court reporter podcast

“I envision focusing on all of this more as of now– being able to really help more people that are in the same boat that I was in a couple years ago” – Brynn Seymour

Hi Brynn!

Hi, Mel. How are you?

I’m well! So I’ll just jump right in if that’s alright? I know you’re a life coach, as well as a stenographer and host of the Court Reporter Podcast, and I’m wondering: which came first? What was your impetus for getting into these areas of work, and how did they become integral parts of your life?

Great question. I started the podcast in January of 2023. So at the end of 2022 I announced to my Facebook group and its community of court reporters that on January 1st The Court Reporter podcast would launch– because it was time that we started talking more about the struggles we faced and the solutions we can create in this unique industry.

I’ve always listened to podcasts. It’s just so convenient to listen to a podcast while you’re doing something else, like laundry, cooking, cleaning, or driving. If there’s something I need to learn about, then I go to podcasts to find out.

So, often every week, I would search for one on court reporters. I looked and looked and looked, and there was really no one out there who was speaking for the court reporting industry, to help us with solving all these industry-related problems that we end up doing so much research ourselves on. There were many podcasts from life coaches, (and my favorite one was The Life Coach School, actually, which got me into life coaching). And those podcasts were very helpful for me, as a person who has ADHD, as a person who is feels disorganized and needs just, for self development, self help things like that. But there was nothing specifically for court reporters.

So I decided that I just have to create the solution to this problem and do it myself.

I love that. How did you meet your mentor, Josh Edwards?

I met Josh at the New York State Court Reporters Association. He was assigned to me when I was in court reporting school, and he would help me with any issues that I had. He’s really good with Case Cat and a wiz with the technology. He’s a master certified court reporter in all the different categories that NCRA has.

That’s fabulous. What’s your experience been with building community around the podcast? I’m curious as well how that’s affected your experience at work, in court itself.

I started a Facebook group, because it seemed that the best way to build a community for court reporters was where they already were. So I have been welcoming people into the group, and building up conversations around what issues it is they want to hear about. We can do live discussions. We can do zoom meetings. We can do big discussions with all of us, it doesn’t have to just be me talking. I don’t want it to just be me. In general, I want more conversations for court reporters, to hear about other people’s experiences, to ask “how do you handle this? How do you do your bills and your booking and your scheduling? How do you manage your time when your schedule is so unpredictable?”

The answers are so different for everyone. So the community has been helpful for that. Although, when I started working full time in court, it became difficult to make time for it. I was working with a group of court reporters, so I gave them printouts of all the ideas that I had for the podcast, and told them that I’d love to interview each of them.

But, working full time in court, it’s difficult to manage our schedules and to find time to meet together, so that kind of held me back from doing the podcast more at first. But now I have officially resigned! I want to go back to freelance so that I can focus more on the podcast and on life coaching, because I really want more people to be able to be helped by what I needed so badly when I was searching for a podcast. I want to be able to offer that to more people, and to really help people one on one as well.

Beautiful. Do you have any favorite moments from the podcast, any that are really near to your heart, or anecdotal?

I mean, all of my guests have been amazing, and it’s a wide variety of people– attorneys, judges, court reporters. One episode I have is called, “Are we on the record?” And we talk about the frustration, when the attorneys and judges just start going off on these side conversations without saying that they want to go off the record, and we’re still on the record, typing everything. And I’m like, do they really want this on the record? Because it doesn’t seem related to the case. So we have these internal battles of ‘what should we do?’ I eventually came to the conclusion that I need to just interrupt them and ask– but it’s things like that, that I really just love having an outlet for with the podcast.

Yeah, I’ve heard a few other stenographers speak similarly about the necessity of asking folks in court to speak up and slow down.

It’s interesting, because some court reporters are great at it; it really depends on one’s personality type. I’m an introvert, and it’s not easy for me to bring attention to myself, not feeling 100% sure if I should speak up at that moment. Sometimes you’re unsure of what you’ve heard. We all have an audio backup sync, and when I go back and check, it’s very easy to think, ‘Oh, why didn’t I get that at the time? In the moment, you’re multitasking: you’re typing, you’re listening, you’re monitoring everything. So I always have that hesitation to interrupt. But later on, it’s so easy to figure it out with the context clues.

