I’ve been writing this blog to help people look at the issues in our field differently and realize that they, as individuals, can change outcomes. Many of us struggle with fear and anxiety, whether it’s about a boss, a work situation, a life situation, or even the simple act of speaking up for ourselves. This blog is about bringing comfort through knowledge and often points out there’s always a way forward.
Here is a way forward for our future public speakers. Years ago, one of my best friends, NYSCRA President Joshua Edwards, asked me to attend a Toastmasters meeting. Toastmasters is a public speaking club. It helps people overcome their fear of speaking or enhance the skills they already have through practice. Toward the start of a meeting they had “table topics,” improvised scenarios for randomly-chosen guests to speak about. As luck had it, the very first time I attended I was chosen to talk about what I would do to sell clothing irons to people. I stood up, said I would lose my job, and launched deeper into an explanation about how I would sell those irons that only my Facebook friends can see because Facebook does not want me to touch the privacy settings on that one.
But I am Christopher Day!
At the conclusion of the meeting they asked “will you come back?” My response? “No, I enjoy my debilitating fear of public speaking.” I did come back a time or two and always listened to what Joshua had to say with great interest. He went on to become President of that Toastmasters chapter, participate in at least one regional contest, and sharpen his already-formidable speaking skills.
Now he’s setting up StenoMasters, an online speaking club. A Facebook group and page will be made soon. This will be geared toward stenographers, but it is not going to be exclusively stenographers, so if you have friends or family that want to jump into public speaking with you, have them check it out. There are many amazing options to learn about speaking and presenting. Because StenoMasters is going to be a nonprofit club, I assume it will be the most value for your dollar in public speaking practice, and I am very happy to share it with my audience. When enrollment opens, I hope to be the very first member to sign up.
We have a big messaging issue in steno. As more of us cross the threshold from voiceless to voices for the voiceless, our messaging and entire field will improve. Again, this is a life skill that will help you in all your personal and professional endeavors. I hope you’ll join me in joining StenoMasters.
After releasing the article on how a New York reporter doubled their money by taking private clients, I was hit with a scenario. “Chris, I went to get private clients, but they showed me invoices they were getting, and they were lower than what I get from my agency! How does anybody make money in this city?” Subsequently I came across an article regarding Veritext’s lawsuit with US Adjustment Corp., and from that lawsuit I was able to get a whole lot of old invoices.
At a glance, most of the invoices seem to be between $3.40 and $3.95, and this is indeed competitive with the rates given to reporters for O+2 work, which usually lands somewhere between $3.25 and $4.25 with no upcharges. For non-NY readers, your O+1 is our O+2. The witness’s attorney customarily gets their copy without charge. For those of you that would like to peruse 200 pages of invoices, enjoy. The rest of you, keep reading.
Just in case anybody missed it, at least one of these invoices is listed at the Cutting Edge Deposition office, a one-star digital reporting outfit. So there’s at least circumstantial evidence that Veritext was linked to or had a relationship with digital reporting services as early as 2015. Note also that there’s basically no difference between the price listed at the digital firm’s office and any other invoice. As old studies have shown, digital reporting is not cheaper.
Judging by that rating, Cutting Edge might cut some corners.
Obviously, these are all over half a decade old and may not reflect current market rates. Obviously whatever rates USAC was getting were probably discounted for the bulk work in the same way Diamond gave the Law Department great rates. The point stands that companies are finding a way to charge less than the reporter is making. How is that possible?
1. Cost shifting via copies. 2. Zombie behavior.
Cost shifting? Cost shifting, in this context, is when one party underpays for a service or product, and the cost of that service or product is recovered from another party who is overpaying.
Again, using New York City’s market as an example, an agency could pay a reporter $3.25, $4.25, or whatever rate was agreed upon. The reporter generally makes the majority of that O+2. Where the agencies get their money is typically the copies. Let’s say you send Johnny on a deposition for $4.25 a page, but you give your client a sweet $3.95 rate because they have so much bulk work. A loss, right? Only if the job is an O+2. There’s no statutory cap on copies here that I know of, and copy rates are notoriously bad in New York City, between 25 cents and 50 cents, so a single copy of more than $0.55/page means profit for the company on that job. Just to put this into perspective, I’ve reviewed a Veritext email from the Midwest region that had copy rates in the $3.80 (regular) to $4.80 (expedite) ballpark. The copy rate for officials in New York, who also collect a salary in addition to their pages, has been hovering around a dollar for the last couple of decades. The idea that private sector is not charging more for that is pretty naive. So assuming an original of 3.95/page, a copy sale of 3.80/page, and a payment to Johnny of 4.50/page, the agency is pulling in $7.75/page in revenue. That’s nearly 42% of the money for them for what is essentially a finder’s fee. It also complicates things for Johnny, who can’t promise clients $3.95 unless he’s willing to take a pay cut and gamble on getting copies.
It goes beyond that with what’s called a sliding scale. The sliding scale awards the client, and sometimes the copy purchasers, with a discount dependent on the number of copies sold. Because the reporters are not fighting for their copies, companies have a lot of wiggle room. They can put $8 on a copy invoice. If a lawyer pays it, then they’ve just made $8 a page under the client’s assumption that “court reporters are so expensive.” If the lawyer complains, they can cut that rate down to $4 or $2, tell the lawyer they’re such a great client and getting such a great deal, pay the 25 cents to the reporter, and walk away with significant amounts of money. Think about it this way: Let’s send Sally on an O+6 for a rocking $5.25 a page, original and 4 copy sales at Johnny’s same rates. The agency can charge 2 bucks a page to everyone, walk away with $10 a page, and again make about what Sally is making despite it being Sally that’s doing 99% of the work because binding transcripts really isn’t hard. Again, Sally is stuck in a situation where working on her own might actually make her less money unless and until copy sales come into play. If Sally can’t survive the short-term pay cut, she doesn’t make it to the big bucks that are keeping agency rents paid, and she’s more likely to accept whatever rate the agency wants instead of the best rate her skill can command. And that $5.25 is generous, because prior to the court reporter shortage getting bad, some companies, like Diamond, didn’t even bother to pay all of their reporters copies. So a company like Diamond as it was would’ve been making 60% of the money from the job before factoring in the proofreading fee that some reporters were asked or told to pay.
The darker side of the sliding scale is when companies ask reporters to change their layout or give a discount on multiple copy sales/realtime hookups. There is typically zero guarantee that they are passing on those savings to clients. Think about that the next time you send a job in your preferred layout and an agency asks you to cram it into a new one that widens the margins or changes the page count. The N word can be your friend sometimes. I knew a realtimer who was asked to slide their rate back because of all the parties ordering. Acquiescence meant losing half their money on that job, but failing to acquiesce might’ve meant the entire job being given to someone else. They used the N word, got the job, and made lots of money. Reporters win when they stand up for themselves.
A hyper-realistic depiction of a court reporter using the N word.
Zombie Behavior? Brains… Several articles ago I explained the concept of zombie companies. Companies can make money through loans and investors, keeping cash flow positive while losing money and/or earning no profit. Zombies can also be defined as companies that are just barely making their debt obligations. 1 in 5 companies examined by Bloomberg were zombies. In a 2019 Kentley Insights report, 1 in 4 court reporting companies was said to be not profitable. Those that were not profitable lost an average of 10% of their revenue a year. These companies can basically use their investor money to hire people and give customers great discounts. If they obtain large enough market share and run competitors into the ground, they can then jack up their prices monopoly style.
This isn’t a fantasy-land scenario. It’s what Uber did. It gave great discounts and even occasionally gave drivers incentives. It killed the taxi industry as best it could, made itself a fixture in people’s lives, and jacked up the rates while claiming a shortage. Meanwhile, the business model is losing billions of dollars a year. Honestly, I’m more concerned with the cost shifting than I am with the zombies. If companies can’t make money exploiting the “driving” skill, companies are doomed when it comes to a specialized skill like legal reporting. This is a simple calculation. About 80% of America drives and about 0.01% of America court reports. It’s about supply and demand. To me, that says that reporting zombie firms are about 8,000 times less likely to be profitable than Uber, a company which despite ubiquity and billions lost has not managed to turn a profit. But the danger of zombies is evident: They can take up significant market share, impact market rates, and bankrupt other service providers for decades before the money runs out. Again, look at what they did to the medallions. A high of $1 million in sales went as low as $140,000 in recent years, likely thanks to companies that do not even have a sustainable model.
What do we do? Hope. I’ve been told “what? That’s business! You hate business? They’re not doing anything wrong!” Legally they are probably not doing anything wrong in New York. I’ll concede that much until I have real evidence to the contrary. But morally it’s pretty clear this is wrong. Why are the page rates such a shell game? Why is everything so hidden instead of the yesteryear commission split that reporters made? Why aren’t young reporters being taught the value of the copy and their work? It’s easy to control ignorant people and conclude a lot of companies want reporters to be ignorant so that the companies can continue to leech off of the work of reporters. So to address the morality question, ask yourself how you would feel about me if my mantra was “I need you to be dumb so I can profit off your work.” That would be pretty evil, right? How about if I reduced standard turnaround times so you were always too busy with work to think about the situation and whether you were getting a fair deal? Let’s say I wasn’t evil and circumstances just lined up perfectly for me to profit off your ignorance, and I let it happen. Am I a “good person” yet? Am I “not doing anything wrong?” Sometimes it seems we have this bizarre notion that anything goes in business except standing up and saying “no, this is wrong, I won’t cooperate with this.” I’m still in the process of vetting the following, but I was told by a colleague that reporting companies here in New York City brought on salespeople, the salespeople saw the money to be made in this field, started creating their own companies, killed the union, and from there our rates literally stagnated for about 30 years. In my younger years I was literally told “if you don’t like the way it is, leave.” A good four people that I knew in or around my graduating class of 2010 did leave. It’s been an incredible decade and we are now at the point where people are talking about this stuff pretty freely instead of telling newbies they’re the problem and that they should leave. As I see it, hope and communication are winning us many battles.
