shorthand Reporter get to come into his courtroom or not, and they’re not and they won’t.
According to the CRB, only certified transcripts created by a licensed court reporter are guaranteed to be accepted in court. In the case of the deposition transcripts above, a judge in Kern County CA refused to admit these transcripts that were not transcribed by a licensed CA shorthand reporter in a CA trial where they were attached to a motion in that trial this past summer of 2021.
CALIFORNIA CODES – CODE OF CIVILPROCEDURE – SECTION 2025.010 – 2025.620
Stenograph
Warning To Digital Innovators: Regulated Industries Can Bite…
Yes, Anir, the Stenography industry is unlike any industry you’ve ever experienced because it’s Regulated. We’re not “divided.” We stand united behind Steno. You’re dividing us with your move to cater to button pushers who are unlicensed in a regulated industry!
The backlash over Stenograph’s new MaxScribe product has been seen as an attack on corporate freedom and digital entrepreneurship as a whole. Such claims are inaccurate because undertakings, irrespective of their legal form, location and mode of operation (digital/ ‘traditional’), are equally subject to, among others, (i) competition law; (ii) the respective regulatory framework, and (iii) rules on (un)fair competition. If an undertaking is found to be in violation of any of these, then naturally respective measures shall be taken to deal with the consequences of the infringement.
At the same time, these decisions are part of an increasing pattern whereby conflicts between regulated business and digital networking platforms in many different industries are playing out in the legal and regulatory arenas. Booking.com is a typical example. Others include Uber, Airbnb, and PayPal. The case of Booking.com should be seen from this perspective. Access to the website has been restricted temporarily by the Turkish court on the grounds of unfair competition, and technically, the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) has implemented the order of the court.
To be abundantly clear, Anir Duta, the President of Stenograph, the largest 800-lb gorilla in the Stenography industry, now sits on the board as Vice President of STTI, The Speech To Text Institute, which many have called out as being a conflict of interest. Some claim, with merit, that STTI is a propaganda machine for proponents of digital technology.
Since I began writing this article, Anir Dutta’s video has been removed where he talks about his dismay at how our industry is divided on the issue of introducing method agnostic technologies to produce a transcript, which he wrongly believes is our end product. The only YouTube video of Anir that is remaining is his interview with Jim Cudahy of STTI on Spotify.
Who does Anir say he has a duty to? Who are his stakeholders in this ecosystem? He describes them as the stenographers, voice reporters, digital reporters, or agencies, or transcription services. But he leaves off the most important stakeholders in the legal ecosystem: the attorneys, judges, and litigants. And let me just add my observation that digital reporters, agencies, and transcription services have never been Stenograph’s customers or focus, that is, before Anir arrived. He’s selling out the litigants, attorneys, and judges to go after the bigger profits that he can get by catering to the new stakeholders – the agencies now hiring notaries, videographers, and transcription services who are all seeking to replace machine stenographic court reporters, his bread and butter. He may just succeed if we don’t do more to stop him now, while he still needs us. We won’t have any leverage left once we reach a tipping point.
Yesterday’s news story (4/18/2023) says it all.
The news sent shock waves through the court reporting community yesterday, leaving decades-long supporters scrambling for other options as software and hardware providers.
The outrage is real:
Stenograph’s new leadership could be to blame for the new direction. In an effort to expand their market reach and increase profits with new technology offerings, they are alienating the customers that have spent 80 years being loyal to them, supporting them, building them, and buying their products that were built specially for their niche market. By focusing on the “transcription” aspect of a court reporters’ job, they are missing the essence of the value that we bring to the legal profession altogether. My belief and understanding is that Stenograph aims to REPLACE steno court reporters, steno agencies, steno CART providers, steno captioners, and steno students with inferior transcriptionists. Their new partnership speaks volumes.
Where do we go from here?
You don’t have a real court reporting industry if the dominant portion of it has no interest in being legal. There’s no other regulated industry in the world that operates like that.
The regulated businesses’ discontent is understandable since customers favor companies that are taking full advantage of the digital economy/world and offering cheaper services, wider choice, larger corporate profits, etc. Digital entrepreneurs may even be several steps ahead of ‘traditional’ service providers in some aspects like recruiting, sales, and training. This is not bad. Being able to adjust your business to the emerging challenges of the digital economy is part of being competitive and successful in the market, as long as it is done within the legal and regulatory framework (i.e. taxation, licensing, permits, fair competition, working conditions, etc.).
In any case, regulated businesses that are currently at war with digital entrepreneurs may be perceived as unofficial ‘watchdogs’ of online platforms’ compliance with laws and regulations. Beware…they may bite!
