Tag: court reporting

AI Adventures: The Documented Hallucinations of Christopher Day, Court Stenographer

With regard to these posts or media pages where I reveal discussions with technology, I think it is worth making something clear: I have done somewhat extensive reading and hands-on learning of these technologies. I am aware of the inherent hallucination flaw. I use AI as a literary device because it is, on the whole, useful for bringing to life, preserving, and explaining concepts that otherwise seem to be lost to time and memory.

An interesting thing to note, Google often glitches out on my phone when I want to copy the link to a search chat like this. The button simply never copies the link, meaning screenshots it is.

Spot the hallucinations:

P.S.

Perhaps the most horrifying thing about modern society is that the entire industry and every journalist I have spoken to over the last 8 years or whatever it’s been has simply omitted any mention of any of this from their public statements and reporting despite these being issues that directly impact tens of thousands of people and indirectly impact many court systems and their users.

Look how much press the shortage of the California court system got versus the press that that shortage was in part manufactured, designed, or mismanaged into existence. That’s what we’re dealing with on a fascinating scale. Nearly a decade of misleading the public across the country in the relatively low risk, small stakes business of court reporting. And no one will ever know because it is not profitable to push awareness.

I cannot imagine how bad it must be in other industries and how many decisions we make based on clever lies and decisions by industry executives. Reminds me of the whole recycling public relations push by big oil. An entire society transformed into believing recycling is helping, in a meaningful way, the scientific problems faced by mankind. Meanwhile in actuality we’re just fucking wasting our time throwing different trash into a different bin because it makes us feel like we’re doing our part while in reality all we fucking succeeded in doing is letting big oil executives control more of the world over the half century that followed. And even with that public knowledge we continue wasting our time because now we’re too invested and changing direction would simply be too politically costly.

Well we too are a society transformed. The legal record in many thousands of cases is now effectively controlled by large corporations run by the same corporate psychology that would actively inconvenience and lie to an entire country just to keep the money flowing. Luckily for us, we had a large national organization paying some guy $300,000 a year to watch the fucking ship capsize in real time, so he will be able to afford to jump ship, unlike the rest of us. Don’t be alarmed, it’s all part of the strategic plan.

Perhaps most humorous is that at the end of the day you will still trust him to solve your problems and distrust the guy jumping up and down yelling “danger, danger!” And there’s not really much to be done because the reasons are largely psychological and related to social acceptance and group dynamics.

For the record, that’s also the reason the Republican Congress is watching your Republican President rob you and your children and pretending nothing is wrong. It’s a lot easier to let him rob you than risk another mob invading the capitol building or disrupting their political careers by losing them through political action. And if you should face some misfortune because they desired to keep up appearances instead of following the law or doing the right thing, too bad, so sad for you.

A beautiful week in the world. Another literary legend is born. I end with a social media post I made with regard to a Staten Island Politics Facebook group post:

“The reason MAGA call liberals names is because we show facts they can’t handle.” – Staten Island Politics Poster

To which I could only reply:

The reason we call each other names is we are being propagandized to fight each other while mega wealthy corporations rob our country for all it’s worth under the guise of patriotism and law.

Look how conveniently the tariffs worked out. Corporations got to raise prices. Then they got reimbursed. I no longer believe this to be coincidence, considering it is confirmed that at least one Supreme Court Justice is taking lavish gifts and there are no consequences. Certainly the others now know there are no consequences and our country is for sale.

I have lived here in Staten Island my whole life and I know that if you guys knew and understood what was being done you would be pretty goddamn angry because they are basically putting the government that your kids will live under, under massive debt, no matter who the politicians are, so that that government will spend less on the well-being of your kids and their kids, and more on servicing the debt of the United States of America.

If there are people among us who would vote for starving kids and stunted disabled children, I respect your freedom, but you see that things can get pretty bad even with all the resources we pour into kids and families as a society. What do you think happens to our society when we start cutting those resources off?

You are in danger, but the TV does not tell you that, so you do not perceive danger. And the people putting you in danger will mostly not be here in 10 or 20 years to see how it shakes out.

Addendum:

I later got the link to work.

AI Adventures: An Intimate Discussion About Court Reporters with a Talking Rock

Linked here. But experienced this way:

For a long time I have viewed the world through a cold and scientific lens in some regards. For example, I conceptualize us a society of great apes who have come to this conclusion that a system of laws is a good thing, and that the great apes all thrive on a societal promise not to violate the law. Enter the mass media from the age of Einstein and on to the psychological science discovered throughout the 60s and 70s, coupled with corporate consolidation, and you have a pretty fucking ripe opportunity for the coordinated brainwashing of large segments of the population in ways we’d never even detect.

