Not long ago, I surveyed over 200 respondents for page rate and appearance data in our field. The general idea is to bring some transparency to a very opaque market. There are plenty of pie charts for people that want ’em. For this survey, I focused on New York, Illinois, California, and Texas, but we did get a number of respondents from “other” states.
With more time and resources, I could perform more conclusive surveying. But, as all of you, I must operate in a world of finite resources and do the best I can with what I’ve got. The Ducker Report, for comparison, was built off of 120 research interviews. This is built off of 271 self-selecting respondents. I am grateful, as always, to the donors that help keep Stenonymous ad free and help me fund projects.
I do have an ask. If you’re an educator or mentor looking at this, you’ll see the wide spectrum of rates. Push your students and mentees to aim high. We band together and teach each other for the betterment of legal records everywhere. Our next frontier is going to be producing stenographers that can understand and seize the market. If I am correct about the shortage being exaggerated and there are no sudden technological leaps, we may very well have the majority of market share for decades, but only if the reporters we’re molding understand that there is a spectrum and that they do not have to be at the bottom of it, as I once was, even if they are not yet realtime.
Thank you again to all my readers. Feel free to share the report, it is free.
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Gawd… Who the hell in California is charging 2.99/pp and under? RUFKM?
I suspect that there are some outliers, folks that answered incorrectly or maybe attorneys that were answering with copy sale amounts. I am surprised that for California it was 14.5%.
As a student I find this information invaluable. I didn’t realize how much real-time was done in my state, or how much more it could earn. Thank you!
Oh yeah. I was shocked at how many people answered they regularly provide or receive realtime because I believe most jobs aren’t realtime.
I’m glad you found this helpful.
Many reporters consider “real-timing” for themselves and not actually to the attorneys as “real time,” so this could be an input error.
I never thought of that. If another survey can be put together perhaps I can be more clear.
This is invaluable information. Thanks for putting this together! I’ve been a stenographic reporter for almost 20 years and I’ve never seen anything so transparent. I do have a question about the survey. Hopefully this is monitored so it can be answered. Does this represent page rates received by independent reporters getting paid directly from lawyers, or does this represent page rates received by reporters from agencies? Thanks.
It mixes both. You’ll see a category in there for type. Some people reported working for agencies, some were direct to client, some were reportedly lawyers/law firms/consumers.
So it lumps in a lot of the data but gives breakdowns of about where everybody is or was.
Is the underlying google sheets data available? Thanks as always for all you do
Yes. I will email it to you.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dBymXSYjg7KnqOLr5h4pRo4QVwRABs-ZAXqySlY0fYk/edit