I can’t say with certainty where the tolerance to everything that keeps reporter rates down comes from Perhaps it’s all exacerbated by antitrust concerns and the fact that our associations cannot engage in anticompetitive behavior such as group boycotts. Perhaps we see they are silenced, so we mimic that silence. NCRA, for example, could never legally denounce Veritext, US Legal, or Planet Depos in the same way I’m allowed to. Maybe that tolerance is linked to survivorship bias. “I was successful and therefore anyone who is not successful must not be trying hard enough.” Maybe that tolerance is linked to expectations and the Pygmalion effect. “There’s nothing I can do, so I won’t try to change anything, and therefore nothing changes, validating my belief that there was nothing I could do.”
There’s no end to the list of “maybes,” but there is a profound power in spreading knowledge. With knowledge on how the court reporting firms are making their money, everyone from the grizzled four-decade reporter to the newbie graduate can compete. That’s a pretty scary thought for anybody who’s been making money off of reporter ignorance. That’s a scary thought for reporting companies that can’t even make a profit in the current climate. But for the people that actually do the work in this field and the reporter-owned companies, it provides real opportunity. Not so entrepreneurial? You’ve seen now hundreds of invoices and just how much money is in this field. It’s time to ask for your fair share. A typical finder’s fee is something between 5% and 35%. Why should you give up 95% on a copy?
Entrepreneurial? Try subcontracting your O+2 out to your non-entrepreneurial colleagues and grabbing those copy jobs. It may be frightening to lose money on any one job, but if you lose $100 on one job and make $1,000 on another, you put more in your pocket, and as I just showed you, it works out mathematically. You can pay your colleagues well and still make boatloads of money. If you’d like to be added to the list of agencies I compiled so that New York reporters can find you, let me know.
There’s no cheap fix. Industry health is a lot like personal health. Took me a long time to get heavy. It was about a decade of decline until I peaked at 290 pounds. It also took a long time and a lot of reporter apathy to get from the golden age 80s to the nightmare of a field I stepped into where rates were lower in 2010 than they were in 1991. Those of you who saw me at NCRA 2021 saw I’m a lot closer to 240 now and headed in a somewhat healthier direction. Without some communication from people that loved me, I probably would’ve remained hopeless and just kept gaining the weight. Similarly we can rehabilitate this field and make the working reporter’s wallet a lot healthier on average, but it’s going to take consistent effort to get word out to the newbies. The long-term consequence of an informed field is probably more stable pricing for consumers, the people we’re doing all this for to begin with, and I can’t see a single drawback.
Addendum: As pointed out in a comment below, I neglected to point out that agencies also create a word index or concordance index and charge for those pages. Some firms charge a reduced rate and others charge a full rate. In my past experience, no firm paid the reporter for the index. Since it’s a practice that relates so closely to this topic, I am adding it here.
About three months ago, after Verbit’s acquisition of VITAC, a well-known captioning provider, I published a strategic overview for captioners and how they can stand up for consumers. Not long ago, a live steno captioner position was posted by VITAC for less than $20 an hour. The position did boast other incentives, such as the potential for health insurance and a 401(k) for full-time captioners. With health insurance being valued by sources like Griffin at $1.52 to $7.42 an hour, it’s fair to say that we can consider a $19.23 hourly rate with benefits a value of about $30 an hour at best and a value of $20.75 at worst.
Remember, the value is slightly higher than the dollar value if benefits are offered.
Stenography is a highly specialized skill. But even other highly specialized skills, like realtime voice writing, were undervalued. The voice captioner posting said $30 hourly at the top, but then in the body of the description, a $17/hr training rate was advertised. It was further advertised that $35,000 could be made in the first year. $35,000 divided by 52 weeks in a year is about $673.08 a week. Assuming a 40-hour workweek, that’s about $16.83/hr — close to half the advertised rate!
Come work for me for $30 an hour! I mean $17! I mean $16.83!
I thought, “if a company is going to pay its specialized workforce $20 or $30 an hour, certainly I feel bad for the positions that do not have labor shortages or specialized skills.” Then I came across VITAC’s posting for Sales Engineer I (SE1). An SE1’s job is all about onboarding new clients and responding to requests from Operations and Sales personnel. They’re offered $58,000 to $70,000 annually, the equivalent of $27.88/hr and $33.65/hr assuming the same 40-hour workweek. So VITAC’s apparent strategy is to pay the stenographer that is providing the actual service to the consumer about 60% of what they’re paying the salespeople. But just to make sure they look good, they added a modern stenotype to the website.
No offense, sales engineer I, but I think captioners have it a little harder than you do.
Maybe if you were offering more than $20/hr, I wouldn’t find this picture so comical.
Of course, having been in the field the last eleven years, I also have some basic familiarity with the rates that captioners and CART providers charge. $20 to $30 for a “live steno captioner” job seemed low to me. Knowing how companies in the court reporting sector have taken advantage of young reporters, I requested information from several service providers in the field with varying degrees of experience in the hopes that I could get solid info out there for young or unknowing captioners. This is what I learned:
Provider A stated that they did not provide broadcast captioning, but did caption telephone calls and Zoom meetings at a rate of “almost $40 an hour” through Innocaption. It was stated that the work was super easy and may even be possible for students to take, though Provider A did mention they usually do not recommend students work. Asked about their understanding of broadcast captioning rates, Provider A stated broadcast captioning was higher. Provider B stated “Even as a brand new CART provider, I never made less than $60 an hour. With one company, after I got my [certification], they bumped me to $65. Another company has always been $65 across the board. The third company has different rates for different jobs. Classes are $60 but if you are doing town halls, harder jobs, it is $75. Fourth Company was a smaller company and [they] paid me $80 per hour, and it was only classes. First company I spoke of is out of Illinois, second is Denver, third is California, fourth is Chicago. And I have never done broadcast captioning. I hope that helps!”
Provider C stated that they performed work for call services that did live captioning and were offered $40 an hour, but they were only taking down one side of a conversation.
Provider D, a 27-year veteran of our field and certified realtime reporter, stated that when they took on captioning work, it was 2014, they had a full-time job, and they did not need to make the same high rates independent contractors usually did. They made $50/hr in 2014 and a 2-hour minimum. That work came to a close. Come 2020, Provider D was again offered $50/hr and attempted to negotiate for $80 because the work was dense and contained a lot of science. The firm “did not know” if they could pay $80, and asked Provider D to come down to $70, which Provider D did with the caveat that they would renegotiate at a later date.
Provider D also received a call from a California-based company and negotiated $100/hr with a 2-hour minimum. The firm paying $100/hr expected no rough draft after events. The firm paying $70/hr required a rough draft. A third firm in Florida offered $80/hr. Provider D stated that the swing was generally between $50/hr to $100/hr and that they would never work for $20/hr because captioning is more than knowing realtime, you have to know how to connect to a multitude of platforms and devices, as well as troubleshoot on the fly.
Provider E wrote “My first response when I read [the $20 rate] was OMG! Yeah, that is SUPER low! So here’s what I know from where I sit in the Pacific Northwest:
There are four levels of captioning that I have ascertained. 1. Broadcast captioning, which is a whole other sphere that requires encoding software and usually above and beyond training to do TV captioning. I don’t really know much about that…” “I don’t know what rates they’re charging, but it has to be higher because the software is not cheap, like a $7k add-on with Eclipse.
2. CART captioning, either in person or remote, through a freelance company or own shingle. This is stuff like government meetings, group conferences, seminars and such, $120-$125/hr with 2-3 hour minimum in my area. We are sometimes requested to bring a projector and/or screen, which adds to rental fees. About half of people charge after hours rates on this. I feel the remote world has let this go a bit. But I know when I go back in person that’ll definitely go back in.
3. Schools. One on one with one student. they are notoriously cheap in my opinion even though they’re being paid by ADA funds, from my understanding. Most commonly in my area $85/hr, 2-hr min. But I’ve negotiated more for after hours and weekend work with one college.
4. There is one company whose name escapes me, probably more, who provide a captioner for phone calls. they only pay $30/hr. I was really bothered by this undercutting of the industry when I found out about the rates folks were accepting. But a reporter I talked to about it said [it’s] mostly sitting there doing nothing because you’re only writing half of the conversation, no transcripts, so super easy work. She considered it easy supplemental income.
That $20 is WAY out of line, especially if that requires continuous writing…”
Provider F wrote “everyone has their baseline. I will do $70 and hide my head, for a friend. But my default is $80 or $85. However, if it’s MY work, my clients, I charge 100 or 125 and pay $80 or $90 or $100 depending on the job…”
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator, $50 in 2014 money is worth $58.08 in June 2021 dollars. $100 in 2014 money is worth $116.15 in June 2021 dollars. Again, for new captioners, this should put into perspective the value of the work and the importance of occasional raises.