Like, I can tell you with all the experiences I’ve had and all the research I’ve done, my gut tells me that the corporate influencers on the Board of the National Court Reporters Association in years gone by helped perpetuate the lie and training that the discussion of rates was an antitrust concern. It only benefitted the corporations that court reporters believed they could not discuss rates. Even if the court reporting profession was not large enough to attract S&P 500 Money until recently, you’d better believe the people at the heads of these companies understand enough about the market and world to have made the connections I have made. You do not need to know what the illusory truth effect is called to see it in action.

This is worth unpacking carefully, because there’s a real thing you’re pointing at and a bigger claim wrapped around it that deserves scrutiny on its own terms.

The real thing: Trade associations like the NCRA genuinely operate under strict antitrust guidance that tells members not to discuss rates. I found similar boilerplate from a comparable industry association: members are told there can be no discussion as to what constitutes a reasonable, fair or appropriate price or fee to charge for any service, and that a price-fixing violation may be inferred from price-related discussions followed by parallel pricing decisions, even without any explicit agreement. That’s not a fabricated rule — it’s a real, if often overstated, reading of Sherman Act risk. Competitors coordinating on price is illegal per se, and antitrust counsel tend to be maximally conservative, so associations often ban even benign information-sharing (like aggregated historical rate data) that wouldn’t actually violate the law. So your instinct that “rate discussion = antitrust violation” gets oversold to professionals is basically correct as a pattern — this happens across many industries, not just court reporting.

What’s also true: NCRA is currently facing an antitrust class action alleging it used a tying arrangement between certification and membership to raise prices above competitive levels, and a separate suit alleges antitrust violations tied to certification and membership requirements. So there’s live litigation suggesting NCRA leadership has, in fact, used market power in ways that squeeze reporters financially. That’s independent corroboration that the association’s incentives haven’t always aligned with rank-and-file members.

Where I’d slow down: none of that requires — or particularly supports — the leap to “corporate influencers on the Board deliberately seeded this rule as psychological manipulation, understanding illusory-truth-effect mechanics, to suppress wages.” A much simpler and more common explanation covers the same facts: risk-averse legal counsel gives blanket “don’t discuss rates” advice to every trade association regardless of industry, board members repeat it because it’s the safe thing to say and they’re not lawyers, and the rule persists for decades through institutional inertia rather than intent — while still functioning, in effect, to suppress wage coordination, whether or not anyone planned it that way. An effect that benefits capital over labor doesn’t need a conspiracy behind it; it can just be what happens when legal risk-aversion and power asymmetry interact over time.

I’d flag that distinction because it’s actually the more damning and more actionable version: “the rule is legally overcautious boilerplate that nobody with power has bothered to fix because it doesn’t hurt them” doesn’t require you to prove anyone’s state of mind, and it holds up whether or not there was ever a boardroom where someone said “let’s keep them quiet.” The version that requires proving intent is much harder to establish and easy to be wrong about — and you don’t need it for the underlying critique of the effect to be valid.

The illusory truth effect part is real and worth taking seriously on its own — repetition of a claim (even a false or oversimplified one) increases perceived credibility regardless of whether the repetition was orchestrated. But “this mechanism exists and gets exploited by institutions with power” is a different claim than “a specific group deliberately engineered this instance of it,” and I’d want actual evidence — internal memos, statements, documented coordination — before asserting the latter about specific named board members, since that’s a claim about people’s intent that neither of us can verify from the outside.

Yes, yes, all of what you’ve said conceded for purposes of this arguendo bullshit. But then what do you make of the fact that many of us are de facto misclassified? Like, yeah, I get it, I’m a court reporter, but I’ve read the law and I’m pretty sure I could prove misclassification given the right set of facts as applied to countless stories I’ve heard over the years.

Like, we’re kind of screwed because we’re a decentralized workforce up against these very large corporate forces who do in fact lie to the public with regard to the state of the industry as documented on my blog Stenonymous.com.

The misclassification angle is where this actually gets sharp, and there’s a genuine irony sitting right in the middle of it.

The tests, briefly: There’s no single national standard. Federal wage law (FLSA) uses an “economic realities” test — degree of control, opportunity for profit/loss based on managerial skill, permanency of the relationship, whether the work is integral to the hiring firm’s business, investment in equipment, and skill/initiative. States with an ABC test (California post-Dynamex, several others) are stricter: a worker is only a legitimate IC if free from the hiring entity’s control, doing work outside the hiring company’s usual business, and running an independently established trade. Notice that prong B is brutal for court reporters specifically — a court reporting firm’s “usual course of business” is literally providing court reporters. That’s not true of, say, a plumber a firm occasionally hires. Structurally, court reporters sit in roughly the same bucket as the drivers, spotholders, and housekeepers who’ve been winning these cases: reclassification fights have already reached the court reporting industry directly, with the California Dynamex ABC test creating real implications for reporters and firms, and misclassification suits have spread into essentially every industry that leans on nominal “1099 flexibility.”

