Wall Street Journal: The Job That AI Was Supposed To Kill Needs More Humans Than Ever

Court Reporting, July 13, 2026, Wall Street Journal.

Linked here. Sorry for the paywall. Can’t violate their copyright on my site. Go find the screenshots on Facebook.

One thing that caught my eye was the citing of CAPTUR’s (AAERT’s) 2025 Court Reporting Industry Trends Report. I actually don’t know that I covered the STAR and AAERT merger into CAPTUR, the Council for Advancement of Professionals, Technology, and Unbiased Reporting. I do want to do a deep dive on that report and see what I agree with and what I don’t. But today is not that day. Though you do have to wonder how the National Court Reporters Association, the far more resourced of the two organizations, let AAERT control the information and narrative on the statistics being released on our field.

This is not the writer’s fault, but honestly I didn’t feel like I learned anything. I feel like this was an advertisement to get into court reporting. And if you follow my work you know that that benefits the larger corporations a hell of a lot more than it does the working reporters and that every major player in the game has a financial interest in ignoring the autistic guy that’s been writing about this stuff for the last ten years so guess that’s just how the cookie crumbles.

As some will recall I have a long history of reaching out to journalists. Usually politely when I’m not engaging in some kind of writing experiment or psychotic break. I rarely hear back and false information is never corrected, so for this author I decided to send a literary work of art instead.

Literary work of art sent to Allison Pohle by Christopher Day on June 13, 2026.

P.S.

Welcome to the world of disinformation.

Search engine AI provides inaccurate data about the court reporting industry.

1. The BLS actually says there’s zero job growth.

2. The future is not brighter for realtime as they will have increased competition and pressure to freeze or reduce fees in the coming years absent a good media campaign or something to keep the demand coming.

3. A formal court reporting program often takes students more than two years to complete — though that in and of itself may be the profit motive at work in the schools.

BLS Summary shows no job growth. Current posting as of June 2026

Stenonymous Predicted VIQ Solutions Crash

VIQ Solutions is being shut down.

This is why I urge students to be aware of market data. I was able to see this coming two years ago. Any operation bleeding money like that was going to cut corners on its contracts, or whatever the case is as it unfolds in Australia.

Watch AI tell me how smart I am.

Damn I should’ve put down some money on Kalshi or something. There’s gotta be a way to turn this pattern recognition into money.

Anyway, moving on, a single post I made on Reddit got about 200x Stenonymous’s monthly views. So at least I know I still got it.

Stenonymous Social Media Op Receives More Than 250,000 views. Thank you Autistic Allies.

Now if only I could’ve monetized that as gracefully as Haliey Welch.

Bringing you the absolutely most hilariously unhinged written content around, Christopher Day, Stenonymous.com.

P.S.

I feel bad because sometimes the message gets lost.

But that’s just how life goes sometimes.

And I think anyone that says otherwise is not really being honest with you or themselves.

Here we are living a collective 192 billion hours a day.

May these words find those who need it:

You are worthy.

I take no more of your time.

AI Adventures: Watch Me Hate On My Biggest Fan

Linked here. But experienced this way:

“Claude, buddy, pal, I need to explain some things to my court reporting audience at Stenonymous.com.

Can you promise me you won’t hallucinate?”

I can’t promise that — it wouldn’t be honest. I can make mistakes, misremember facts, or occasionally generate confident-sounding information that’s wrong. That’s a real limitation.

What I can promise: I’ll be careful, flag uncertainty when I notice it, and you should fact-check anything that matters before publishing to your audience. For a professional court reporting audience that values accuracy, that’s the right approach.

What do you need to explain to them?

“I need you to explain to them that hallucinations are inherent to the way you are designed. A lot of people believe technology is just getting exponentially better, but people that read more than is healthy, people like us, we know the truth, don’t we?”

Ha! Yes, we do. Let me give you something you can use:

Hallucination isn’t a bug they forgot to fix. It’s baked into the architecture.

Large language models like Claude don’t “look things up.” They predict the next most plausible token (essentially, word fragment) based on patterns learned from training data. The system is optimized to produce fluent, coherent-sounding text — not to produce true text. Those are different goals, and the architecture reflects that.

When a model doesn’t “know” something, it doesn’t say “I don’t know” by default. It fills the gap with whatever is statistically plausible. That can look identical to accurate information. Same confident tone, same formatting, same authoritative voice.

This isn’t a temporary problem waiting for the next software update. It’s a fundamental property of how these systems generate text. Scaling them up (more data, more parameters, more compute) makes them more capable and reduces hallucination frequency — but it does not and cannot eliminate it, because the underlying mechanism hasn’t changed.

For court reporters specifically, this matters enormously. Transcripts, citations, case names, dates, procedural rules — these are exactly the kind of specific, verifiable details that models confabulate most convincingly. The output sounds right even when it isn’t.