I also reached out to StenoCaptions LLC and received the following response:
“Good afternoon, Mr. Day,
Thank you for your question about our company. StenoCaptions LLC is proud to be a minority woman-owned business. Our team of independent contractor captioners earn between $100-120 per hour depending on their qualifications and length of time in the field. As our website discloses, we charge $140 per hour for most jobs. This means that our captioners, who are the people doing the difficult and demanding work of providing live accurate Communication Access Real-time Translation, net between 70-86% of what we bill. StenoCaptions LLC is proud to support our highly trained, highly reliable stenographic captioners.
We are happy to be quoted on your blog. Let us know if you have any further questions.
Sincerely, Wendy Baquerizo and Joshua Edwards Co-owners StenoCaptions LLC StenoCaptions.com”
As of writing, there is little doubt in my mind that the rates being offered by VITAC, and I suppose by extension Verbit, are well below what could be considered a market rate no matter which market in the United States we examine. Again, in the best-case scenario of a $30/hr value, they are paying 40% less than Provider D, whose full-time job was not captioning, made in 2014! A company like Steno Captions is literally paying six times as much to their providers. This has some troubling implications. Verbit’s entire model, as I understand it, is automatic speech recognition transcription coupled with a human transcriber. Verbit claims on its site that after 8 hours it can provide ADA-compliant material at 99% accuracy, at least that’s how I understand their infographic. They also make the claim of 95% accuracy with an 8 to 12-second delay.
To be fair, it takes me about 8 hours to get 99 percent accuracy on 160 pages. But I’m not a captioner.
We have to deal with the hard fact that, in its series A funding, Verbit made the claim that its “adaptive speech recognition tech” could generate detailed transcriptions with over 99 percent accuracy at record speeds. In its series B funding, Verbit, through CEO Livne, said it would not take the human transcriber out of its workflow. Now it’s apparent that Verbit regards “record speeds” as 8 hours. We have to deal with the hard fact that, when studied by people at Stanford, an entire host of automatic speech recognition products from companies far larger than Verbit had accuracy levels that were 25 to 80 percent dependent on who was speaking.
There’s just no good reason to believe that Verbit consistently has the capabilities that it says it has. This is all part of the claim game that I demonstrated earlier this year. In the video I just linked, I tell six lies, one partial truth, and one actual truth in fifteen seconds. I challenged my readers to think about how long it would take to prove the truth or falsity of each claim. I have to make the same challenge here. Verbit’s website boasts that they are trusted by “400+ organizations,” but when one flips through the organization list, one sees about 16 organizations. Even if one wanted to spend the time and energy to fact check the claim of being trusted by 400 organizations, one could not do so. Why bring it up? Because stenographers need to be aware that a lot of the “intimidating” information out there falls apart when given any sort of investigation. Likewise, there are entities out there that will try to convince young captioners that their skill is not worth very much. I’m publishing this information today to counter that.
Perhaps the low pay wouldn’t bother me, but it goes directly against digital recording’s main talking point of “we need to record it because there are not enough stenographers to meet demand.”
You guys showcase the shortage. I’ll keep showcasing your BS.
Maybe the shortage of stenographic court reporters and captioners is exacerbated by companies like this coming in and offering pay that’s nowhere near the market rate. There’s no innovation involved. It’s a shameless war on workers. It doesn’t take a particularly bright person to say “gee, there would be more money for the company if only we could reduce the labor costs.” It also doesn’t take a particularly bright person to point out to captioners that they cannot accept this if they want a healthy field. We’re going to need the entrepreneurial individuals among us to consider jumping in, setting up shop, and competing. We’re going to need captioners to demand the pay they deserve. So if you come across an inexperienced reporter getting told they’re only worth $20/hr, please share this with them and be a major part of pushing back.
Addendum: I realized after my initial draft that the $20 an hour could be a full-time job. Assuming 7 hours a day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year, that’s a salary of about $36,400, below the national average, and well below what I started working for as a court reporter around $70,000 a year. So even looking at it from the standpoint and potential of “more hours for less pay” I am unimpressed and captioners should be too.
A series of 2019 predictions by Gartner were reported on by Venture Beat on June 28, 2021. As explained in a priorpost, “AI”, or machine learning, relies on datasets and algorithms. If the data is imperfect or incomplete, a computer has a chance of giving bad output. If the algorithm that tells the computer what to do with the data is imperfect, the computer has a chance of giving bad output. It’s easy to point to anecdotal cases where “AI” makes a bad call. There have been reports of discrimination in facial recognition technology, driverless cars killing people, or Amazon’s algorithm deciding to fire drivers that are doing their job. I’ve seen plenty of data on the failings of overhyped technology and commercial ASR. What I hadn’t seen prior to today was somebody willing to put a number on the percentage of AI solutions that succeed. Today, we have that number, and it’s an abysmal 15%.
Perhaps this will not come as a surprise to my readers, considering prior reports that automatic speech recognition (ASR), an example of machine learning, is only 25 to 80 percent accurate depending on who’s speaking. But it will certainly come as a surprise to investors and companies that are dumping money into these technologies. Now there’s a hard number to consider. And that 15% itself is misleading. It’s a snapshot of the total number of implementations, not just ASR. ASR comprises a percentage of the total number of implementations out there. And it’s so bad that some blogs are starting to claim word error rate isn’t really that important.
Judge, I know I botched 20 percent of the words. But word error rate really isn’t that important.
That 15% is also misleading in that it’s talking about solutions that are implemented successfully. It is not talking about implementations that provide a positive return on investment (ROI). So imagine having to go to investors and say “our AI product was implemented with 100% success, but there’s still no money in this.”
The Venture Beat article goes on to describe several ways to make AI implementation a success, and I think it’s worth examining them briefly here.
Customizing a solution for each environment. No doubt that modeling a solution for every single business individually is bound to make that solution more successful, but it’s also going to take more staff and money. This would be almost like every court reporting company having their own personal software development staff to build their own CaseCAT or Eclipse. Why don’t they do that? It’s hopelessly expensive.
Using a robust and scalable platform. The word robust doesn’t really mean anything in this context. Scalability is tied to modular design — the ability to swap out parts of the program that don’t work for specific situations. For this, you need somebody bright and forward thinking. They have to have the capability to design something that can be modified to handle situations they may not even be aware exist. With the average software engineer commanding in the ballpark of $90,000 a year and the best of them making over $1 million a year, it’s hopelessly expensive.
Staying on course once in production. This involves reevaluating and sticking with something that may appear to be dysfunctional. This would be almost like the court reporter coming to the job, botching the transcript, and the client going “yes, I think I’ll use that guy again so that I can get a fuller picture of my operational needs.” It’s a customer service nightmare.
Adding new AI use cases over time. Piggybacking on number 3, who is going to want to continue to use AI solutions to patch what the first solution fails to address? This is basically asking businesspeople to trust that it will all work out while they burn money and spend lots of time putting out the fire. It’s a customer service nightmare.
I really respect Venture Beat trying to keep positive about AI in business, even if it’s a hopelessly expensive customer service nightmare.
With some mirth, I have to point out to those in the field that believe the stenographer shortage is an insurmountable problem that we now know machine learning in the business world has a failure rate that’s right up there with stenographic education’s failure rate. Beyond the potential of exploiting digital reporters or stealing investor money, what makes this path preferable to the one that has worked for the last hundred years? As I wrote a week ago, the competition is going to wise up. Stenographic court reporters are the sustainable business model in this field, and to continue to pretend otherwise is nothing short of fraud.
I had an e-mail exchange recently with a New York stenographic court reporter that began taking private clients. With the understanding their identity would remain anonymous, they gave me good insight into how it has increased their profit. I have presented plenty of academic theory on how low our page rates are here in New York and the importance of copies. Today I get to bring reporters a real-world example of just how much a little risk can increase your bottom line. Check out our Q&A below!
Q. How long have you been reporting? A. I’ve been reporting for 10 1/2 years.
Q. We’ve had multiple discussions now where you’ve disclosed you’ve taken up private clients. How is that going for you? A. So far it’s a success. I work with my clients 1-2 times a week, which I expected. They aren’t big firms, so I didn’t expect constant work. In March and September they gave me 15 jobs. One thing I hear people express concern about is collecting money for copies. That is, of course, a concern, and I have had to lean on law firms. But I can say that so far no law firm has stiffed me. And while some have been a little slow to respond, all have. So, fortunately, I haven’t had to chase anyone for payment yet. The best thing is the vastly increased copy rates, which makes this work a whole lot more enjoyable 😉.
Q. Did anybody give you permission to do this or did you just start doing it? A. No one gave me permission. I took it upon myself. It’s all about developing a relationship with the attorney. I should say mostly. A law firm that has used one agency for many years and is happy with the service will not likely change. But still, without developing the relationship, it is unlikely that they will try to work with you. It can take a while, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. I probably worked with my first client four or five times, but we got along very well. I brought up the possibility of his working with me at a time when there was little pressure. I definitely did not bring it up while on a job for someone else. I took a chance and it worked. He said yes. There are other factors that induced him to switch to me. We worked out a good financial arrangement which benefited his law firm, too.
