The women of court reporting need your help!
Stenographic court reporting has been the consumer favorite for decades. We’re the people that type what you say in court. Private equity firms have decided they want to replace us with recorders (digital court reporters) and have spread fraudulent statistics to the public in order to exaggerate and exacerbate the ongoing stenographer shortage. They’re lying to jobseekers, investors, and consumers. The Stenonymous.com blog and Christopher Day fight to inform. I also fight to reform the industry into one that is more transparent and accountable to the public.
Blog facts:
- Blog used to advocate and fight for working women of court reporting. Private equity firms are likely trying to eliminate their positions.
- Private equity firms are lying to jobseekers. They’re not telling them stenography is a better career path than digital court reporting. For example, in New York City, the stenographers can work for the courts, digital court reporters can’t – not telling jobseekers things like this is wrong.
- Digital reporting is less efficient than stenography.
- In the Testifying While Black study, stenographers only scored 80% on the AAVE dialect. Laypeople in pilot study 1 scored 40%. In a different study, Racial Disparities in Automatic Speech Recognition, automatic systems scored as low as 25% on AAVE. Stenographers are better at taking down diverse dialects and accents. Should justice depend on how you speak?
People can help by:
- Sharing photos and video. The more people that hear about this fraud, the less likely it will continue.
- Ask the New York State Attorney General to investigate Veritext, U.S. Legal Support, and Planet Depos for deceptive business practices.
- Ask the New York State Education Department to look into BlueLedge / Ed 2 Go and whether they are advertising digital court reporting to New York student consumers without giving them all the facts.
- Donations of money at Stenonymous.com increase our reach and voice.