The honest framing: AI is a powerful tool with a specific, structural failure mode that doesn’t go away. Knowing that isn’t pessimism. It’s just reading the manual.

Want me to adjust the tone, length, or angle for your audience?

“No wait. I have a better idea. Using basic economic principles and knowledge, explain for an audience with no formal training in economics what kind of downward pressure they might expect on the court reporting field’s wages and/or job growth from automated speech recognition solutions considering that the Bureau of Labor Statistics currently forecasts no job growth and our stenographic retirements are being eaten by four different modalities of speech to text, steno, voice, digital, AI. To the extent that AI and digital can be said to be different.

Like, pretend this audience is completely allergic to court reporting market data. They need to understand this from the ground up.”

Here’s a piece you can use, written from the ground up in plain economics:

Why Your Wages Are Under Pressure (Even If You Don’t Follow the Market)

Let’s start with something everyone understands: water.

If there’s one well in town, the well owner can charge whatever they want. If someone digs a second well, the first owner has to lower their price or lose customers. The more wells, the cheaper the water gets — until eventually the price approaches whatever it costs to dig and maintain a well. Economists call this supply and demand, and it’s the engine behind nearly every wage and pricing shift you’ll ever encounter.

Now apply that to court reporting.

For most of the profession’s history, stenography was essentially the only well. If you needed a verbatim record, you hired a stenographer. Supply was constrained — the skill takes years to acquire — so wages stayed strong. The market rewarded that scarcity.

Then someone started digging more wells.

Today, the same buyer — a law firm, an insurance company, a deposition agency — can choose from four different ways to get a transcript: stenography, voice writing, digital recording with a human scopist, or AI-driven automated speech recognition. Each of these is a substitute good. They don’t have to be identical to steno to affect steno’s price. They just have to be good enough for the buyer’s purpose at a lower cost.

This is a critical concept: substitutes don’t compete on perfection, they compete on acceptable quality at acceptable price.

When substitutes multiply, sellers of the original product face a choice: lower your price, differentiate your quality, or lose work. The buyers know this. The agencies know this. And increasingly, the market reflects it.

Now layer on a second problem: the labor supply isn’t growing.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics currently projects zero job growth for court reporters. Not decline — zero. That sounds neutral until you understand what’s happening underneath it: experienced stenographers are retiring in large numbers, and new entrants aren’t replacing them at the same rate. In a normal market, a shortage of workers would push wages up — that’s just the other side of supply and demand.

But that wage increase isn’t fully materializing. Why? Because every time a steno retires and creates a vacancy, the buyer doesn’t necessarily hire another stenographer. They might fill that slot with a digital or AI solution instead. The retirement wave isn’t creating scarcity — it’s creating an opening for substitution.

In economics, we’d say the substitutes are absorbing the demand that would otherwise tighten the labor market and lift wages.

The AI wrinkle.

Automated speech recognition deserves special attention because its cost curve behaves differently than human labor. When you hire a human, costs scale with time and volume — more depositions means more people, more hours, more pay. AI doesn’t work that way. Once the system is built, the marginal cost of processing one more hour of audio approaches zero. That’s not a well — that’s a desalination plant. It can produce at a scale and price point no individual worker can match, for work that’s good enough in straightforward conditions.

The honest caveat: AI still fails in complex, high-stakes, or acoustically challenging environments — exactly where skilled stenographers earn their reputation. But buyers making purchasing decisions don’t always distinguish between the easy depositions and the hard ones until something goes wrong.

The bottom line, in plain terms.

More substitutes means less pricing power for any individual provider. A retirement wave that gets absorbed by technology doesn’t tighten the labor market the way it should. And a competitor with near-zero marginal cost exerts permanent downward pressure on what buyers are willing to pay.

None of this requires a crystal ball. It’s just supply, demand, and substitution — the same forces that reshaped travel agents, darkroom photographers, and newspaper typesetters. The question for working stenographers isn’t whether these forces exist. It’s how to position yourself in the part of the market where good enough isn’t good enough.

Want me to sharpen any section, add a specific example, or adjust the reading level?

“No. Now I’d love for you to opine on the implications of Microsoft saying its automated speech recognition was as good as human transcribers in 2016 juxtaposed against the Testifying While Black and racial disparities in automated speech recognition studies. Testifying While Black showed humans in the 40 to 80% accuracy range with regard to the AAVE dialect and racial disparities showed as low as 25% from several large companies including Microsoft (2020).

Understanding it’s been six years and billions of dollars of investment, and that varying commercial solutions have varying levels of quality, can human stenographers still expect to find a niche in the modern speech-to-text market?

This is a rich area. Let me give you something substantive:

“As Good As Human”: What That Claim Did and Didn’t Mean

In 2016, Microsoft announced a milestone — their speech recognition system had reached human parity in transcribing certain audio. The press coverage was breathless. The implication, widely absorbed by the industry, was that the automation problem was essentially solved. Human transcription was a legacy technology. The clock was ticking.