Court reporters need to look to other regulated industries and start implementing some of the actions they’ve taken to fight off unregulated outliers. Court reporters need to stand united, adopt customized technologies that can ensure their success, and fight back against the invasion of digital entrepreneurs who threaten not only the livelihood of licensed and legitimate court reporters, but Justice!
A divide in the industry has been taking place. It’s time to just call it what it is. Those businesses who are adopting digital reporting where they record the proceedings and have it transcribed later, are simply “transcription companies” now, and not “court reporting” companies. If every stenographer and voice writer stopped working for “transcription” companies and buying software and hardware from transcription companies, and let the world know that those companies are no longer “court reporting” companies, it could end this fight right now. The money they make off court reporters when working for them and the money they make when their products are bought goes to marketing digital alternatives and are helping them to pivot to this new business that threatens not only the livelihood of court reporters, but their very existence; wouldn’t you agree? In my opinion, if court reporters continue to support them, it will be the death of court reporters and the court reporting profession. It will be the death of Justice in America!
Reporters divide and conquer, but they also must be united. We are stronger together!
Adopting AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies in the court reporting industry is one of the most complex issues of our generation, despite the great promise that AI holds for CAT (computer-aided transcription) software vendors looking to create a better and faster experience for its customers and higher translation rates for the ultimate end users of a reporters’ realtime feed.
Applying AI technologies is a critical competitive advantage. Even once we have a sense of how we could serve our market with AI, adopting and scaling these technologies within our industry is a behemoth of an undertaking. The conventional wisdom – to start small – has given way to a recognition that organizations need a fundamental shift in their approach to data to do even that well. Onboarding AI is not an easy undertaking.
Especially as the pandemic has accelerated the use of remote technologies — such as Zoom who has incorporated ASR (automated speech recognition) technology into their platform for judges and attorneys to use, instead of a stenographer’s realtime streaming — the big question on everyone’s mind is whether all that onboarding eventually means that the ASR bots are going to take all our human jobs. The promising answer from most experts is that there will certainly be roles for humans even in a machine-powered future; the real question is what those jobs will be, how our court reporting industry can prepare our workforce to incorporate emerging AI technology, and how human stenographers and AI will work together.
Finally, the question at the crux of any discussion about AI and ASR is this: Are we managing the machines, or are they managing us? Leaders need to set boundaries for the bots (ASR, AI), ethical, legal, and otherwise. There are a myriad of ways that AI’s tentacles can reach dangerously beyond what we expect – so we need to learn how to keep them reined in.
How Big Agencies Exploit Legal Loopholes in the Use of Digital Recorders
Many large agencies that advocate for the use of digital recorders are managing to circumvent laws in 25 states that require transcripts to be produced by licensed Court Reporters (CSRs). They argue that these laws can be bypassed through stipulations, and in some cases, they’ve succeeded in convincing the legal system of this. For example, a Veritext executive recently stated that they have yet to find any law preventing them from stipulating to the use of a digital recorder instead of a stenographer.
Due Process and Its Constitutional Roots
The concept of due process is deeply embedded in U.S. law, particularly in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no individual shall be deprived of “life, liberty, or property” by the government without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment extends these protections to all U.S. citizens, regardless of race, gender, or religion.
Due process ensures that legal matters are handled according to established rules and principles and that individuals are treated fairly. Its origins can be traced to the Magna Carta, a foundational document from the 13th century that established key legal protections. One notable clause in the Magna Carta reads: “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.” This essentially means that a judge must review and rule on any stipulation made in a legal case.
The Due Process Exclusionary Rule: A Barrier to Illegal Practices
The Due Process Exclusionary Rule states that if evidence is obtained illegally — for instance, through an unlawful search and seizure without a warrant — that evidence cannot be admitted in court. This principle can be extended to the creation of transcripts. If a transcript is made illegally, through methods that violate state laws or regulations, it cannot be used in court.
Stipulations and the Role of the Judge
While attorneys may attempt to stipulate away legal requirements, the law is clear: only a judge has the authority to validate such stipulations. Attorneys cannot simply bypass laws on their own. If they wish to alter or disregard a specific legal provision, such as the requirement for a licensed CSR to produce transcripts, they must present their stipulation to the judge. Only after the judge’s ruling will the stipulation hold weight.
Attorneys can stipulate to anything they want, but only a judge can make it so. If attorneys want to stipulate away a law, then they must bring it before the judge who will then make a ruling on their stipulation before it will be allowed.
“The presence of fear is a sure sign you’re trusting in your own strength.” ~A Course in Miracles
As human beings, we all experience fear. Our bodies are built for survival, and our fear is the gatekeeper. Fear protects us and keeps us safe and secure by making us aware of any potential threat that might come our way. Fear breeds suspicion, caution, and vigilance.
