Some time ago I came up with a pretty good formula for figuring out a court reporter’s hourly rate. It excludes appearance fees, but depending on the job, appearance fees can be pretty damn minimal and simply by adding a small amount to the hourly rate, you’d be adjusting for the lost appearance income.
Page rate * pages per hour = hourly rate.
Hourly rate * 0.33 = writing time rate
Hourly rate * 0.67 = transcription rate
Perhaps divide your appearance fee by 4 and add it to the hourly. This is a little more fair than the 4-hour blocks many in the industry use today.
From my experience, believe it or not, you can get a New York City deposition reporter for somewhere around $4.00 a page. And a court reporter gets somewhere between 40 and 60 pages per hour.
That gives us a range for a non-realtime reporter of $160 to $240 an hour. Seems high, but for every hour on the machine it can take up to 2 hours of transcription, and court reporters that can do it much faster are either cutting corners, really experienced, or really, really good.
According to my sources, digital court reporters make around $30. Just so everyone knows, a fraud nonprofit called the Speech-to-Text Institute was used by the larger corporations of the court reporting field to systematically soak the market in misinformation, confusing jobseekers and consumers. The aim was to expand digital court reporting, increase the supply of “court reporters” to create a market glut, and make corporations like Veritext look good on paper so they could be sold to the next sucker.
30/240 = 12.5%
And let me be clear, $4.00 per page is not exactly a rich life in court reporting NYC. There are many that make more than that, which means digital is an even smaller percentage.
Did your deposition discovery costs decrease 90%?
My sources say lawyer bills are higher than ever.
The secret is that charges that court reporters don’t share in are added to the bill while page rates are kept artificially low to keep you thinking you’re getting a great deal.
Do what you will with that information. Might I humbly suggest that if they’re going to use a digital court reporter, you demand that the bill be something like 20% of what it usually is.
Or let them milk you, and by extension, your clients. That’s cool too.
With stenographer jobs being systematically eliminated via fraud and deceit rather than by actual technological advancement, there’s really no reason for us not to expose what the companies are doing. After all, if they’re successful enough in reducing stenographic court reporter numbers, courts won’t be able to fill spots, and my job will likely be eliminated someday too, and with the disabilities I live with, I’m unsure about being able to do better than what I’ve got. Call me biased, sure. But your whole system of law is based off of two biased sides presenting their evidence, so if bias is a reason to disregard truth, you can just throw out the whole justice system today if you want to paint biased people as untrustworthy.
Just writing that for a fan of mine.
Side note, corporations that make millions of dollars let a respected 14-year member of our field publish openly about their fraud for almost 3 years now. They’re banking on you doing nothing. I suppose I am too.
Enjoy your day all.
P.S.
Waiting by the wayside…
…of an endless reverie…
…where all the things I run from…
…are sure enough to find me.
Addendum:
November 2024:
It occurs to me it might be best to come out and say that in terms of rates lawyers have a financial interest in prolonging this digital v steno thing. More suppliers in the market, more competition. This is juxtaposed against what the corporate schemers want, continued corporate consolidation of the field under people that can jack up prices a la tacit parallelism.
Lots of pressure for you to switch to digital. Now you know why. Do with it what you will.
With all due respect, this is an article I had to read a few times to comprehend, and I’m still unsure I do understand it. Are you saying that digitals make $30 an hour before or after editing their initial rough draft?
-Noah
As a working digital reporter employed by Veritext, yes, I do make $30/hr. My “appearance fee” is assigned by Veritext without negotiation. The “appearance fee” is a 3-hour minimum, so $120 for a 3 hour block. Beyond those 3 hours, I get $30/hr, but depos only last about an hour. What are they charging the clients whose jobs I’m assigned to? $750 for that 3-hour block. You also have to keep in mind that Veritext requires us to work off the clock after the depo is over: I go home and upload all my audio files, prepare and mail physical exhibits, and clean up my end of the transcript. This usually takes about 2 additional hours, or more, of my time. I get no pay for any of that and Veritext tells me the 3-hour “minimum charge for services rendered” assumes that homework is included in that 3-hour block of my time. In other words, they know precisely that depos usually take an hour or so and they’re getting a hell of a deal on my labor.
Sure, they say we’ll earn more if we’re “certified” through AAERT. But why would I pay $300 to take a multiple choice online test that any person with a brain cell can pass, when the reward is only $10 more an hour? It’s not worth my time and it’s most definitely a scam.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience Anonymous. I have been trying to warn jobseekers because of the behavior of the larger corps in our field. I’m sorry they treat you this way and get so much out of you.
Stories like this inspire me to do what I can to change things. Your time is valuable whether or not they acknowledge it.
They make $30 an hour. Many of them don’t do their transcripts at all. Running the audio through AI and then fixing it up is like hell on Earth for anything that the AI doesn’t get 98%+ on.
Lawyers should ask what kind of technological advancement requires two people, a digital and transcriber, instead of one, a stenographer.
The beginning boils us down to an hourly so that the lawyers have apples-to-apples comparison.
The next part drops the fraud info, because corporations committing fraud to push digital is relevant to this discussion.
Then I basically playfully say, hey, they’re paying these guys peanuts but loading up your bills with charges we don’t charge.
The last bit, I took inspiration from California courts, whose administrators cried shortage, shortage, while not using funds earmarked for the acquisition and retention of court reporters, as I heard it.
Feel free to ask more questions.
I’m a scopist for stenographers. I’ve been running the audio my reporter sends me through ASR, and I “scope” it from there. It’s more accurate most of the time, and there’s a time stamp for every word, making editing faster and easier than through the native software. I pay $5 per audio hour, and it still works out better for me. Make of this what you will.
I would selfishly want to do digital and produce my own transcripts, but all I’m seeing is exploitation and atomization of job roles (one sits, one transcribes, one proofs, etc.). On the other hand, I’m seeing stenos utilizing ASR assistance and still getting paid their usual rates, as they should, of course. Real-time digital reporters don’t exist and/or could never expect the same pay and don’t seem to produce their own transcripts. If the answer here is to learn steno, I’d have to say “pass.” Just trying to make ends meet right now.
I’m sure it’s obvious to you, but I want you to know I’m aware that I know nothing about this industry other than scoping, so I apologize if this is a perspective that’s unwittingly part of the problem.
Actually your perspective is really interesting. I think more stenographers should see it.