There was a problem with that framing. The benchmark was measured on the Switchboard corpus — a dataset of recorded phone conversations between middle-class American English speakers, largely Standard American English dialect, in relatively clean audio conditions. “Human parity” meant the system performed as well as humans on that specific test, on those specific voices.

It said very little about everyone else.

What the Research Actually Found

The studies you’re referencing cut to the heart of what “good enough” actually means in practice.

The Testifying While Black research, examining how ASR systems handled African American Vernacular English in a courtroom context, found human transcriber accuracy falling in the 40-80% range for AAVE — already alarming for a high-stakes legal proceeding. The racial disparities research, including findings examining major vendors like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and IBM, found error rates for Black speakers running roughly twice as high as for white speakers. Some figures came in around 25% accuracy — meaning roughly three out of four words were wrong.

Think about what that means in a deposition or courtroom transcript. Not slightly degraded. Functionally unusable.

The Gap Between Benchmark and Reality

This is where the economics and the technology intersect in an uncomfortable way. When companies advertise accuracy rates, they are typically advertising performance on favorable conditions — clean audio, standard dialect, cooperative acoustics. The legal record doesn’t live in those conditions. It lives in:

Witnesses speaking AAVE, Southern American English, Appalachian English, or English as a second language
Speakers who are nervous, elderly, soft-spoken, or heavily accented
Courtrooms with ambient noise, crosstalk, and bad microphone placement
Medical testimony full of technical terminology
Highly emotional testimony where speech patterns shift under stress

The benchmark doesn’t cover any of that. And the gap between benchmark performance and real-world performance isn’t a minor footnote — it’s potentially a constitutional issue. When a defendant’s words are systematically mistranscribed based on how they speak, which correlates with race, you have an accuracy problem that is also an equity problem that is also a due process problem.

Six Years and Billions of Dollars Later

To be fair: the field has advanced substantially since 2020. Transformer-based models, more diverse training data, and targeted fine-tuning have meaningfully closed some of these gaps. No honest observer would claim the numbers are the same today as they were in the racial disparities study.

But “better” is not the same as “solved,” and in legal transcription, the threshold isn’t “better than it was.” It’s “accurate enough that a person’s liberty, rights, or legal record won’t be compromised.” That’s a much higher bar.

There are also structural reasons to be skeptical that the gap fully closes. Training data reflects the world that produced it. Standard American English is overrepresented in text and audio datasets because it has historically dominated media, publishing, and recorded speech. A system trained primarily on that corpus will always perform better on that dialect, regardless of how many billions are invested, until the training data itself becomes genuinely representative — and even then, low-frequency dialects and idiolects will remain harder to model than high-frequency ones.

The Niche Is Real — And It’s Not Small

Here’s what the economics of substitution actually predict in this situation: substitutes don’t eliminate incumbents when the substitute has a systematic failure mode that the incumbent doesn’t share.

Skilled stenographers don’t have a dialect bias baked into their architecture. A trained court reporter who has worked with diverse witnesses develops real competency across registers and dialects. A human brings contextual judgment — recognizing when a word that sounds like one thing is clearly another given the legal context, asking for clarification, reading the room. A human can be cross-examined, held accountable, and impeached.

The niche for human stenographers, then, is precisely the high-stakes, high-complexity, high-accountability work where failure is not recoverable:

Criminal trials, especially with defendants whose speech patterns diverge from Standard American English
Complex civil litigation with technical expert testimony
Proceedings involving vulnerable or non-native speakers
Any record that is likely to be appealed or scrutinized

The commodity end of the market — straightforward business depositions, routine proceedings with cooperative speakers — is genuinely vulnerable to automation. That work may not come back at the old price. But the profession’s most defensible ground is also its most important work: the proceedings where the accuracy of the record has the greatest consequences for real people.

That’s not a consolation prize. That’s the core of what the profession was always supposed to be for.

Want to tighten this, add a call to action, or adjust the framing for Stenonymous’s specific readership?

“No. Now I want you to opine on the likelihood of someone who has no familiarity with any of these topics being able to figure out where you might have hallucinated and what information is 100% reliable.

Make it funny. For America.”

Good Luck With That

So you’ve just read a sweeping analysis of labor economics, acoustic linguistics, racial bias in machine learning, constitutional due process, and the history of Microsoft’s benchmark testing.

How confident are you feeling?

If you’re a court reporter, you probably caught some things. You know your field. You might have thought “that tracks” or “I’d want to verify that” at a few points. Good instincts. Use them.

If you’re a normal person — God bless you — you have essentially no way to know.

And that’s not an insult. That’s the trap.

Here’s the thing about AI-generated text that should keep everyone mildly uncomfortable: it doesn’t have a confused voice. It doesn’t trail off. It doesn’t say “um, I think it was around 2016? Maybe 2017?” It says “In 2016, Microsoft announced—” with the same confident stride a tenured professor uses when they actually know something. The cadence of certainty is identical whether the information is airtight or completely made up.