Q. What are your feelings on poaching? A. By poaching, do you mean taking clients? When we use that term, it makes this sound like you’re doing something wrong if you take a client. This is common practice in all industries. Most of the client the agencies have, they probably acquired through “poaching.” The only thing to avoid is unethical practices. As I said, I would never broach the subject while on a job for someone else. And of course don’t lie.
Q. The audience is going to want to know some hard numbers. What kind of differences are you seeing in take-home pay? A. I turned in a job 131 pages long, including the [word index], and got two copies. Total take-home was roughly $1200. That was for a med mal case that might have gone two hours . And by the way, I do not charge high rates. So with a different client with the same factors, the total could have been considerably more. This is not the only one.
Q. Wow. That’s like $9 a page. You charge your clients $9 a page in New York? A. [No], my rate is closer to 4. Again, this is a relatively low rate. But the real profit is in the copy rate. That’s where you’ll make the money. (Just a side note, not one law firm has contested my copy rates. Hopefully that will never be an issue. I’m saying this for those who are concerned about collecting the payment.) So I don’t mind if the law firm wants to negotiate a rate down a little, not too much, as long as I’m aware I can keep the copy rate. On that 131-page job, nearly $800 of my pay was from the copy rate! Keep this in mind, remember this, we’re in business providing a service for law firms. So a) be gracious and patient in dealing with the law firms; b) be open to negotiate rates, just as long as you keep in mind where you’re really earning your money from.
Q. Isn’t it a challenge getting them to pay you? A. Sure. But I’ll take this challenge over the challenge of trying to make money when agencies are charging 4 dollars a page per copy and they’re giving, so generously, 40 cents a copy. Exactly what was said there. No more needs to be said. We have to strive upwards. I accept the challenge of collecting over the challenge of squeezing small incremental rate increases.
Q. Isn’t the cost of printing eating into your money? A. Not really. I had a $1,200 job the other day. When it was all said and done, I paid $90 to have it printed up. How come reporters are willing to blow a third of their money on scopists but not willing to even consider seeking their own clients and spending 10 percent on printing? Compare the costs to that of most industries. The cost here is very small in comparison to that in most fields.
Q. Anything else you’d like to tell reporters generally or New York reporters? A. Look, if someone does want to go out on their own, it’s understandable. For years, I said I would. I made halfhearted attempts, but didn’t really follow up. Even when I got my first client, I almost didn’t expect the attorney to take it seriously. But now that I see the huge difference in what I can earn per job, it’s motivated me to try and get more clients. I will say to those who want to try and do it on their own, just try it. Don’t be afraid of being blackballed by other agencies. You have nothing to lose and so much to gain. I’ve heard people say they don’t want to bother with putting transcripts together. First of all, it takes maybe 10 minutes. That’s it!
Second, it’s a great experience in motivating yourself to be an even better reporter, because you don’t want to turn in an error-filled transcript to your own client! You will be so much more careful and your notes will be so much better! I know because I’ve improved significantly just in the three months since I picked up my first client. If you’re so inclined to strike out on your own, I urge you to trust yourself and go and do it. Develop those relationships. Make business cards. Give them to everyone you know who knows attorneys. It can take time, so don’t get frustrated. Eventually you’ll get a first client. Not every job is big payday, but you will have some jobs where you will see double and maybe even more than what you would’ve earned if it was work for an agency.
In my view, this speaks for itself. Taking private clients can double your money. Collecting can become problematic, but the alternative of allowing certain agencies to continue to push substandard means of reporting on consumers is not a good one.
My girlfriend is very upset that I blew our vacation money on an ad campaign for steno. I’m not allowed to hire graphic designers anymore. Everybody that wants to donate to my vacation fund can do so at paypal.me/stenonymous. (joke)
Addendum:
A reader asked how many copies were charged in the above example. Our anonymous respondent said “2 copies. Keep in mind I give a discount to my client when I have copies. I also only charge 3/copy. I’m pretty sure many agencies, if not all, are charging more.” For more context on this model, it is called a sliding scale. Companies will often decrease the cost to their client when copies are sold so as to be giving them a page rate that cannot be undercut. After all, why would a reporter offer someone $2.60 a page when they could work for an agency for around $4.00? But in New York this continues to hide the value of copies from the working reporter, who up until recently were accepting as little as $0.00 to $0.25 on a copy.
A close friend sent me a Bill Maher clip from a while back. Obviously, Maher has his political leanings, but after he gets done with flaunting those, he makes a decent point. He describes the over-engineering of society and gives some pretty striking examples. His preferred vape’s newest model has no mouthpiece despite being something you put in your mouth. Car handles are replaced with buttons in some cars despite no efficiency gains. He describes a situation where his rental car asked him if he’d like to open the trunk while going 60 miles an hour. The point is clear, change for the sake of change is not always worthwhile or efficient. Indeed, change for the sake of change can be very dangerous.
This is connected to the exaggerated claims of salespeople that I’ve written about extensively, especially as it relates to voice recognition. I described it several posts ago as the claim game. Anybody can say anything. Anybody can make their business seem like the new, hot thing. Take this blog post by Kaplan Leaman & Wolfe from about a year ago. It reads nicely, and it sounds innovative. It mentions a flat-rate fee, affordable per-page price structure, a design to significantly reduce legal expenses. At the point in 2020 the post was written, everybody was doing remote stuff. Pretty much everybody’s got a per-page price structure. Anybody can claim their service is affordable or reduces expenses. It’s called puffery and it’s an ordinary part of business.
Where it gets messy, and where I’ve tried to educate reporters, is some advertisements are easier to spot than others. If Burger King says they’ve got the best burger, most everyone knows that’s puffery and sales. Things get harder with technology. How do you prove or disprove whether someone has made a technological breakthrough without a comprehensive understanding of the science and concepts at work? Not all reporters understand the concept of machine learning. Even those of us that have researched quite a lot can’t possibly know everything there is to know. This leaves a gap for tech sellers to come in and try to fool consumers into buying services that may not suit their needs using the hype train.
Told you I write a lot about this. I read a decent amount too.
This also leaves reporters playing a catch-up game of learning about these systems so they can help their clients navigate claims and discern fact from fiction. For example, the truism that technology is improving every day. We look around ourselves and marvel at this magical modern world. But I’ve taken the pretty hard stance that certain technologies, namely voice recognition and associated technologies, are not improving every day. Give it speech it’s used to and it’ll do fine. Give it speech that’s just a little off from what it’s trained for and it’ll turn “would you raise your right hand” into “it’s rage right hand.”
Yes, it’s rage’s right hand.
But surely reinventing the wheel and all these claims of being BETTER aren’t BAD for business, right? If puffery is normal then a little bit of stretching the truth won’t hurt anybody! But we already see that’s not the case. Take Maher’s example. One little glitch on the highway and you could have dead motorists. Take the fact that 25 percent of court reporting companies may be unprofitable; court reporting has been around a long time, it’s likely the losers are the ones trying to switch it up too much too fast. Take vTestify’s massive switch from boasting about providing inexpensive court reporting services to providing an online platform for the legal industry. Take Verbit’s claims in its series A funding of 99 percent accuracy and its subsequent announcement that it will use human transcribers after all, and the very real possibility that it is, despite all its funding, not profitable.
Exaggerated claims serve only as a cliff from which these companies have a chance to walk off of or step back from. The competition is going to wise up. The consumers are going to wise up. I can only hope that a lot of these tech companies realize this, wise up, and start putting their resources behind actually improving our technology. It’s a lot easier to compete in a field with maybe seven players like Stenograph or Advantage than it is to beat out thousands upon thousands of independent contractors and hundreds of reporting firms, many with their own clients and connections. It’s frighteningly easy to see there’s a more lucrative path than over-engineering what stenographic court reporters have made simple, and I can only hope that business owners realize this before walking investors’ money off that cliff.
In our court reporting field today, there are a number of roles that need filling by caring, competent people. There is a constant need for good stenographic court reporters and scopists. If one doesn’t care about the work, it taints the work itself. You can see this in anything; news articles that don’t bother to use spellcheck, contractors that get drunk on the job, or waiters that “Frisbee” food plates at you are all good examples of work tainted by laxity. In some circumstances, there are opportunities to check the licensing and/or certification of the service provider or vendor. In other instances, a license may not be necessary or a certification may be misleading.
Even honest recommendations or reviews can go wrong. In our world, there can be a lot of “guess and check” when it comes to the people we work with and rely on. Great working relationships have been forged on giving someone a chance or taking a shot in the dark. But this can also lead to a lot of unexpected or undesirable outcomes. As an example, a long time ago, I sought out scopists for help on a large amount of work that I was hit with unexpectedly. I reached out to at least four scopists, two of which were recommended to me. The first recommendation dragged their feet on what I sent them and later admitted they were too busy to do it. The second recommendation told me my writing was “too confusing and labyrinthian.” The other two powered through what I sent them without any problems. This doesn’t mean anyone in the scenario was a bad person, but it does stand out as a great example of how recommendations can go south.
