Jamie S. Blair’s Monday post, “Cloud”-Based Malfeasance in the Digital Court Reporting Industry explored some of the human cost of digital reporting. When StoryCloud decided to wrap up its business earlier this year, there was no warning and no severance for its workers.
Ken Kalb from StoryCloud allegedly stated that investors had grown weary of yearly losses from StoryCloud, raising the possibility that it was a zombie corporation. Even if it was not a zombie corporation, Jamie Blair notes that he later got information from Stenonymous (and his friend Christopher Day!) about the writ in Texas that was filed and truth behind the StoryCloud debacle.
This all illustrates what I have been saying on social media for a while. Digital court reporters across the country are being misled to believe this is the future. Worse, when things collapsed, no attorney would help, and as Blair writes, “we were victims without bellwether trial voices.” And what happened after the collapse and digital reporters came on the market? Lowball offers.
Hopefully by sharing with and educating each other we can continue to reach more people before they face the kind of situation the employees of StoryCloud faced. For now, I’d like to thank Jamie for coming forward with the truth and give us some perspective of what it looked like on “the other side.”