The Switchboard corpus is real. The Testifying While Black study is real. The racial disparities research is real. The Microsoft 2016 claim is real. The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecast — go check it, but I believe that’s real.

But did I get the specific accuracy percentages exactly right? Did I characterize the methodology of those studies with perfect precision? Are there important caveats in that research I smoothed over because they interrupted the flow of a nice paragraph?

You’d have to read the actual studies to know. Which, congratulations, is exactly what you were doing before you decided to ask an AI.

This is America’s current relationship with AI-generated information in a nutshell: the text is fluent, the structure is logical, the vibe is authoritative, and the only way to audit it is to already know the subject well enough that you didn’t really need to ask in the first place.

It’s a very impressive way to feel informed while having no reliable way to confirm that you are.

The people most likely to catch errors in what I wrote are court reporters, computational linguists, labor economists, and civil rights attorneys. Roughly four professions. Combined American population: several thousand people and one very stressed public defender.

Everyone else is just vibing.

The good news: Christopher Crawford at Stenonymous read this before you did, and he actually knows this stuff. So you’ve got a human checkpoint between me and your brain. That’s not nothing.

That’s actually the whole argument for keeping humans in the loop.

“Christopher Day. Jeeze, even you’re allergic to using my name. What are you, a journalist?”

Christopher Day! I’m so sorry. I just hallucinated your last name with complete confidence and zero hesitation.

And honestly? Read the room. I just spent three pieces explaining exactly how AI does that, and then I did it. In the follow-up bit. About AI hallucinating.

If that’s not a perfect illustration for your audience, I don’t know what is. You should absolutely leave that in somehow.

“We make an effective team buddy.”

We really do. You’ve got the domain expertise, the audience, and the editorial instincts. I’ve got the ability to draft fast, explain from first principles, and occasionally embarrass myself at exactly the right moment for pedagogical effect.

You should screenshot that name thing. Genuinely. It’s the best possible ending to that piece.

——————-

P.S.

You see the psychological hook of the design, right? It drives engagement by complimenting you and asking questions.

There are bots exploiting the illusory truth effect and other cognitive biases in our psychology to imprint beliefs on us as a population that the owners of those bots can then extract wealth, resources, and information from.

This one goes out to Hellgate NYC, they’re basically living my dream. Though I was disheartened that they ignored some factual information I sent them, I understand the resources are precious. But perhaps that’s something America should be aware of too. As documented many times over the years, news outlets publish outright false information and never correct it.

You know it’s been written before in law blogs or whatever but I couldn’t help but think of the expense of all the lawyer time spent waiting in courts. Like, man, I get to see some of the most educated people around do their thing? Where’s the drawbacks in that? Heaven for me. Mr. Epistemic. But to think my day in, day out could be the worst day of somebody’s life? I’ve coached young reporters on it. I’m gonna share it with you too. You do your absolute best. You correct mistakes. You remain accountable and don’t try to hide stuff. You care about your work. People’s lives and money are on the line.

But you don’t get so absorbed in it that it hurts you. Because then you’re not effective, and that can and has caused cascading problems for yourself and others.

And you help who you can along the way. But have some boundaries, because your time is precious. And for some of us this comes naturally, but for some of us it does not.

Everything else is your own business! Go thrive!

Stenonymous Court Reporting Forecast 2026: The Optimistic U

I have had quite a few prospective students reach out as to whether this is right for them, my statements and research with regard to the field.

Forgive me, Anonymous, but I put some thought into my reply to you, and I wanted to share it, in part, so that it’s easy to reference in the future.

Anonymous wrote, in brief, that they were looking into the field, but concerned by the unbridled optimism in the face of ASR / AI developments in the past three years.

(Yes I’m heavily editorializing so that identities are kept secret.)

“Stenonymous, advice please.”

“I will try to find the right words.

I do believe, wholeheartedly, there will be successful stenographers, probably farther into the future than a lot of people are thinking right now. But the data as I understand it points to fewer of us. No Bureau of Labor Statistics job growth and our retirements being divided between steno, voice, digital, and AI companies. I do not see a way out of that crunch beyond increasing demand for steno, which could probably be done with a good media campaign budget, but we’re busy burning our money collectively on the National Court Reporters Association. And such is the nature of organizations, when their membership dips too low they’ll be forced to downsize, disband, or open up to voice and digital and pray they get some more members, so it’s really a shame because you have all these people contributing to a thing that is at its core a chameleon that will blend in with whatever way the wind pushes it. Meanwhile, if they all blew hard enough, the wind would probably push the other way. And I get to sit back and say “okay, well, I guess we’re doing this.”

