They’re still searching for a motive to the attack last I checked in the news. But I’ve got a theory.
One of the reasons for school shootings was thought to be infamy. Nobodies who wanted to be known for something could do something terrible and inevitably end up in the news. But school shootings are just about universally reviled, so much so that some people pretend they didn’t happen to cope with the horrible reality of our time. At least that’s what I tell myself.
With the Brian Thompson story, people were applauding — some of them — some people were happy. It was a long time coming in the words of some. To them, a system that legally kills thousands had a shot fired at it.
And again, with this stabbing, you’ve actually got people cheering the attacker. They see special treatment of the wealthy as a slap in the face to things like equality under the law.
We’ve now entered a period in history where people are realizing you can stab your boss, get a little fame and a fan club, and the state will feed and shelter you so you can escape the 9 to 5 grind. It doesn’t quite have the same evil tone as shooting kids — despite killing of kids being a lower priority problem for the United States of America and law enforcement than the killing of a CEO.
I’m somewhat kidding of course. But also just a little serious. I think we’re going to see a lot more of these attacks until the U.S. starts to bend pro-labor. People are snapping because the economic conditions created by legal action and inaction are squeezing them, or for the empathetic, others around them. What do you do when you feel you are under attack? Fight or flight, and a lot of us have nowhere to run from burnout.
Take it from someone that knows, it’s hard to snap violently when all your basic needs are taken care of and you feel you have something to live for. It takes a relatively broken person to seek violence for the “thrill” of it from my observation of the world. But humans are all pretty much capable of turning the empathy off and turning to violence if the mood calls for it. It’s the job of policymakers to create conditions that don’t inspire that mood.
You can’t tsk, tsk, tsk away the human condition. You can only create conditions where only the most depraved do the kinds of things we’ve been reading about recently, and only the most deranged cheer them on.
Do I know the motive? No. My guess is as good as anyone else’s.
But I’ve predicted things a time or two, and my prediction here stands. We need a pro-labor bend to stifle the wave of violence we are likely to see.
It’s been said that people encourage the use of proper channels because they own the proper channels and are sure proper channels won’t work. Given the federal court’s recent attack on overtime pay and the Ohio Supreme Court’s refusal to allow a straightforward negligence case to trial, even I’m starting to buy into that rhetoric.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like we’ll get a pro-people bend in government any time soon. The incoming administration has a goal to dismantle the FDIC, putting all of our savings at risk. Imagine a world where our savings aren’t backed by the United States government — just another stress point for a population that’s already overworked and underpaid. Now you’ll have to worry about whether your bank will belly flop into bankruptcy too! May it never come to pass.
I’m one of the most privileged people out there. You know what I want for this country? I want everybody to have what I have. The privileged people above me? They want what little you got.
Oh, and if it should come to light that the attack was due to mental illness…
Some will remember that in 2019 I put together a list of associations that offer mentoring. I now took the time to create a list of New York court reporting agencies and their office locations. Generally I erred on the side of inclusivity and pulled names and numbers mindlessly off Google. Please feel free to let me know about more firms that have New York coverage. I envision this as a resource for students and working reporters. Back when I was in school, we tended to gravitate towards a very limited selection of agencies, and it was probably to the detriment of some of us. Here’s the list. It’s available to share or download. You cannot edit my master copy, but you can edit any copy you create.
I put aside my personal feelings and included anything that came up as advertising court reporting services. Some entries on there are not stenographic-reporter friendly. Hope springs eternal that they’ll change their tune and embrace the unmatchable efficiency of stenographic reporting. Great example, stenographic reporting could probably bring up Cutting Edge Deposition’s rating from 1 star to 5. Our stenographic reporters across the state are going to be competing directly with the businesses that don’t use steno, and this is really a golden chance for those businesses to turn things around. Regardless of how that goes, let this stand as a reminder to students how valuable your skills really are. There would not be over 200 offices for over 150 businesses across the state if there was not money there. The vast majority of these are stenographic reporting agencies or utilize primarily stenographic reporters. Hone your skills and get ready for a bright future not only in the courts, but in freelance and the private sector.
Also a tip for students, if someone says they can’t afford XYZ but they have 9 different offices, they might be pulling your leg.
Interesting trivia, Southern District Reporters is actually a corporation for the officials of the United States District Court, Southern District of New York. Last I checked, you need Eclipse to work there. I’ve heard great things.