In another situation, a friend needed a scopist and/or transcriber. An individual reached out to my friend to get the work and said “I know Christopher Day and Joshua Edwards.” I expressed some skepticism then, and I pointed out that most everyone knows us, for better or worse. At the time, I was a New York State Court Reporters Association board member, and Joshua Edwards is, as of writing, the president of NYSCRA. I also let my friend know I didn’t know that person, with the caveat that I don’t know many scopists because I scope most of my own work. As it turns out, the work was done inadequately. Letters were where words were supposed to be, the work was unfinished, and incorrect words were found throughout. It was disastrous.
There are even situations where ostensibly respectable people will lie to you. There is a court reporter in my state that, from all I know, is doing fine. They have built a nice book of business and command good rates. Some time ago, they contacted me, telling me that a reporter in another state was telling others that my writing was horrible and to never scope for me. That would be believable enough, but I had never hired the accused to scope for me, and the accused and I were and are pretty friendly. We had just gotten to meet in person at Empowerment 2019. In short, I knew that the accuser was lying, but if things had played out differently, I might not have.
Finally, there are situations where someone looks great on paper, but there are other factors that make them impossible to work with. In one instance, I was asked what I knew of another reporter, and I admitted that I did not know much, but they had several certifications, including realtime certification, and I felt at that time that they must be a great reporter because they had acquired so many certifications. That certified reporter ditched a job early without obtaining any backup reporter or alerting the agency because they didn’t like the jobthey were on. Prior to that day, such a situation was unfathomable to me. So even where someone has the skill necessary to do the work, they might possess traits that make them a bad fit for our wonderful field.
All this is to say I have seen, heard about, experienced, and evencreated some tough professional situations. In an effort to help others avoid having to live through the same, I’ve got some general advice and flags to look out for that one can apply to court reporting, scoping, and beyond. There are rarely hard deal breakers, but there are certainly some situations that may make you want to put brakes on the deal. Just keep in mind that though this post focuses on vendors/sellers, clients and buyers can have similar traits that make them bad for your business.
The Namedrop From all I have seen, when someone starts namedropping, it’s something the purchaser of the goods or services needs to take note of. Sometimes people are just proud of who they know or what they do, and that’s okay, but sometimes people drop a name or title to create an air of credibility. So don’t be a sucker. If somebody tells you they’ve worked for the president or that they know some other recognizable figure, take it with a grain of salt and consider verifying where possible. Giving the benefit of the doubt to the wrong person can be incredibly damaging to your wallet and/or reputation. The namedrop is also closely related to people that advertise skills and services that they don’t have. Be skeptical.
The Sad Story (SS) If somebody approaching you for work is telling you a very sad story, you may want to consider it a flag. In life there are people that share too much. It’s a natural human response to feel empathy and even want to help. Unfortunately, when someone is telling you the sad story™️, you can’t tell if they’re genuinely over-sharing, a con artist, or simply have habits that put them in the position they’re in. A friend hired a scopist who complained that they couldn’t get work anywhere. Nobody would work with them. In typical sad-story fashion, the friend gave them a chance, they stopped communicating on the status of the job, and eventually turned over substandard work. The sad story doesn’t always have to be sad. Any story that’s engaging your emotions can be someone trying to manipulate you. SS is also linked to making excuses or apologizing instead of improving. Hiring people that do not take responsibility for their actions or people that “take responsibility” but make no attempt to improve is a sure way to ruin your business. It’s as bad as hiring someone who has a bunch of sad stories and no skills. Remember that you don’t have to light yourself on fire to keep others warm.
The Uncertified Certholder Anybody can stick the letters RPR or CSR after their name in an email or transcript. There’s no Court Reporter Bureau of Investigation to bust down the door and arrest an offender the second they attempt to deceive someone. Luckily, you can often pull up a certified reporter in Sourcebook and check their certs on the spot. In places with licensure, you may also be able to do a license search. Trust, like empathy, is a fundamental part of being human, and therefore a major target for con artists. Trust, but verify.
The Unknown Certholder Even where a license or certification is verified, one must have some understanding of what a license or certification is before purchasing a good or service. As an easy example, in our field, there are NCRA, NVRA, AAERT, and many other certifications. There are practical and knowledge components to certification exams, but they stand for very different things. AAERT’s CER seems to focus on multiple choice questions with regard to knowledge about court procedures, annotations, and vocabulary. It requires 80 percent to pass. Then there is the CET. In addition to its multiple choice questions, it presents a practical portion where the transcriber must transcribe audio and create a transcript in accordance with federal guidelines. The transcription portion requires 98 percent accuracy. Compare that now to NCRA’s RPR, which has a knowledge portion and three skills portions where a reporter has to create transcripts at 95 percent accuracy. A buyer that does their homework knows the RPR is sitting there getting 95 percent accuracy with no chance to interrupt or repeat. The CET is being given 150 minutes to listen to and transcribe audio files given to them. The uninformed buyer might just assume 98 percent accuracy is better than 95. The informed buyer understands there are different skills being tested here; be informed.
Even when one understands the nuances of the different available certifications, one must be sure to remember that certifications are not testing for every skill that might be relevant to a job. Billing, binding, and disposition are all things that can seriously impact a job or project. Nobody tests for those! Certifications can be a great starting point or strong indicator that someone is serious about their work, but buyers must be aware that until they’ve built a relationship with a service provider, the service provider is an unknown, and certifications won’t change that. Don’t rely exclusively on certification.
The On Again Off Again (OAOA) Like any toxic relationship, somebody that is only there for you when it’s convenient for them is a problem. If you can’t get a hold of someone for weeks at a time and then they turn up when they need money, you’re not important to them. Chances are high you don’t want someone who doesn’t care about you working on your stuff. Dealing with the OAOA can be as simple as having an honest discussion with them or cutting them off completely, but it’s not often a problem that resolves itself. The hardest part of dealing with this is setting the boundary that their behavior is not acceptable. The OAOA may try to guilt you, may have a sad story or great excuse™️, or there may be any number of factors, such as a friendship in common, that make you hesitate in having a discussion about how you feel. OAOA’s nature is not always conscious or intentional and can arise from things like substance abuse or mental health issues. Ultimately, if someone is treating you in a way you do not like to be treated, it’s up to you to take action to stop it.
The Big Threat (TBT) You’ve just hired someone to provide a service. Suddenly, without any arrangement or discussion, they’re demanding payment upfront. If you don’t pay right now they’re going to tell everyone on Facebook you don’t pay your bills. The big threat people™️ solve problems through anger. They want what they want, and they’ll threaten you with whatever they can to get their way. Most people don’t really like conflict, and TBT largely takes advantage of this by applying pressure. “If you don’t do what I say, X will happen.” This could come in the form of threatening to file a lawsuit, threatening to damage your reputation, or in extreme cases threatening to harm you in some way. These conditional threats are designed to make you afraid and get you to do what TBT wants you to do, and often the way to deal with it is to call the bluff. Just like sextortion scams, if TBT carries through on their threat, they no longer have any leverage over you. If they do not carry through, then you get to see firsthand that their threats are empty and you will feel that much stronger and certain the next time someone tries to use threats against you. Let go of fear.
One major exception to the “ignore it” strategy is when threats are illegal. If the threat itself is coercive or otherwise illegal, it makes good sense to cut contact and alert the authorities. Do not wait until the threat is carried through. While I haven’t personally run into this in the court reporting world, I know that victims of crime often feel embarrassed or scared. A victim dealing with a violent or malicious TBT might very well blame themselves for getting into the situation. Police and district attorneys often publish resources about what to do if you are the victim of a crime or believe you may be the victim of a crime. Remember, the perpetrator is doing it to you because it worked on somebody else. Break that cycle and remember you are not alone.
The Buy Now We usually see this more in the timeshare business than the court reporting business. Anybody using high-pressure sales tactics to get you to commit to something is likely under some kind of quota or is not being upfront about what they want from you. If they’re under a quota, they do not care what they sell you, they care only that they sell it. If they don’t care, it calls into question the quality of the work or product that will be produced. As far as not being forthcoming, you might see that in the shape of “order a depo today, get one on us.” Free is never sustainable, and if someone offers something for free, the buyer needs to start questioning what’s sustaining those giveaways. Is the firm selling your information? Is the firm cost shifting? Is the firm going to hit you with lots of hidden fees and charges that they just forgot to mention™️? What are they getting from you and do you want to give it to them? It can get a little tricky differentiating regular sales and someone trying to rope you into a service you don’t need, but buyer beware the “buy now.” Ask questions.
The Sage Regularly you want someone confident to handle whatever you’re paying them to handle. The Sage takes that confidence to an unbearable extreme. They’ve been doing this so long that they discard your concerns out of hand. “I would really like it if you used the margins we agreed to last week” says the client. “Trust me, I know what I’m doing” says the sage. This one is big in court reporting. The average age of the court reporter is around 55 and the vast majority of reporters have been doing this one or more decades. Frankly, it’s not wrong to be reluctant to cave to every consumer demand. Most of us are independent contractors and the customer is not always right. But when you have someone that’s completely unteachable or so set in their ways that they won’t hear you out, it might be time for you to wise up and hire somebody else. Note that though we often equate age with experience, the sage mentality can happen at any age or experience level. Reasons matter, and if someone is almostalways answering your questions with “that’s just how it is,” it’s fair game to assume they’re a sage. Seriously, ask questions.