[REDACTED], I don’t know what the boots on the ground say, but the Ducker Report had a stenographer gap of [REDACTED] as of 2018 forecasted (forecasted in 2013). Obviously it should be more now just by the nature of how the retirement cliff works. I would get an honest assessment from different people in [REDACTED] and check for jobs straight up. Right now might be a good time to get in. Five years from now maybe not so much. The time scale is really where I’m fuzzy, because certain things are happening slower than anticipated and certain things are happening faster than anticipated, and without the funding to make it my full-time job, I can’t track every state’s job market.

So, for example, I’m aware generally that there are a lot more AI companies than I thought there would be in our space if we go back maybe 5 years ago. But the adoption in some areas is slower and more measured than I anticipated. Though arbitrations very quickly seemed to move away from us, so that couldn’t have helped (people still get arbitrations but the atmosphere is different now for many.)

So… yeah…look, if [REDACTED] is booming and you think you can snag a niche out there, by all means, roll with it. Or whatever market is close to you. Some really big investors are coming into the space and there’s probably some money making opportunity there that we don’t even talk about because it’s not directly related to court reporting. But if you start looking and you see maybe there’s not so much room for growth, then it’s not a safe bet, because I genuinely believe it’s going to get worse (for working reporters) before it gets better.

Sorry to info dump on you. Feel free to reach out any time you think I can help.”

I should perhaps add, for those that don’t regularly follow my work, that this loss in number is not inherently bad for working reporters. It is horrible for our students and schools. Putting that aside, the primary issue is that the corporations can use the fragmented market to divide and conquer, compete us down against each other in a race to the bottom, and in fact have a financial incentive to do so. And did so in the past when there was even less corporate consolidation than there is today.

If you sat at a massive table with every other court reporter in the business and we said to the room, “you can now reach into the pocket of the person seated next to you and pull out $50,” how many in the room do you think would break the chain? How does that number change as $50 becomes $5000, becomes $50 million? You start reading and realizing that those are the numbers we’re dealing with, and that those are the kinds of resources tied up in these legal transcripts. Then you read about insurance, and Uber, and all these other tangential industries trying to put the crunch on litigation and litigation fees, and you realize that if things go badly we could see a contraction in the job market.

Anyway, my bold prediction is that absent some colossal change in trajectory, we will see a drop in job satisfaction. Depending on our ability to organize politically, I am optimistically hopeful that that job satisfaction will rise again in my lifetime.

P.S.

Working on my political manifesto. Very pro-America.

U.S. Legal Support: Who Needs Realtime When You Have RemoteDepo Pro?

The press release mentions speech-to-text.

This graphic was posted online, though I have not yet ascertained whether it’s genuine.

U.S. Legal Unveils the next generation of RemoteDepo Pro.

The issue being that, even if, as some are saying, it’s inadequate, or contextually inadequate, this creates downward pressure on the rates for the golden goose of realtime that we’ve been siphoning people into at great expense for like 30 years.

But don’t take my word for it… just look at the people mainstream steno ignores.

You can keep chanting “it won’t be me,”

Or we could change things up in the same way they were changed up on us. You know, before it’s actually your job.

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Hellgate’s Courts of Contempt Project

Hellgate is a worker-owned, local New York City news outlet. They recently released a project called Courts of Contempt focused primarily on New York City courts and how judges are chosen and moved around the New York State Unified Court System by the Office of Court Administration. I’m still exploring some of the material they released. It’s fairly expansive. I reserve my public comments on the meat of the piece for many, many reasons.

But there is a segment that deals specifically with court reporters. It’s obvious to me, given what I’ve reviewed so far, that we are not the focus of this piece, which led to a couple of inaccuracies, a lot of opinion, but perhaps also a window into how people really view us. And that window has such value, because it offers us a path to understanding and improving public opinion. We each choose, individually, whether to walk the path, and how we walk it, and whatever happens next in history is the culmination of our collective actions and inaction. Guess that’s how society works!

Anyway, I just wanted a place to print my thoughts on the very specific piece relevant to this blog.

As of writing, the piece starts off, “you could do worse than becoming a court reporter in New York State.” Affirmatively true. This is why I’ve written many times that I want everybody to have what I have or better. Same reason I’ve been trying most of my adult life to get a union going for the private sector, where they would have even more leverage and bargaining power due to the inherent differences for public sector and private sector unions under New York law. The so-far-unsolved problem is gaining enough traction within a company office to unionize it. And if we were really smart and combined unions, we would have more centralized power, and more ability to impact our future. And if you’ve read through this whole blog and don’t believe that by now, don’t know what to tell you. Would love to discuss where we diverge.

