How 60 Stenographers Changed Reality

After unprecedented articles exposing the bad behavior of corporations in our field like US Legal and Verbit, with help from Protect Your Record Project, We were able to secure nearly $4,000 in donations from about 60 stenographic court reporters and stenographic reporting firms across the country. That’s an average of about $67 a reporter. All donations, big and small, have contributed to this moment. Advertising campaigns have been launched to facilitate consumer and public awareness via Facebook and Twitter. Many court reporters have shared the posts and/or tagged local state and women’s bar associations. If this is something you want to become a part of, it’s a great time to jump in and like or share the posts on the Stenonymous Facebook page or my Twitter. This publicity is getting people asking the important questions.

Just for a recap, we got US Legal to admit to not using Sourcebook / PRO Link to recruit despite its contention that the stenographer shortage is impossible to solve. How can one make the claim something is impossible to solve in good faith when one has not tried to solve it? It’s consumer fraud at its finest and it’ll grow increasingly harder for them to dance their way out of it as more people know it’s happening.

We also exposed that Verbit, a company that misrepresents itself as being New York based and had posted family court deposition audio to the internet. I have a source that states the audio issue was known about prior to my investigation into it, but it didn’t get taken down until after the publication of my blog post. Stenographers, you did that!

It’s also notable that for all their money and “power,” the corporations have given us more valuable information. They are guarding an empty fort. I’m probably one of the easiest people on the internet to find and email, and they haven’t bothered to threaten me with a cease and desist letter. They have not bothered to do much of anything at all. Their strategy is seemingly to ignore the situation and hope that we cannot articulate these issues to the media, the public, and associations of lawyers. Their strategy is seemingly to hope that we are summarily dismissed without thought or question. Their strategy is to hope we declare mission accomplished and stop kicking down the gates of that empty fort.

Well, we have seen firsthand how that will work out for them. How well were things going for us when we sat idle hoping things would be okay? Compare that to what happened when 0.2% of this field stood up and said “no!” No, you cannot take our jobs with your inferior product. No, you cannot scapegoat digital reporters. No, you cannot lie about our shortage. No, you cannot post people’s proceedings on the internet to train your offshore transcribers and get away with it! If 60 of us can do that, what are 27,000 of us capable of? This field could afford to pay an advocate like me for nearly two decades with a one-time payment of $67. Heaven help whoever’s talking impossible shortage if we ever secure that much money.

Our strategy? Part one was to show all of you your own power. Part two has two prongs. One, we must continue to apply this social pressure so that the companies stop behaving badly or fold under the incredible weight of their own incompetence. It’s clear they know nothing about the field they insinuate having expertise in. Two, this pressure and publicity will bring people to stenographic court reporting. Young men feel lost? Here’s a direction. Caption advocates don’t like autocraptions? Time to make friends.

The publicity is a big thing. In the next ten years we could easily double or triple the size of this field and start expanding into new markets. Why not? Humans like being listened to. There’s an obvious human need to be heard. Computers can’t do what we do. What is business but profiting off of human need? What is court reporting but our quest to memorialize what others have to say? Even the grimmest view of our field, that only maybe 10% of the population can do what we do, means that there are over 30 million people in the United States that can learn this skill. Look how many thousands of people stenographic reporting has gone in front of already. And this movement has only just started.

Try to remember prior to this week what our reality was. “Nothing we can do.” “Impossible.” “A dying profession.” “An industry ripe for disruption.” That changed because we willed it to change. If you have ever doubted your own power, I urge you to stop, reassess what’s not working, and push for the things that matter to you. Push to change the things people claim cannot be changed; 60 brave reporters have just shown you they are wrong. History is filled with all sorts of winners and losers, including winners that beat overwhelming odds. If you, reader, allow others to dictate to you what your chances of victory are, you are already halfway to losing, and you have a choice to win.

If you would like to support the campaigns going now, take to Twitter and Facebook and start directing news people, legal professionals, and bar associations to my articles. If you would like to contribute financially to the advertisement campaigns running, please feel free to donate to my PayPal at ChristopherDay227@gmail.com, Venmo at Christopher-Day-141, and Zelle at my email or 917 685 3010. As this continues to grow, I will look into advertising in other media so that our message makes the largest impact possible.

Of course, to our beloved corporations, you too have a choice. You can get in line with the industry standards or cease to exist. You can help recruit stenographers or lose all of your investors and customers to them. Trying to outsmart all of the people all of the time didn’t work out. Do the right thing, suck up your pride, and move forward with us. Let your digital reporters know that stenography is worth looking into. As we have just shown you, we will accept no less. I personally will accept no less because as I admitted to everyone, I am a product of the sad side of the industry that took from me and my colleagues until we had no more to give. I now have no compunction against taking it all back, giving it to our next generation of reporters, teaching them the tricks of the trade, and exposing to them the silence that allowed the abuse of mine. It was a simple calculation for me. I knew we had more people and better funding. I knew we had the more advanced technology. I knew that if the narrative remained “nothing we can do” my job would probably be at risk sometime in the next ten years. All I had to do was let go of the embarrassment and shame associated with saying “my industry has problems and I’m willing to be a part of the solution.”

My early career was defined by people telling me there was something wrong with me because I was not as successful as them. Now that I have success, I move into the rest of my career with a message for every entity in a position of power that thinks it’s going to use it against our young people and our newbies: We are coming for you.