The Social Media Monster (TSMM) You can usually pick up a few things about a person from their social media. When you’re considering hiring them it’s not out of the question to check. If you see rants about their former employers littering their space, it’s a good idea to pause and evaluate whether or not you want to risk ending up there as well. We often go through life with the best of intentions, and no one wants to start off a business relationship by thinking about what might happen if it goes bad, but for TSMM you might want to stop and have that thought exercise and conversation with yourself.
Note that heavy social media use is not inherently a problem. I knew a very kindhearted albeit political interpreter that would attend many rallies and marches. Their social media broadcasted this heavily. They applied to be an employee for a local court. At the interview, they were asked about their activities and social media. “Do you think you can separate your personal activities from your work performance?” The answer was yes, and to this day they serve as a shining example of what a language interpreter should be. Let social media be a part of your hiring decisions, not a manual.
Great. What Do I Do? Now that we’ve gone through some problem personalities and things to look out for, it’s opportune to write about what to do when everything goes horribly wrong™️. But first, a word from our sponsors (WARNING, some viewers might find this unsettling or graphic. If cartoon violence bothers you, do not watch it. It’s also not really a sponsor. My only sponsors are donors.)
0. Admit there’s a problem. For everybody who skipped that, it’s a cartoon dog, sitting in a room that’s on fire, sipping coffee, saying “this is fine.” The point of the thing is the situation is clearly not fine, and by refusing to acknowledge that there’s a problem, our cartoon hero suffers a terrible fate. Similarly, when you are looking to buy a good or service, if you refuse to acknowledge a problem, you may suffer. Solving any dilemma requires admitting there is a dilemma, and psychology tells us that once we’ve invested time, money, or effort, we’re more willing to keep sinking resources into the investment even where the cost outweighs the benefit.
Like so many things in life, how to solve a problem can be very context sensitive. Creating a guide to every possible scenario and how to solve it would be long, boring, and nobody would read it, so I’ll boil down the thought process I use for solving most conflicts.
In Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Conker the Squirrel gets incredibly drunk before meeting the alcoholic scarecrow, Birdie. Birdie explains B Pads are context sensitive. So when Conker uses it near Birdie, it gives him some alcohol. When he uses it at the gate to start his journey, it gives him a magic hangover cure. We don’t get B Pads in real life, we just get Brains.
Assess the relationship. After you’ve admitted to yourself there’s an issue it’s time to start problem solving. What are the power dynamics of the relationship? What do you like about it? What do you dislike or what’s the problem? Is it a relationship you want to keep? What kinds of changes would salvage it? What changes could you personally make? What changes do you need the other person to make? This first step sets up everything else. You are going to treat a longtime business partner, friend, or lover differently than you will treat someone you met an hour ago. Right at the start, you want to start forming an idea of how much the situation is impacting you, your ideal solution, and boundaries you can live with if you cannot reach your ideal. The first step is assessing the relationship because you may very well realize you don’t want the relationship.
If you take a position on just about anything, you’re going to find that you have allies, enemies, and a whole lot of neutral parties. The allies are the ones you’re going to want to spend the most time on in the context of a problem or personality conflict.
Assess the communication. Have you communicated clearly to the other person that there’s an issue? Have they communicated to you that they understand the issue? Have they communicated that they see the issue differently? Do you believe their communicated perception of the situation is genuine? Is it possible that there’s been a miscommunication? When young children begin to lie, it is a sign of cognitive health, because they are grasping that other people have knowledge or beliefs different from their own. As adults, we often forget that and fall into a world where we assume people have seen the things we’ve seen, know the things we know, and most importantly, know what they’re doing. “He knows what he did.” “She knows what she did.” How do they know? Telepathy? People do this all the time; It’s a logical fallacy called the hasty generalization. In fact, I just did it by stating people do it all the time. If you haven’t communicated with whoever it is that there’s an issue, then it’s generally best to start from the assumption that they don’t know there’s a problem. By assessing the communication, you’re helping to make sure you’re not the problem.
This is something I have real experience with. In the context of this blog, I once had a situation where I published a post without doing enough research and without reaching out to a party for comment. Now, I do a lot of commentary, and I do not always ask people for their comment or quote, but I ended up looking pretty stupid because my communication was lacking. Don’t be stupid, communicate.
Assess the response. Once you’ve opened up the topic for discussion, it’s time to see what the reply is. If the person shuts down or stops answering, is it possible they’re busy? Are they belligerent? How many times have you attempted to have the conversation? Have they brought up valid counterpoints? Does it seem like the two of you can reach your ideal solution or, at least, a solution that is satisfactory to you? If you’re at this stage, it’s worthwhile to keep an open mind, because it means the relationship is worth salvaging and you care enough that you’ve communicated to the other person there’s an issue.
Even where you don’t know someone very well, or don’t feel it is comfortable or appropriate to communicate all your feelings or knowledge, it is possible to communicate enough that you form an idea of what the person thinks. For example, I had a situation where I vehemently disagreed with the way a reporter handled something. Rather than launch into a stalwart defense of all I stand for, I said “you know, I’ve been in the business a while, and generally, it’s not right to handle things that way.” They didn’t care, and that lack of caring was enough for me to realize this was not someone I would be associating with.
Conclude. Eventually you’ll have to decide what to do. You started off with a problem, got a rough idea of what you wanted to happen, communicated that to the other party, and got some kind of reply, even if the reply was silence. At this point, there are some general avenues you can take if you’re unable to reach a resolution together.
4a. Continue on with the problem. Take all the work you did assessing and communicating and throw it out the window. People take this avenue a lot. Maybe after everything they decide the problem isn’t big enough to threaten the relationship, or maybe they’ve fooled themselves into believing it’ll resolve on its own. Whatever the case, you can always choose to not do anything, but know that it may leave you unsatisfied or resentful no matter the benefits of working with the person.
4b. End the relationship. If the negatives outweigh the positives and the other person isn’t meeting your needs or won’t make any concessions, it’s time for things to end. This might take the form of hiring somebody else to scope or report the proceedings. This also can take the form of a final confrontation with the person where you let them know that they’ve let you down. Thanks to the sunk cost fallacy, this can be very hard to do dependent upon the situation. The relative smallness of our field can exacerbate the difficulty of letting go, since burning a bridge may mean something goes uncovered on some future date. But there are health considerations when dealing with someone who is stressing you out with no end in sight. You have to choose yourself.
4c. Be A Mentor. Sometimes in the course of communicating you’ll find out that the person is not being difficult on purpose. If you’re close enough, you may learn that they have some other underlying issue that’s causing them to behave strangely. Substance abuse, mental health issues, changes in medication, or domestic incidents are all things that can hit hard, fast, and without warning. For many business relationships, you simply won’t be close enough to a person to learn about what they’re going through. On the rare occasion that you become aware of such deep personal issues, you can take the time to listen, understand, and perhaps even offer suggestions or help. There are many ways to be a mentor. One can just listen and let the other party vent or one can go so far as to help the other party with their work obligations or schedule appointments. The most important part of being a mentor is setting boundaries, because simply erasing the other party’s problems creates a situation where you become a de facto punching bag. Some people will use up every ounce of your kindness and simply continue on with their bad habits. Just remember, mentor, you can only bring a horse to water.
4d. Create consequences. When someone’s bad behavior is pushing down your business, it’s fair game to push back harder than simply ending the relationship. This can take root via social media shaming, an ethics complaint, or even legal action. More often than not, my moral compass points toward compassion, unity, diplomacy, and forgiveness, and I’m sure that many of my readers cringe at the idea of “attacking” someone. But as noted above in the TBT section, there are people who will do whatever they want. Their philosophy in life is “screw you, stop me.” They will continue to crush people until somebody stands up to them. Lying, cheating, denial, and projection are all tools in the “screwer’s” arsenal.
Fiction can make very powerful statements about the real world while keeping things light and entertaining. I think the Boondock Saints movie said it best. “…We must all fear evil men. But there is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men.” Sometimes taking the path of least resistance is an admirable course of action. Sometimes doing nothing simply allows the screwer to move on and screw the next person.
Many posts on this blog are an example of consequence. By keeping a public archive of statements and events in or around the field, it creates a social pressure that makes it harder for people to misrepresent events. Two years ago I pointed out that vTestify’s calculator erroneously claimed it could save attorneys $3,000 per deposition. As of today, a lot of that stuff has been scrubbed from their site and they now advertise themselves as a platform that, to me, is more reminiscent of Zoom than a traditional court reporting agency. Can I claim it was thanks to me? No. But I had a part to play in letting court reporters know “this company is saying they can do what you do for dirt cheap, and they’re pants-on-fire lying.” Happy they made the pivot. Haven’t heard anything bad about the platform. But consequences matter, and when someone is not being honest about a product or service, it doesn’t make you a bad person to stand up and say “NO.”
4e. Reroll. In the video game world, sometimes the strengths and weaknesses of a character or situation are decided by a roll of the dice or a random number picked by the computer. You don’t like what you get? Oftentimes you can reroll. Same holds true here. Sometimes restarting the whole process of assessing your relationship, communication, the other party’s reply, and your conclusion can change an outcome. Every few years I have the pleasure of getting raving-lunatic levels of angry at something or someone in this field. Usually with some time and reassessment I am able to see things from their perspective and realize something I thought was a huge problem in the moment is actually a minor bump in the road in the context of a close business and/or personal relationship. Other times, with time and reassessment, I feel more justified.