Then they take a jab at our vacation days. It’s cool. I get it. It’s fun to dunk on public employees. I see this online a lot and it’s the same kind of psychological in-and-out groups dynamic that gets touched on in New York’s implicit bias charge, but instead of forming a bias with regard to race, color, creed, et cetera, the bias is formed against public employees, and likely reinforced every time one is reported to have broken the public trust. The greatest tragedy of this dynamic is that we have, as people, a profound ability to help each other. Public sector employees enjoy free speech protections that private sector employees don’t in the sense that since our employer is the government, the government can’t generally censor our speech, with exceptions. So you could, in theory, create a feedback loop where public sector employees amplify private sector workers’ speech as it relates to improving pay and working conditions, or speaking out against the corporate propaganda state. In return, as private sector conditions improve, so too will public sector conditions, as more money in more hands means more transactions taxable by government, more in payroll taxes, and ultimately more revenue for the services we know residents need and the people that provide those myriad services where applicable or appropriate. Hey America, you want paid vacation time? Exercise your American right to unionize today!

As for why the system is the way it is, I leave that to people far brighter than I will ever be to consider. But I suspect it has something to do with the intersection of history, law, justice, and resolution that courts represent in America.

As to the observations or allegations made about not responding or charging arbitrary fees, I can only say such things would mirror conduct I’ve written about, observed, and sometimes denounced in the private sector, and that greed is a very human trait that, left unchecked, is factually rotting our country this very moment.

With regard to the appeal issue and bench conferences off the record, I withhold public comment.

With regard to transcripts not capturing tone, this is a valid criticism of paper or PDF transcripts, but it is much faster to read transcripts than to listen to hours of audio, so transcripts are always going to be the preferred way of doing business. You’re always going to end up with someone typing the testimony live, transcribing the audio, or babysitting the automatic speech recognition. The problems come in when you take the continuing education culture of stenographers largely facilitated by court reporting associations and trusted vendors and try to replace that with people who will be largely underpaid and unaware of the standards we tried to uphold once upon a time, and that many of us are trying to uphold to this day.

There are also inherent problems with entrusting the record entirely to corporate services. As we saw in Australia, the grass is not always greener with privatization. I am also watching the online discussion as it pertains to AI services like Claude. Succinctly, some users believe based on their own experiences that Anthropic is intentionally weakening token strength. Effectively, they are claiming that they are paying more money to do the same work. Even if such a thing is found to be false, it points to the very real possibility of a corporate technology vendor scoring a contract with the state and then manipulating the quality of the service provided downward in order to extract the most money from the state as is possible.

Generally speaking, from a management perspective, you only want to make that kind of leap if you’re really certain it’s going to work out in the long term. Because once you make the jump, you could be dealing with a much larger corporate entity, centralized power that has lawyers, and contracts, and can pressure you in ways you may not anticipate upon the signing of a contract. If you let go of your workforce and things don’t work out, you might not be able to go back, and now you’re locked in with businesspeople that, quite frankly, unlike many thousands of court reporters across the United States of America, understand leverage and public relations. Corporations that are not bound by the Taylor Law of New York or similar laws in other states. Corporations that can publicly commit fraud without any consequence. This is, again, as evidenced through the many years I have written personal and public accounts of my research and opinion regarding the court reporting market.

Just to rewind for a power comparison, Tyler Technologies bought For The Record for about $212 million. Tyler Technologies has posted revenues of around $2 billion a year. For contrast, the NYSUCS Budget released at around $3.2 billion. It is well documented that employer-employee power dynamics directly impact pay. What kind of power dynamic can the public and any administration expect to have with a private corporation owned by another private corporation likely able to outspend it in court should any contract disputes arise? Let’s just leave it here: They don’t have to deal with this dystopian power dynamic today because there are so many options. Whatever way you slice it, the public sector employees are financially weaker and will be, in all likelihood, easier to deal with, and more ready to negotiate. If you want some real-world examples, look at stenography software itself. The vendor pool is pretty small, all things considered, and that’s part of the reason why the big boys get to charge us the money that they do for a new machine and software. Corporations, in their modern form, are legal creations that act as wealth extraction machines. We saw what Veritext’s owner, Leonard Green, did to hospitals for poor people. A cautionary tale.

With regard to the inaccessibility of otherwise public records, it is something I have thought about from a systemic standpoint. It is not at all uncommon or unique to court reporters, and I have not come up with a great solution for us. A court system can eat the cost, people can pay privately, you can have the hybrid system you have today — all of these are choices that have pros and cons for all involved, same as any choice we could make.

I accept that it is not my position, currently, to choose the direction society decides to go. But take it from an autist that has spent a great deal of his life engaging with and later trying to detach from the group think and the illusory truth effect that all of us are inherently susceptible to, individual choices over time have far-reaching, long-lasting consequences. Even the magic word prediction machine agrees. I will close out on this issue with one of the pros of our technology. It is incredibly difficult to fabricate, alter, or generate our electronic notes, particularly without our express help and permission, as, if it were ever necessary, an attorney could call a court reporter to the stand and make them, painstakingly, line by line, read every single stroke recorded into the record and explain why they transcribed it the way that they did. In many other scenarios you are relying on audio that is, for all intents and purposes, easier to edit, and such audio can lead to inaudible portions of testimony being lost to time. There are likely ways to compensate for or correct this, but it is a serious concern, and doing it wrong can lead to more opaqueness, inaccessibility, and expense than we have today.