Those things are fine if a hungry lion is chasing you. But if your intention is to live in the abundance that is always here, to lead with the heart, to be open to the depth and breadth of what might be possible in your life, then fear deserves your attention.
We fear being replaced by Speech to Text Recognition Software (ASR). We fear that ASR is crazy good. We fear that our vendors and associations are betraying and abandoning us. Many stenographers will simply want to run and retire or find another career. We can’t let fear dictate our fate. We must stand and fight! Because the truth is, we can win and survive long into the future and make more money as stenographers than ever thought possible! We must learn how to control our fear, or it will control us.
Purely a Matter of Choice
Simply said, running from fear doesn’t work. If we avoid turning to face it, it will nip at our heels forever. What does this mean? We live a fear-led life, choosing partners, jobs, and friends out of fear. Habits and addictions run wild because we are afraid of meeting our feelings. We feel separate and alienated, while deep inside, we recognize the echo of truth whispering softly.
Here is my question to you as we move into 2020. What do you want? I mean what do you really want for this precious life you have been given? If you are committed to knowing yourself fully, to living fully, then get to know fear. Start with these facts, then step aside and let your life unfold in all its glory.
Facts About Fear
Fear-motivated thoughts are all about “can’t.” They create a negative, imagined scenario about the future. Here’s the truth: you don’t know what is going to happen, so these thoughts can’t possibly be true. Buy into these thoughts, and you are inviting limitation. Let them float on by, and you will see what is actually true for you. We must focus on the “win” scenario. Stenographers will win this fight!
Fearful thoughts are designed to keep you safe and limited. They are not wisdom, and they are not truth. You get to choose what to follow. Keep your thoughts on positive action items that you can do to help you survive. If you encounter a bear in the woods, you pick up a big stick and make a lot of noise. We need to raise our voices and let them know how big we are. There are 27,000 of us. The truth is: we outnumber those that seek to take control of our profession. Let them hear how big we are!
Fear always includes physical sensations. Learn to recognize these, and receive them as they are with an open heart. Channel the energy of fear into excitement and enthusiasm. Let the adrenaline of the fight flow to propel you into ACTION! Take action! Take to social media, like blogs such as Stenonymous, speak out, speak at bar associations, court reporting associations, write letters to your congressman, your state attorneys general. Gather evidence of law breaking in your states that require certified transcripts!
Fear makes us think that something negative will happen, when the truth is that we don’t know what is going to happen. Become comfortable with not knowing so that fear doesn’t rule you. Stay focused on a positive outcome! Stenographers will win!
Resisting fear strengthens it. The antidote is awareness – being willing to directly experience fear as it appears to you in the moment, recognizing the thoughts and physical sensations. Fighting with an end-game scenario has proven effective in negotiating successful outcomes. If an ASR takeover in the legal industry is successful, it can lead to absolute corruption by those in power, jeopardizing the entire United States justice system!!! Spread that awareness of the potential of a disastrous outcome.
The goal is not to get rid of fear, as you don’t have the power to make this happen. But you do have the power to change the way you relate to fear. Learn to receive it with curiosity and a loving heart, get to know how it spins thoughts that deflate the things you are enthusiastic about. But don’t feel like something is wrong or you have failed if it continues to appear. Simply meet it lovingly every time. Don’t sweep it under the rug and not talk about it. Do the opposite. Talk about it, debate it, and get the conversations freely flowing about our potential fate. Don’t be afraid!
A surge of fear tends to arise directly after a moment of truth. Say that an idea appears in your mind about something you’d love to do. Soon after, you might notice that your mind is filled with reasons why you can’t or shouldn’t do it. Recognize that this is fear speaking. Maybe you’d like to do a presentation at your local bar association, and then you are gripped by the fear of public speaking. Join the recently-started StenoMasters toastmasters group that is a remote, all-virtual meeting that you can do from the comfort of your home office or even in the car on the way home from a depo or trial!
Recognizing the presence of fear allows you to make conscious decisions. You have the clarity to see what fear is guiding you to do, and you can consider what you really want. We want to survive! Right?
Fear is not the enemy. It can be the voice of reason, caution, and practicality that serves you well at times. But don’t let it slow you down. Sometimes the seconds you hesitate could mean life or death. If we’re going to save the stenography profession, we have to act NOW!
It takes energy to resist fear. Getting to know it and allowing it to be lets your body and mind relax, as the fight is over. This opens a space for creativity, wonder, awe, love, beauty, inspiration. Embrace it! Use it to propel you into action NOW!
Learn about fear. Know it so well that it can’t sneak up on you. Free yourself from the chains of fear, and every moment of your life will shine.
How have you dealt with fear? Does it hold you back? What happens when you embrace fear? I’d love to hear…
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.
STENOIMPERIUM 