There’s been a great deal of marketing and many press releases about “disruptive” technology in my field. I’ve been a stenographic court reporter for a decade. I’ve worked right next to reporters who have been working for three or four decades. All of us concede that technology, on average, is getting better. Computers today can do things that few could have imagined in 1970. Computer programs used to be written on punch cards. Try inserting one of those into your iPhone. It’s no wonder that when people see some of the older stenotypes, they ask where the punch card goes.
You write on a stenotype but type on a typewriter. Can’t explain that!
Of course there’s no punch card. But we end up getting a pretty bad rep because the keyboard layout we use is a hundred years old. It’s easy to look at that and forget there’s a whole arsenal of technology attached to that keyboard layout. By 1963 we were using magnetic tape for computer transcription. By 1987, our stenotypes were rocking floppy disks. Today’s stenotypes are so damn good you can read my notes off the screen without any special training.
You would be able to read the notes off the screen, if I ever took any.
There was no secret that there was a court reporter shortage coming. Our field first learned this shortage was coming towards us in 2013. By 2019, the entire country knew there was a shortage. There is a court reporter association in almost every state, a National Court Reporters Association, and myriad nonprofits and other initiatives aimed at solving the shortage. Since 2013, we’ve seen things like Open Steno, A to Z, and Project Steno all aimed at meeting the demand for stenographers in their own way.
With even a gentle push from the larger corporations in our field, things would have been fine. But we started to see some strange moves in our industry by some companies. Some companies started to ask law offices to change their deposition notices to allow for audio recording. Some companies started saying that reporters were unavailable even when we were all sitting at home on social media chatting away with each other. Some companies started completely fabricating news, saying things like “…this world hasn’t been digitized…” Some companies say AI is making things better even though AI only gets 65 to 80 percent of what’s being said. Some companies started to push “digital” court reporters. Digital reporters, while they are nice people, are just recording your deposition and taking some notes. They are being used by those companies as part of the record and transcribe method. These companies are literally taking people who could fill the stenographic reporter gap and telling them “no, do this instead, it’s newer.” They don’t bother to tell them that stenographic reporting utilized the record-and-transcribe method several decades ago with Dictaphone technology and has since evolved to be far more efficient. Stenography has been digital since before some of us were born.
Eventually, you have to ask yourself, “what’s the deal? If there’s is a shortage, why does Veritext, or Planet Depos, or US Legal advertise that they’re hiring digital court reporter positions in New York, but almost never a single ad for a stenographic reporter?” Well, reporting firms, like just about any other industry, make a good deal of their money being the broker for the buyer and seller. You buy our services, we sell them, and the court reporting companies make money by knowing how low we’ll go and how high you’ll go. I started out as a deposition reporter in 2010 and was offered $2.80 a page. Years later I learned that was almost the exact same rate given to reporters in the 1990s and far lower than the page rates that court reporters working in court got. Court reporting companies told me reporters were a dime a dozen and that law offices wouldn’t pay a penny more. Meanwhile, I was taking depositions where the attorneys were telling me how expensive our services were. On a deposition with a lot of copy sales, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was taking home 20 percent of the total invoice. That’s a lot of money to a company to market and print, bind, and mail a transcript that takes hours of reading, research, and transcription on my part.
Our entire profession is in a state of shock because we placed a great deal of trust in reporting firms to market our skills. This is similar to the trust you put in them to find you a qualified stenographic reporter. Yet we find ourselves compiling state databases, national databases, and nonprofit databases dedicated to helping you find stenographic reporters because some companies can’t be bothered to connect consumers with the service they want. They see the education culture that stenography has as a threat. They see it as an expense to do away with. What happens when you take a field with 60 nonprofits and dozens of schools dedicated to the welfare and training of court reporters and replace it with people that have no such support system? You get workers that are easier to intimidate and lowball in the long run. How do I know? It already happened when the Federation of Shorthand Reporters in New York collapsed. Worker pay stagnated while the invoices to attorneys skyrocketed; this is the same situation on a national scale.
What law offices need to know is that they alone decide what happens next in our industry. Ultimately, law offices set the demand. It’s you, the attorneys, office managers, paralegals, and secretaries. You can trust us to recruit enough to fill any shortage. You can trust us to adopt the latest technology. You can trust us to continue over a hundred years of tradition, value, and service by making sure your record is accurate and turned around quickly at the best cost. We have to trust you to demand a stenographic reporter every time so that steno schools can keep pumping out graduates and promising jobs. We have to trust you to look at claims that a stenographic reporter could not be provided with skepticism. We have to trust you to be smart consumers. We have to trust you to let your colleagues know what’s going on in our tiny industry. Don’t just do it so that I have a job in ten years. Do it for your clients. Do it for your consumers. I guarantee that if the demand for steno slips, you’re going to be looking at some crazy deposition bills and hearing some new excuse.