That’s another thing I want to help court reporters who are especially shy with. Because they don’t teach you that confidence in school, which is more focused on the trade and typing skills. When it comes to those emotions that we feel, and the internal struggles– I needed that kind of help when I started out, and it just wasn’t there. So that is something I want to help people with now.

That’s awesome. I’m interested in your experience as a woman in a male dominated industry. Does that coincide with your impulse to advocate for yourself and other women, who may hesitate to speak up when they should?

I do feel a little bit more comfortable when it’s mostly women. I don’t really like to be surrounded just by men. But the good thing is that there are so many more women attorneys nowadays than in the past, and it’s getting better. In the Bronx Supreme Court, where I was working, 90% of the judges were female. That was so great.

Wow! I’m so happy to hear this.

The tables are turning. I’m also part of The Church of God, which does a lot of sustainable development events, and we hosted an event for women judges in this month of Women’s history, on March 3. We did a UN International Day of Women Judges event, and 15 women judges came from the court system to the Church of God in Scarsdale. We honored them, they spoke, there was a panel discussion about the rise of women and about women really taking that step forward.

Incredible! How do you feel about AI and the future of Stenography work? Tell me about the VTM program you’re developing.

VTM has nothing to do with AI– it’s where you implement a system for yourself as a court reporter, so you don’t have to be working so much at managing every deadline and transcript, but you have built a team for yourself with humans.

If there is an AI solution, I’m all open to learning about it. If there are tools that can help us with our work, I would love AI. I do think there are risks, and we have to be careful, and that’s why I want to do my research first.

Actually, Chris Day and I spoke about it when I interviewed him for the podcast. He does so much research on that. There is a tool in Case Cat, called “check it”. And it’s pretty popular in court, so I decided to try it. And when I did, I thought, this is kind of garbage, to be honest. It was suggesting changes that were completely ridiculous, such as changing ‘address’ to ‘dress’, even though the context was asking, ‘What is your address? State your address for the record’.

I know artificial intelligence is supposed to be intelligent, so maybe that was just a fluke, but that stopped me from using it.

I love the continuity between your podcast, volunteer work and spiritual work, via your love of helping people. I’m curious how you navigate that work-life balance?

There’s a program that I took when I was in my life coaching certification school called Monday Hour One, which trains you on making a schedule for yourself. So every Monday (or I like to do Sundays), the idea is to plan out the things that week which you want to do for your personal life– whatever is most meaningful and important to you, you plan first. And then you plan your work and everything else around that.

As all court reporters understand, in our industry we struggle with the ability to predict what our day is going to be like, and I too struggled with that for a while. But as I’ve grown as a person and as a life coach, I feel like now I’m finally coming to a point where I’m getting closer to that balance. And it really does make a difference when I am able to schedule out my weeks where I spend that one hour really planning, downloading everything that I have to do out of my brain and onto paper, and then prioritizing each thing and putting it into my calendar.

The most important thing to me is my spiritual life and my relationships and the people that bring meaning to my life, and family. So I put those things in first, and now that I have an open-canvas calendar without the nine to five, that’s what I’ll be doing more of. I’ll be able to put more time into those things.

Like just today, I was able to meet with my sister at lunchtime, and I just got back from it, and it was great, because it felt so good to be able to put that in my schedule and to actually stick to it.

I love that, you really practice what you preach.

The most important part is to take the time to reflect afterwards– why wasn’t I able to stick to the schedule, what happened, what came up, and why? And do I like the reason why? And if it was for a good reason, okay. But if it was unintentional, or a waste of time, then I take that into the reflection– which we’re supposed to do every Friday, to reflect back on how the week went. I think I personally need to reflect every single day. So that’s what I’m doing.

I’m trying to do that too. Who have you encountered in your work who is also supportive of court reporters, who is championing their value?

