The Court Reporter Shortage is Half as Bad as the Speech-to-Text Institute Claimed It Would Be, Maybe Less

Saw the claim that there’s a nationwide deficit of 5,500 court reporters in the Brooklyn Eagle. As anybody that obsessively refreshes my website knows, we’ve seen this before. Past NCRA President Meadors stated earlier this year that that number was lifted from the Ducker Report in a different article. He also commented that the Ducker Report “has been pretty well debunked now.” I recall that NCRA Strong mentioned something about Ducker too.

The Speech-to-Text Institute made the claim that we’d have a shortage of 11,000 by now.

Oh, I’m sorry, 11,345. And yes, I see the 5,500 number in the 2018 slot. Raises questions. Are journalists ignoring the 11,345 number because they just don’t know about it, they know it’s inaccurate, or some other reason? And why does our shortage constantly make the news? And why is news about a shortage juicier than news about a corporate rigging of an entire market?

That aside, does anyone get why I called Speech-to-Text Institute, Veritext, and U.S. Legal Support fraudsters yet?

Most of the individual people in these organizations are just people doing their jobs or trying to make the most profit. That’s not a bad thing. But someone, somewhere along the way, decided it would be a good idea to lie about these numbers and fool students, jobseekers, consumers, workers, small business owners, associations, court administrators, and the general public. And certainly at this point these organizations have chosen to ignore my letters and activism despite a known propensity of the big boxes to harass court reporters for what they post on Facebook. I feel like, law in general, we look at people’s actions to tell us their intent. So even in some bizarro world where it wasn’t their intent to rig the market and jump their revenue like $500 million, it’s not like they stopped once they knew what they were doing.

When big men in this industry are threatened by powerful women, they start saying words like slander and defamation. When I do it? Carte blanche. Checkmate, sexists. I might have some partial face blindness going on, but I see you for the cowards you are. I’m on their side.

And, in a literary, figurative, nonviolent, and patriotic sense,

we’re coming for ya.

Bonus:

I knew there was a propaganda campaign before I knew there was a propaganda campaign.