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PS. This article comes after a great satire (image here) was done on this topic by a reporter under the alias DigitalByHumans. In that satire, posted to Craigslist, the writer describes a world where a company does this same sort of thing to attorneys, deciding to use “digital” attorneys, and goes on to note that the company makes a lot of customer comfort moves to hide the fact that they aren’t using actual attorneys. While my post here tries to focus on getting straight to the facts I know and the conclusions I draw, I really think that it was something special and illustrates the frustration a lot of us have on this topic. There are states where we are very heavily regulated and the regulating bodies have, through inaction or inability to enforce the law, allowed people to come in and record as “digital court reporters” without any regulation, whereas a stenographic court reporter doing pretty much the same thing would be fined or reprimanded. It’s not the digital reporters’ fault, it’s the companies’ fault, but until consumers and consumer protection agencies stand up and say “no,” the situation will continue.
I’m writing to you today because chances are high we aren’t that different. Maybe we both like law, or depositions, or working with lawyers. Maybe we both heard this was a great career with lots of potential. Maybe we will both face the same hurdles and challenges. Maybe you’ll cruise around my little blog here and find articles that pertain to you.
For the longest time, the deposition was the space of the stenographic reporter. Depending on where you’re at, we were making a lot of money and still have great careers today. Now what’s happened is the companies that previously used stenographers are trying to move towards transcription. They’re using you all to record and transcribe what we take down and transcribe. And I’m here today to make two points for your benefit:
Try stenography. It’s easy to learn, it’s hard to do fast, and our community is in the process of building free resources for you to try it out.
There’s a constant and unending thing at play called the market.
Stick with me, because I’m going to offer solutions. We all know that there are buyers and sellers of goods and services, and they are always, through one way or another, negotiating. If Law Office A doesn’t like Reporting Company B’s style or service, they can always use Reporting Company C. That’s the market at work. But there’s an unspoken side of the market, the labor force. Stenographers, voice writers, electronic reporters, transcribers, are all players in the market, and our actions can dictate our future.
Succinctly, when I was a deposition stenographer I was making only about $3.50 to $4.00 a page, and 25 cents to 50 cents a copy. That’s on a regular 14-day turnaround. There were also services where we’d rush the transcript for more than 6 bucks a page. To put that in perspective, let’s say that a fast-talking lawyer can do at least 60 pages an hour. 240 an hour. But for every hour at a deposition it would take me about an hour of transcription, 120 an hour. Sounds high, right? But I was an independent contractor and had to factor in the days where I made $0.00.
So now let’s take you, the valuable, amazing person they’re now pitching $20 an hour at, or $40 an hour at. Let’s say that you’re also doing the transcription work, and let’s assume it takes you much longer so you’re getting more hours transcribing. $40 at the 1 hour deposition, then four hours of transcription. $200. It takes you 5 to 10 hours of work to make pretty much the same $200 I was getting in two hours. Don’t forget, you’re doing pretty much the same work, it’s just taking you longer and making your life harder.
So what are the solutions? I’ve got 3:
Try stenography. It’s going to make your life easier. You’re going to command higher rates and pump out work fast. Has someone told you it’s dead? Consider whether they have a financial interest in telling you that.
Negotiate for more. Just like I’ve told stenographers for the last 4 years we are what we ask for. The work you’re doing is hard, and it is valuable. They can afford to pay you more and they know it, and I know it, and now you know it too. They’re not passing the savings of using you off to the lawyer, they’re pocketing it. And as capitalism teaches us, the money is always better off in our wallet.
Unionize. I’m not even kidding. As freelancers we deposition reporters would’ve had an uphill struggle to unionize. Unions are a dirty word now but let’s look at what they’re entitled to by law: Good-faith negotiations. Ultimately the union gets a peek at company finances and the company and union negotiate on what would be a fairer market rate for the services being provided. Where direct pay isn’t available, a union could negotiate for job security, better workplace rules, and medical or other benefits. There are even already legal workers unions in NYC.
If you found this helpful, spread the knowledge. Empower your colleagues. Fight because this is a fight worth winning. If you found this strange, consider that the rules in life are too. The longer you play by the rules dictated to you by others, the more you are set to lose. Take control. Be polite, be professional, be the best, but go forward with the understanding that you are a market force, and your actions dictate the future.