To really drive home the power of the reroll, about half a decade ago, I received a message telling me I needed to be more involved with the field. I had just started a new job that I felt completely unqualified for. I was in the middle of a relationship with someone who was hopelessly addicted to drugs. The insulin levels in my body were about eight times more than a normal human. I blocked the person that sent me that message. Be more involved?The only thing I wanted to be more involved with was laying in bed all day hoping tomorrow would forget to come. Over a week or so, I thought the situation over and quietly unblocked them. To this day they are one of the people I look up to and love in this field. We share a love for the field that not too many can match. Such a relationship would’ve been impossible without the reroll.
There will be people inside and outside of our little field grappling with all the same pains and problems. “Why don’t we get along?” “How do I navigate this stressful situation?” None of us will have all the answers, but I hope that this one reaches people who need it. It’s okay to stand your ground. It’s okay to change your mind. It’s okay to help people. It’s okay to help yourself. It’s okay to set boundaries. It’s okay to make the best decision you can with the information you have at the time.
It’s okay to be human, because if they wanted a robot, you wouldn’t be in that seat today.
If the sad iron stenographer got you to crack a smile today, pass it on.
Journalists, we need to talk about court reporting.
Court reporting? What’s that? Court reporting traditionally refers to stenographic reporting, where somebody is taking down verbatim notes on a stenotype. We do this in legal proceedings as well as broadcast captioning, and believe it or not, our keyboard design, invented in 1911, is the best technology in voice recognition and taking down the spoken word today. Sounds incredible, right? But look at the airplane. It started out in 1903 looking something like this:
But what about my in-flight movie?!
We all know what happened. The design got better and today we have airliners that can fly hundreds of people at once. Same with the camera of the 1800s that became the compact and ubiquitous technology we have today in so many devices. Very much the same happened with our stenotype. In fact, I have a handy guide here. Feel free to use that middle image in any article you want.
Manufacturer: Stenograph. The notations on the right are just me poking fun.
We started off with old timey machines where you tap the key and it punches the ink into the paper. We evolved into an era of Dictaphones and floppy disks where we’d narrate our notes to be typed up by somebody else. These days we’re packing laptops attached to minicomputers. We’re always asked “why don’t you just record it?” Truth is we’ve had that capability for a really long time. We go beyond that and have the ability to transcribe what we’ve “recorded” in record times.
We have audio jacks, SD cards, USB ports. Some of us even use Bluetooth.
We have a real perception problem in our field. There’s this ongoing push from tech sellers to come in and say our technology is old and that automation is on the way. The problem? Tech journalists, publications, or analysts often eat it up and publish it right away. I always point to this October 2020 article as a great example. It literally depicts an old-fashioned stenographer phasing out into computer code under the headline “Will court reporting undergo a pandemic shift?” It goes on to publish some quotes from Verbit and Veritext that point to things changing/evolving/shifting. The messaging is really clear. “We have the technology. Why do we need court reporters?” They term court reporter criticism as “resistance.”
Where did those SILLY court reporters get the idea we’re coming for their jobs?
A lie is being sold. This isn’t something that takes heavy investigation to figure out. When asked about the field in that article, Veritext’s CTO was quoted as saying “there will be no choice but to move forward with well-proven audio and transcription technologies and services to meet the need, and we expect to see rapid adoption there.” Meanwhile, when asked for a quote for Stenonymous, Veritext said with regard to technology “…it will not take the place of the stenographer…” They’re not alone. Tom Livne of Verbit has been quoted saying our world is not yet digitized when I just showed you that it is digitized and it has been for decades. In series A funding for Verbit, claims of 99 percent accuracy were thrown around. In series B funding, it was said that technology would not replace the human. All these automation proponents are pretty quick to dismiss automation. Could it be that automation of speech transcription is just not that simple?
It would be fair enough if it was just my word against theirs. But there are outside observers that have looked at the situation and concluded all the same things. In a May 2020 article from Scientific American, journalist Wade Roush noted that speech recognition simply was not perfect and might never be. He pointed to Microsoft’s claim in 2016 of 96 percent accuracy, better than human transcribers, and noted there have been few improvements since. In the Stanford study “Racial disparities in automated speech recognition” it was noted that automatic speech recognition was 80 percent accurate on white speakers, 65 percent accurate on black speakers, and “worse” on the AAVE dialect. “Worse” meant 25 to 50 percent accurate. So here we are taking stenographic reporter accuracy, certified with 5 percent total errors or fewer and comparing it to a word error rate between 20 percent and 75 percent.
But do we really need accurate court transcripts and good captions for captioning consumers? Nobody cares who this hurts as long as it makes investors happy, right? Sadly, there’s not much evidence to show that it’ll even do that. Much of the financial data for court reporting is hidden through private companies or paywall research data. When I examined VIQ Solutions, a company that recently acquired Net Transcripts and is ostensibly part of the “record and transcribe” crowd, I pointed out there’s plenty of revenue there, but net losses. In news regarding Verbit’s acquisition of VITAC, it was stated that revenue was in the millions and cash flow was positive, which means it’s likely profits are low or non-existent. At the risk of sounding like a cynic, I think it’s very clear, if there was profit and a decent rate of return they would be unreserved in telling us that. Like other AI ventures, there’s probably just a slow burn of money. So every time a writer jumps aboard the “technology” train without consulting anybody that actually works in the field or doing a little research, it’s burying the truth a little deeper under this false perception and really hurting a vibrant, viable field that really needs people. We’re not so different. The tech sellers are coming for your job too, and it’s just as hilarious and embarrassing.
I admit it. I skimmed the article because it was an absolute bore. That didn’t stop them from claiming that it “rivaled human skills.”
The other issue we have is that we know you can figure this stuff out. When our job is up for grabs, there’s a kind of jubilant repetition of the word “disruption.” Meanwhile, when it’s a job that has some sense of importance or power, like a judge, journalists begin explaining things. Take this article on Chinese holographic AI judges, where the author makes sure to point out there are differences in American and Chinese law that may make this more plausible, as well as explaining that the “AI” is only as good as its dataset. This is a big problem, because the companies invested in “AI” have zero accountability. If someone brings up issues with a technology’s output being racist or sexist, they are summarily fired and their opinion swept under the rug. In my field, at the very least, every member of the public is entitled to make a complaint about a court reporter that violates our ethical codes. That’s on top of any legal remedies that may be available or justified in the event a court reporter acts irresponsibly! If you can’t get it right when you report on it, these companies are not going to correct you when you’re wrong in their favor.
All we are asking for is some fairness in the way our field is reported on in the news. I’ve often joked that advocating for stenographic court reporting is a lot like the children’s story Horton Hears A Who. We’re here but we’re unseen and unheard. We’re in danger of being boiled by big money and tall tales. Those of us that speak up can face a lot of ridicule or be cut short. Take my appearance on VICE News about the Testifying While Black study. Here’s an important topic that deserves headlines, namely, addressing disparate outcomes based on the dialect that someone speaks. I was filmed for about two hours, and Taylor Jones and his people were, as I understand it, filmed close to nine hours. Nobody expected a ten-hour special, but this topic got fifteen minutes. Court reporters took some serious heat in the news because we scored 80 percent accuracy in African American Vernacular English dialect. Every single news source I’ve seen has missed or excluded pilot study 1, where regular people scored 40 percent, and pilot study 2, where lawyers scored 60 percent. VICE cut me talking about the pilot studies and how people who really care about record accuracy need to join our field. You have a story here where court reporters are twice as good as the average person at hearing and transcribing this AAVE dialect that we get no training in, and that got warped into many variations of “court reporters don’t understand black people.” That’s a concept mired in ignorance. The story itself acknowledges not all black people speak AAVE, and yet the headline and lede rips on us despite the fact that we’re the most likely ones in the room to understand AAVE. I cannot imagine such an irresponsible word game. It’s almost like publishing an article with the headline “Journalists May Be Reporting Black People’s Stories Wrong” just because they might ostensibly fit into the category of “regular people.” But I can’t imagine that anyone would ever lump groups of people together and make broad, false headlines just for clicks. Oh, wait —
It’s a perfect topic, a good story, and a great writer, but the headline pits people against each other. You harvested court reporters, AAVE speakers, and black people for clicks.
Even in a pretty amazing article about social justice where I got to offer some input, the accuracy of us versus others ended up not making the cut. I like the author a lot, but it’s pretty clear that somewhere along the way a decision was made to exclude the possibility that we’re hearing people better than anyone else in the room. Not much different from when Max Curry was quoted as saying digital reporting was too risky, but there was hardly any explanation as to why, despite a field of nearly 30,000 people and data that suggests recording proceedings achieves no real cost reduction and no efficiency gains. See what I’m saying? Sometimes it’s worse than simply not publishing anything from us. Sometimes it’s cherry picking what we say to make it look like both sides are represented when they simply aren’t or that a topic was explained when it simply wasn’t.
