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.