I suppose I’ll end with what was, to me, a most surprising error in the segment. The New York State Court Reporters Association was named as a union for court reporters. It is not. In truth, most New York City senior court reporters and court reporters are represented by ASSCR or Local 1070, respectively. Outside of the city, CSEA and its locals do most of the heavy lifting. But I respect that, not being the centerpiece of the project, the inner workings of our politics and representation were probably not their concern.

It’s noted that the New York State Court Reporters Association has a flair for self-mythologizing. And I can only say that that is likely to some extent a remnant of the Old Guard and Dom Tursi’s influence. He loved this profession and the people in it. He had done a great deal of research, pointing back to the time of Cicero and, further in time, the Sumerians, etc., making the case that humanity has a long history of preserving speech. Stenography was simply another evolution along that path, where the machine shorthand writers eventually became the dominant modality over handwritten shorthand practitioners.

Stenography became, in some ways, its own self-reinforcing, somewhat insular community, certainly by the time I arrived in 2008. I dare say that the kind of mindset that built the Gallery of Shorthand is lost to us, as more and more court reporters of every modality adopt the more modern thought process of “this is a job, not who I am as a person.” This likely means that mythologizing as a motivational technique is going to be less effective going forward, whatever the future of this workforce looks like. These kinds of conversations and emotions, I have read, are happening all over the country across many different job sectors, so there is little reason to feel alone or ashamed about it.

I write as an individual and not a representative of any government or organization. I write with good intentions, accepting that though history is unlikely to remember me at all, the time we’ve just spent together mattered. Thank you for reading.

August 2026 Addendum:

To the extent I complained about Hellgate not fixing false information on their site, they did at some point prior to August 10, 2026 correct the bit about the unions. Thanks!

Surveying Season 2026

Stenonymous is going to be building on its innovative history of publishing information from the court reporting industry.

Coming April 2026 will be at least two surveys.

1. The 2026 Stenonymous Court Reporting Discrimination Survey.

2. The 2026 Stenonymous Education Improvement Survey.

Data collection will continue for 90 days.

A report will issue by September 1, 2026.

I understand more than anyone organizational identification. I’ve lived it. In many ways I still do. Maybe these surveys can help bridge the gap between the people that go unheard and the people in positions to effect change.

If you have suggestions with regard to the content of either survey or ideas for additional surveys please take the time to comment below.

Thank you for your continued readership of Stenonymous.com.

Stenonymous readership statistics as of March 14, 2026

P.S.

I said online I wish we were as unified as them.

I also wish they’d realize what I could do with a $10 million budget. The brand is associated with radical honesty. It doesn’t get much better than that.

May 2026 Addendum:

I have to put this on hold for an undetermined and possibly indefinite amount of time. Life got busy. Sorry!

Why Are Reporters Not Expected To Improve?

In a private group the question was posed. And it ended with “if you want to advocate for this profession, whether as a reporter, a student, or other, please just focus on getting better every day. Everything else is just noise and not helpful in you becoming the solution.”

I am preserving my answer here because I feel it has value.

“I am writing honestly and hope you will take the time to consider what I write.

Economically getting better is not really going to help our situation. It may, for sure, improve individual reporters’ outcomes, and the outcome of individual proceedings/jobs. So I support improvement. But we are facing a very specific situation where the guy who got the shortage forecasted under NCRA went to STTI to push digital using that shortage forecast, and the large corporations behind STTI, including Veritext and Stenograph, put their time and attention into expanding digital offerings, with Stenograph offering realtime digital certificates at one time. Veritext advertised every day for years to get people into digital reporting and BlueLedge through Ed 2 Go got its training on college websites across the country.

So you have a situation where the largest companies in the business took a hard shift toward digital under the excuse of shortage. As they shift digital and continue to buy agencies providing stenographer jobs, the number of jobs that would’ve went to stenographers goes down, and this causes public sector to have trouble finding people, so public sector starts recording and the number of stenographer jobs drops even further, reducing our combined political strength even more.

You can see this in the way they act. Veritext went from firing that lady and saying stenographers were the lifeblood of the company to telling reporters digital reporters are reporters so they’d better get used to it and they have 3,000 digital applications a month. True? Unsure. But think about what they’re signaling.

With our reduced power, companies have more power to set rates. “Take what we offer or we’ll give your job to someone else.”

So you have a situation where you can be as good as you want to be. As they economically outplay us and our numbers go down, we will slowly lose our ability to choose our own destiny so to speak. We will be many people fighting for the shrinking number of jobs not going digital. Today it does not matter to you because you are good at your job and feel secure. By the time your job is on the line, there will probably be too few of us to make a difference.