I know that this perceived unfairness is a result of many factors and that some are outside your control. The drive to get people to read strongly encourages clickbait journalism. Editors and outlets can decide to cut journalists’ work if it doesn’t adhere to a particular narrative or standard. The fact that court reporting and machine shorthand stenography is a fairly niche skill adds to the dilemma. Industry outsiders are not going to know there are national, state, and nonprofit databases to find court reporters for interviews and demonstrations. There are a myriad of issues that coalesce to create the situation I’m describing. But we really need some attention on these issues. We create the legal record for so many lawsuits and criminal prosecutions. We broadcast (good) captions so that the deaf can have access. The inadequacy of alternatives cannot be understated. But the average reporter age is 55 now, and to continue our good work we’ll need the media to be unafraid of publishing the truth. Help us attract people who will carry on this service for generations. We need the media to stop republishing the shortage forecast from 8 years ago and point people towards all the resources that we have built since then to help people find this career, such as Open Steno, Project Steno, and NCRA A to Z.
A reader suggested I define AAVE better in this article. I feel it better to point to the work of the linguist Dr. Taylor Jones if you want to learn more about this dialect.
If you’re looking to promote your steno nonprofit or your primary steno business, the numbers don’t lie, marketing is going to bring more eyes to what you’re selling. That’s a common-sense statement, but let’s drive it home. This blog, on average, will get about 500 to 1000 unique visitors a month and about double the views or clicks. That’s just me writing what I write and sharing it on Facebook. In honor of CRCW 2021, I ended up posting a lot this month. I published over a dozen articles, and the “average” did not change much. Now we’ll compare that to December 2020, where I wrote three posts and advertised two on Facebook.
I wrote my heart out and it’s not even close.
About 700 visitors, 14 posts, that’s about 50 visitors a post. That’s compared to nearly 3,000 visitors, three posts, a thousand visitors a post. About $200 gave me 20x the reach.
Yay for me. Why am I writing this? To help you. On Facebook today there are groups and pages. Groups serve, more or less, as discussion boards. Pages are more like ad space. They’re promotional and you generally control the content on there. You can have a page and a group, and you can have a page act as an admin to a group. There’s one major difference between the two. As best I can tell, groups cannot advertise. Pages, on the other hand, have the power to boost posts. So if you’re looking to market, get yourself a page.
What kind of monster doesn’t even like his own page?
When you create a post on your page, you have the option to boost a post. Check the boost post option before you make your post to get to the “boost” controls.
Nobody liked that.
After you click post, you’ll get transported to the magic world of the boost page. That’s going to look like the image below, hopefully, and it’s going to give you options to put in your budget, and more importantly, edit your audience. Generally if you put in more money, they’ll estimate more views per day. If you put in more days, you’ll get fewer views per day, but the ad will run longer. There are some minimums, but you can go as low or as high as you want. Again, in December, I felt comfortable spending in the ballpark of $200 for week-long campaigns. What will you see in the edit audience tab?
You get to target, gender, age, location, and then add specific demographics.
The only thing you should know is your audience has to be broad enough to run the ad. If you’re way too specific, it blocks you. For example, I started clicking demographics for all these things and the potential reach was only about 5,000. I clicked “lawyer” and the potential reach jumped up by millions.
That’s all there is to it! There are a few other options, like whether you want your ad to run in Facebook, Messenger, or both, and whether you want to use Facebook Pixel. My personal preference? I run the ad only Facebook and do nothing with Facebook Pixel. I know a lot of us trust and believe in face-to-face conversations. We want to grow deep connections and be one with our audience. But again, we’re looking at 20x the reach with a small budget.
With that in mind, I’ll be launching and advertising a post on March 1 directed at digital reporters and transcribers. Here’s my thinking: We have this whole group of people who probably like sitting in court proceedings, the companies they work for are not telling them about steno, or maybe even lying to them about steno. It’s time to break that in half and get the good ones over to us. If you support that, or even if you’re just grateful for the information in this post, feel free to donate here. I’m very grateful to people that have donated in the past. Every dollar helps keep this place ad-free. We don’t want to go back to that time.
Alternatively, if you’re tired of my blog, check out Glen Warner’s or Matt Moss’s. There are so many out there, including businesses like Migliore & Associates or MGR. It can be really heartening to see the incredible amount of information and opinions we have out there. Highly suggest checking out any of them.
One piece of feedback I get back from time to time is “we can’t stand up to XYZ Corporation. They make 100 million in revenue!” I deeply empathize with this reaction because I’ve felt that before. Back in freelance, that feeling was constant. How could I negotiate with a company that was only offering $3.25? They were a big company with lots of work. I was basically a kid just out of college with my extremely shiny AOS. I didn’t even have a squid hat yet.
With this thing on, I became unstoppable.
But about 3 years ago I started to teach myself very basic computer programming. I began to learn a little bit more about numbers and math. I had always hated math, and the whole experience completely changed that perception. I started to like math. One the first programs I ever wrote was a simple counter program similar to this one:
This program loops for as long as steno is awesome, and steno never stops being awesome.
In this code, you start with the number 0 and it adds one forever until the computer malfunctions or the program is shut down. What you see happen very quickly is that when you’re adding one several times a second, one quickly becomes 10, 100, 1,000, 1,000,000.
What the hell does that have to do with stenographers? We are the ones that add up in this program called life. For example, let’s say we have XYZ Corporation and it makes $100 million a year in revenue. Now let’s say there are 23,000 reporters, like vTestify said almost three years ago, and let’s assume that reporters ONLY make a median salary of about $60,000 a year. Those reporters make $1.3 billion in revenue annually. You take two percent of that a year and throw it in an advertising pot, and you’re talking a $26 million annual advertising campaign.
5 percent? I said 2 percent. Someone should fix this immediately.
So now to bring this out of theory and into reality, you can see it happening in real life. There’s no group of people that’s going to have a 100 percent contribution rate. But when you look at the numbers, you start to see that overall we put far better funding into our organizations and activities than alternative methods or spinoffs. Take, for example, AAERT, which pulled in about $200,000 in 2018 revenue. For those that don’t know AAERT, they’re primarily engaged with supporting the record-and-transcribe method of capturing the spoken word. As I’ve covered in past blog posts and industry media, it’s an inefficient and undesirable method (page 5), and most digital reporters would do a lot better if they picked up steno.
Published by ProPublica
Then we can look towards the National Verbatim Reporters Association, which seems to focus more on voice writing, but definitely includes and accepts stenographic reporters. We see the 2017 revenue here come in at almost $250,000. Not bad at all.
As far as I’m concerned, every dollar is deserved. I’ve never heard a bad word from an NVRA member.
But then we look to our National Court Reporters Association, which is primarily engaged in promoting stenography and increasing the skill of stenographic court reporters. This is where we see the collective power of reporters start to add up in a big way. In 2018, the NCRA saw more than $5.7 million in revenue. The NCRF brought in an additional $368,000. That’s over $6 million down on steno that year.
I think I can see my membership dues somewhere in there.
When I pay off my massive personal debt, I’m going to become an NCRF Angel / Squid.
What conclusions can be drawn here? As much as the anti-steno crowd wants to say the profession’s dead, dying, or defunct, there’s just no evidence to support that. Here you get to see some fraction of every field contributing to nonprofits dedicated to education, training, and educating the public. We know from publicly-available information that our membership dues are not 30x more than these other organizations, so we know that there are a lot more of us, and we know that there are a lot more of us participating in continuing education and sharpening our skills. We’re the preferred method. We’re the superior method. We’re training harder every day to meet the needs of consumers. There are only a few ways this goes badly for stenography.
We lack the organization or confidence to counter false messaging.
We lose trust in our collective power and institutions, stop supporting them, and stop promoting ourselves. Kind of like the Pygmalion effect.
We spend time tearing each other down instead of boosting each other’s stuff.
See the common theme? There’s really nothing external that’s going to hurt this field. It all comes down to our ability to adapt, organize, and play nice with each other. In the past, I equated it with medieval warfare and fiction. The easiest way to win any adversarial situation is to get the other side to give up and go home. It’s an old idea straight out of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Applied to business, if you can convince people not to compete against you, you win by default. This might be in the form of a buyout. This might be in the form of convincing people that stenography is not a viable field so that there are not enough stenographers to meet demand. This might be in the form of would-be entrepreneurs believing they cannot compete and never starting a business. This might be in the form of convincing consumers that stenographic reporters are not available. This might be in the form of casting doubt on stenographic associations. This might be in the form of buying a steno training program and ostensibly scrubbing it out of existence. These are all actions to avoid competition, because as the numbers just showed you, we only lose if we do not compete. If you do nothing else for Court Reporting & Captioning Week 2021, please take the time to promote at least one positive thing about steno. If a guy in a squid hat could get you to think differently about just one topic today, what kind of potential do you have to make a difference in this world?
I’ll launch us off with an older quote from Marc Russo. “If you are a self-motivated person with a burning desire to improve your skills, this is the field.” This is our field. This is our skill. All we have left to do is stand up to the people that take advantage of our stellar customer service mentality and the public perception that we’re potted plants.
Can a potted plant do this?
PS. That $3.25 I was having trouble negotiating up from? Some of my friends were making $4.00+ with less experience than me. The limitation was me and the way that I was thinking about it. We have all had to deal with hurdles that seemed insurmountable. Max Curry talked a little bit about it in his NCRA Stenopalooza presentation “Fear…Let It Go!” when he talked about his father and introversion. It was an amazing presentation. But here’s my takeaway for those that missed it last year. If you’re having a problem, try looking at it another way.