There are some court reporters doing great work promoting the profession, volunteering and just getting the profession out there in general. And I think it really helps court reporters to hear from attorneys and from judges about their own views on the importance of the court reporter, and their view on how a court reporter can do their best. Those kinds of insights are so helpful.

I want to see more of the different roles in the justice system working together. How can we collaborate with each other, even interpreters and court officers, like a team? The judge too. In freelance though, it’s more about the relationship between the attorneys and the court reporters. So I love to dive into the personality types, the emotions we go through, and the communication styles that we have.

Wonderful, yes! On a different but related ‘collaborative’ note, tell me about your take on court fashion.

I have an Instagram called Courthouse Fashion. So whenever I have a nice outfit on, I just go out and take a picture and post it. If I’m early enough, I like to use my tripod– sometimes the girls and I would go out and do a whole photoshoot. There is a spot at the Supreme Court that’s particularly good for pictures.

And that Instagram gained a large following, and people really liked it. I still haven’t figured out where I’m going with that. But, I love fashion. It’s so important to be able to feel confident in the way that you present yourself. If I’m not wearing an outfit that I feel comfortable in– like hair, makeup, outfit– it ruins my whole day. I think it’s important for me as a way to express myself and to appear confident. It can be overwhelming for people when they don’t know what to wear, and it’s a whole project! So, you know, creating systems and processes and routinizing that aspect of life– I did a podcast episode about that. Episode Five was about how to declutter your brain, so: planning those things ahead, like what you’re going to wear, what you’re going to eat, just setting it up as a routine. So it’s kind of just like the same thing again and again, but changing up the color, or finding your uniform. That’s one thing I’d like to talk about, because it’s very related to mental health and well being

Absolutely, I completely agree. What are your hopes for the future of the court reporting industry, the court reporting podcast industry, the wellness industry?

I envision focusing on all of this more as of now– being able to really help more people that are in the same boat that I was in a couple years ago, who are struggling to manage life and to organize everything without feeling like you’re drowning under all the deadlines and pages.

So I really want to work with court reporters one on one, and and to put the content out there; all the conversations, all the discussions that we have. I want to share it and let it be available for free, and not have court reporters have to pay thousands of dollars on top of all the money that they’re already spent on maintaining their equipment and their association. It can be an expensive profession. I would rather have more free content available, which was so difficult for me to find back then.

I’m going to be releasing more episodes, more content on social media, more videos, more YouTubes, and also hosting more webinars and open discussions. And then eventually, I see a community being formed around this, and I see a group coaching program in the future, that anyone can bring their questions to, to get coached on any topic. We’ll all be helping each other in that way.

That’s so beautiful. What’s your number one advice for people getting into court reporting?

Number one advice would be: try to know if you’re going to be good at it. For me, I just knew it was going to be the perfect fit, which is strange, because I’d never felt like that with anything in life before. I was always indecisive. But with court reporting, the evidence shows that people who are musical, especially pianists, do really well at it.

The dexterity, right?

Yes. And it’s a job that has a flexible schedule, you can choose which days you’re working and still make a good living. Yeah, no brainer. So I would say to anyone who’s thinking about getting into it: you should definitely try. But especially people who are musical, who play piano, who have these skills and traits– it needs to be advertised to these groups of people. I just stumbled upon it!

I think this industry is so lucky to have you, and it just seems like you’re doing really great work, and I’m sure it’s just gonna grow and grow in terms of reach!

I would love to invite you to my church. We have events all the time with, like, the SDGs volunteering, seminars and things. If you’re interested!

Yeah, please. I did a little research on it and I really dug it!

It’s the only church that believes in God the mother. In the seminar that we did with the women judges, they spoke about how the prophecy is that the female image of God would be revealed in the last days, and how it’s not a coincidence that all these women are rising in power. So I’ll definitely let you know when we have more events!

Please do! Great speaking with you Brynn, thanks so much.

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And from Chris Day, a sincere thank you to Mel Elberg and Brynn Seymour!

Tag: court reporter podcast

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