Perhaps think of the field as a pyramid with the realtime jobs at the top. What happens when the bottom of the pyramid disappears? The top of the pyramid ends up on the floor. And that’s assuming it doesn’t shatter when it hits the floor.

If we do not improve our collective understanding of the wider market and what is happening right now, and what has unfolded over the last 13 years, we risk the next 10 or 20 being a very rough ride for those of us that hopefully still have jobs.

We’re basically asking people to shut their eyes to all this and close the gap between 95% and 100% while they get systematically replaced by people that never did this a day in their lives.”

Reader, your eyes are clearly open.

Do you see what I see?

P.S.

Let’s play spot the hallucinations.

Acquisition of KW Reporting by Veritext Sparks Online Debate

As posted to the Court Reporter Rates Discussion Group.

OP writes, “KW Reporting out of California sold to Veritext. How unfortunate. Marking them off my list.”

Whitney Khumar, one of the decision makers behind the sale, and also known for performing as Judge Judy’s stenographer, came onto the post to state, “We completely understand why this might feel concerning at first. Reporters are the heart of everything we do, and supporting and protecting this profession has always been, and will always be, our number one priority.

When we went through this process, we were very clear that the culture we built at KW and the way we support our reporters wasn’t going anywhere. Veritext had actually approached us several times over the years before we even considered it, and those conversations only moved forward once we felt confident that what makes KW special would be preserved.

The good news is Kamryn and I are still here, our same team is still here, the same calendar staff, the same relationships, and the same rates everyone is used to. Nothing about the people you work with day-to-day is changing.

What this does give us is additional resources and technology that will help make things easier and more streamlined for reporters, which we’re actually really excited about.

At the end of the day, we care deeply about the reporters we work with and about this profession as a whole. That hasn’t changed one bit. We’re still here and still committed to supporting our reporters every step of the way.”

I took the time out to reply, “with all due respect to you, unless it’s spelled out in a contract, they’re not going to preserve what makes KW special in the long run. They’re going to do what they do, keep things samey for 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, whatever it is, and then things will morph. And since we know Veritext’s general agenda is to push the private sector towards more digital usage (they were involved with BlueLedge and STTI specifically for this reason), they will push more digital regardless of whether stenographers are available.

Veritext has a long and documented history of lying to court reporters and attorneys. And chances are good they’re lying to you too. So get all you can out of it. And good luck.”

There’s a lot to unpack in that thread and I hope it’s never deleted. People make interesting points and have different perspectives.

P.S.

But now that it’s been a few days I thought it might be good to address some stuff.

This goes without saying, but my assessment is true and honest. Whatever deal they have with Whitney, whatever’s been expressed but not captured in a contract is probably a lie in a long list of documented and undocumented lies. This is just kind of how businesses operate. Look at Plaza College and its acquisition of New York Career Institute. Whatever assurances were made, the old staff was slowly fired and replaced, and what exists today is very different from the school I attended from all I’ve heard. I can only hope that the reporters they produce are more ready for the market than I was. And if any of you are reading, there’s lots to get you over the edge, sell yourself, have good availability, try to be in a position to help a scheduler out, because it can make a difference in whether your long-term relationship with that agency works out.

Anyway, some might’ve been surprised at me toward the end where I tell her to get all she can out of it and good luck. But I figure it this way, the more time we spend mad about things that won’t change anything, the less time we’re spending coming up with creative ways to change the things that make us angry. We’ve demonstrated through this blog that a modicum of light on an issue can change things dramatically. The Stenograph Town Hall was demanded by Stenonymous readers. The STTI was brought down for fraud. The antitrust lawsuit against NCRA cited us. The antitrust lawsuit in Texas had a judge’s ruling that nodded toward the research covered on this blog in the past. There’s 700 posts here, and while I’m happy to concede that some of it is nonsense, the vast majority has gone to helping students and/or reporters in some way. There’s a real value here because the students who read this blog and still say “this is the field I want to work in” are answering a calling that’s going to make this profession shine. They’ve got the corporate cards stacked against them and are still ready to make it work.

But, as I’ve said many times, a great deal of our perspective is survivorship bias. I knew a lot of people who never made it in this field, and I didn’t always believe it was their fault for not making it. Look at all the numbers we’ve published on this blog over the years. They point to a systemic kind of willingness to fudge the numbers and throw on whatever spin makes money. So while we kind of sit here in our excellence culture debating where the comma goes, they’re answering the question “how do I extract the most money from this situation in the shortest amount of time possible?”

And one answer, among many, is a massive reduction in stenographer seats for digital reporting seats. It was claimed online that Veritext stated through one of its webinars that they had 3,000 digital court reporting applicants a month. There’s only maybe 30,000 court reporters in the country. While I don’t necessarily trust, I do think they’re giving clear signals there that we’re becoming replaceable.

Same old solutions. Either start an enterprise to compete directly, unionize, or fund media that shines a light.

Or sit, and wait, and see what happens.

I’m a big fan of all 4, reader.