Hey Staten Island Neighbors, Be Wary of Digital Court Reporting!

I’m in a local community Facebook group called Staten Island Neighbors. Fun group. Highly suggested to any of my readers from Staten Island.

I thought I’d raise to my community a more national issue that I’ve been raising consumer awareness on for years now because, sure as hell, it impacts us locally, specifically jobseekers.

If you want to skip the story bits, scroll down to the next bolded part.

I’ve been a stenographic court reporter for about 14 years now. There are many of us on Staten Island. We’re the people you see in court with those funny stenotype machines. It’s a good living. And there are much more reputable Staten Islanders that I bet would agree.

And when I went to school for what I’m doing, I was told a great many things about the outlook of the career. Lots of nuance to that discussion. But if you want to become a court reporter for the New York State Court Unified Court System, stenographic court reporting remains the way to do it.

Over the years I documented a private sector plot to fool lawyer and student consumers into accepting something called digital reporting, that is, the recording and transcribing of testimony. Digital’s been around for many decades in one form or another and hasn’t supplanted stenography because it’s less efficient. About half a decade ago, a shift started to happen, and long story short, large corporations in our field started spending A LOT of time and money on digital reporting. The end goal is pretty simple. They want to push us stenographers out of the market, put in lower paid digital reporters, and pocket the difference. And their money and influence even spread to our College of Staten Island.

Here’s the deal for anyone that clicked that Ed 2 Go link, these people are not trustworthy people. Ed 2 Go is known to have worked with fraudsters like Brian Kennedy. Veritext, one of the plot pushers, is owned by Leonard Green, a private equity group known for looting hospitals for poor people. BlueLedge digital court reporting training is either owned by or heavily affiliated with Veritext. There’s a whole rabbit hole that’s not appropriate for this post. But these are not people that we can trust with our futures or our kids’ futures.

I documented this stuff so well that when you Google Veritext fraud, my stuff comes up, and the multimillion dollar Veritext hasn’t sued because it would only cause the evidence against the company reach a courtroom.

TLDR: The bottom line is that a lot of time and money is being spent on convincing Staten Islanders that digital court reporting is a good job when in reality it is lower paid and has fewer job opportunities than stenographic reporting. Tell your friends and family if they’re considering a digital court reporting career.

Happy to answer questions in the comments. I’m a lifelong Staten Islander. The media and government are ignoring what has been documented despite the illegal actions of these corporations, so it is down to us to protect each other through information sharing. That’s what this website brings to the table. That’s what Staten Island Neighbors brings to the table. And to all those that believe in honest business, and believe businesses shouldn’t violate the law to get ahead, thanks for sharing.