The statement source link is found here.
We were all told realtime is the future, realtime is valuable, realtime is job security. Manufacturers, agencies, associations — everybody knew realtime was king. There were only fringe idiots like that Christopher Day guy who pointed out that if you trade away all the non-realtime work to the digital folks then the realtime reporters become more easily replaceable by virtue of having no political or pushback power. Everyone pointed and laughed at his stupid ideas and that was the end of that.
Well now I’m showing you in print that they intend to equalize you with digital court reporting. Stenograph had also made public statements that indicated as much.
I read up on enough law, science, and business to put these allegations in print and make it easy to Google the court reporter shortage fraud / Veritext fraud. The corporate fraudsters didn’t really have an answer for it. They got caught with their pants down, gave up on Speech-to-Text Institute, and ran over to STAR.
My position is growing stronger with time. My current understanding of defamation law is that pretty much anything in my state published over a year ago can never be challenged. That significantly diminishes my formerly overblown fear of a BS lawsuit. These companies have allowed publication of things that describe their fraud and lies to the public for over two years.
Which also means we’ve entered a period in court reporting history where the largest court reporting firm in the country was accused of fraud and didn’t care enough about its reputation among stenographers enough to do or say anything about it in the middle of what it outwardly professed as a massive shortage. Doesn’t seem to make much sense, does it? I wonder who could have seen this coming…
Happy Thanksgiving to all of you.
Addendum:
A Stenonymous reader gave me permission to repost their social media post.
– – –
After this post was launched, a person claiming to work in Veritext sales wrote to me, in pertinent part,
“Hi Christopher. I work for Veritext in sales. Good morning. In re your most recent post about DRs providing real-time, I can assure you of the following:
- Veritext’s technology, since our DR software/hardware implementation is proprietary, as of today is not capable of providing real-time.
- As someone who works in sales, I can assure that I nor any of my colleagues are telling attorneys that DRs can provide real-time. First, it’s not true and second the attorneys who want real-time also tend to want stenographers.
I cannot speak to why the website says that, but I’d imagine it was either put together by someone high up on totem pole who knows very little about the industry, or a third-party who knows even less.
Overall, your concerns about real-time being possible via DRs are real—it’s just the nature of technology. However, as of today, it’s not possible nor are we actively selling a service that can’t be provided.”
That social media post from the reader is shocking…wow.
Hopefully people get to see it.
THIS… This is exactly why the NCRA needs to adopt a “Responsible Charge” statement and it needs to be incorporate into every state CSR license. We are the responsible charge, meaning that we are present and certify every word as having been present to hear it, and we oversee all of the work that was done in producing the transcript – including our scopists and proofreaders – and we are ensuring that the record is protected (with 3 backups), and that it hasn’t left our control, and it has not been tampered with, and that we put it together and are certifying that it’s all there. The agencies cannot do this, but Veritext has a certification page they now include at the end of all of their transcripts that removes the reporter as the Responsible Charge, and places themselves, the agency, in the position of the responsible charge. This should be illegal and not allowed. NCRA needs to act on this immediately and issue a Responsible Charge statement. This will prevent them from doing the job of the court reporter or having an unlicensed person in their employ doing it. They have absolutely no responsibility in the production of the transcript except that they print it, bind it, and scan it electronically. We PRODUCE it, meaning create it. It’s our work product, not the agency’s.
I would love to see NCRA give that a try.