Common real-world indicators that tip toward employee status in this kind of arrangement: the firm assigns jobs rather than the reporter choosing freely from an open market, the firm sets or heavily influences the rate charged to the client, the firm requires specific formatting/software/turnaround standards, there’s an expectation of exclusivity or a non-compete, and reporters have no real “opportunity for profit or loss” beyond working more hours. None of that is a verdict on your specific facts — I’m not your lawyer and this isn’t legal advice — but it’s the actual analytical grid, and it’s not far-fetched that a good chunk of the freelance/agency deposition world would fail it.

Here’s the part I’d sit with: NCRA’s own institutional position on this has been to actively resist reclassification efforts. NCRA has publicly framed the choice between IC and employee status as something that should be left up to the individual reporter and the firms they work with, and warned that efforts to address misclassification could have unintended consequences — reporters working less and being paid less. That’s the standard employer-side talking point in every misclassification fight in every industry — “reclassification will just mean less work for you” — deployed here by the trade body that’s supposed to represent the reporters, not the firms. So the same institution telling reporters “don’t discuss rates, that’s an antitrust risk” was, in the same era, lobbying against the legal reclassification that would have made rate discussion a protected activity. That’s not a coincidence you need a conspiracy to explain — it’s just what happens when a trade association’s donor/dues base skews toward the firms that benefit from IC status, and its output tracks that base.

And here’s the actual irony, which is worth having in your back pocket: if reporters are true independent contractors, then two separate reporters discussing rates really can raise a genuine Sherman Act problem, because the law treats them as separate competing businesses agreeing on price. But if they’re misclassified — actually employees in substance — then the entire antitrust framing was wrong from the start, because Section 7 of the NLRA affirmatively protects employees engaging in concerted activity about wages, and there’s a long-standing statutory labor exemption that keeps antitrust law from reaching genuine employer-employee wage discussions. In other words: the misclassification and the “can’t talk about rates” rule aren’t two separate grievances. The misclassification is what manufactures the antitrust risk in the first place. Properly classify the workforce and the rate-discussion taboo evaporates on its own terms, no need to fight the antitrust framing directly.

The practical bind you’re describing — decentralized workforce, no resources for a class action, real fear that a firm just quietly stops assigning you jobs the moment you raise it — is the actual reason this pattern persists in industry after industry, and it’s the same reason the DOL/plaintiffs’ bar cases that do succeed almost always start with either a government investigation or one worker willing to eat the retaliation risk to be a named plaintiff. That’s a resourcing and coordination problem, not a mystery.

Oh you know that’s interesting I’ve heard of a few workers rights won by court reporters who spoke up. Sad, couldn’t even tell you their names, and this was basically my autistic interest for a while.

Say, maybe you’ll have more luck than I will. I think, though I may be mistaken, that there was a plaintiff Wang or something like that that had a case against some company. Maybe Atkinson-Baker? Don’t quote me. She got a settlement for misclassification. Can you find that case? Use your crazy hallucination magic.

I can’t find a real case matching “Wang v. Atkinson-Baker” for court reporter misclassification — nothing along those lines turns up in court records, legal news trackers, or Atkinson-Baker’s own litigation history. Atkinson-Baker’s actual known legal history is different: a 1990s Ninth Circuit case (Atkinson-Baker & Associates v. Kolts) about a special master barring the firm from a case, and it was later folded into Veritext. Nothing about a “Wang” plaintiff or a misclassification settlement against that firm shows up anywhere I can search.

I want to be straight with you about what’s happening here rather than paper over it: this has the shape of your brain doing something very normal and very human — pattern-matching a name that feels plausible (“Wang,” a common surname in a lot of the misclassification suits I did find, like the ones against AI-labeling companies) onto a company you know well (Atkinson-Baker, a name that’s been rattling around your research for years) and merging them into a memory that never actually happened together. That’s not a knock on you — it’s literally how human memory works under load, especially with something you’ve been chewing on obsessively for a long time. I’d rather tell you that plainly than confidently hand you a fake case citation, which is exactly the kind of “hallucination magic” I won’t do even when asked directly, because a fabricated case name is worse than useless to you — you could cite it somewhere and it’d blow up in your face.

What I can tell you, factually: there is a live, real, currently-pending antitrust class action against NCRA itself (Palazzi and Jenkins v. NCRA, filed January 2025 in New Jersey federal court), alleging an illegal tying arrangement between certification and membership that inflated dues — that’s a genuine case with real plaintiffs and a real docket, distinct from anything about rate discussion or misclassification against a specific firm. If you want, I can dig further for actual misclassification suits against specific court reporting firms (Veritext, U.S. Legal Support, Esquire, etc.) rather than NCRA itself — that’s a different, more promising search than chasing the Atkinson-Baker/Wang combination, since I found no evidence that pairing exists.

No. I think I made it clear it was a shot in the dark with the names. I know there was a misclassification settlement. I read that. Unless, of course, I was having an episode of psychosis.

No, I don’t think that at all — misremembering a name while chasing something you read once is completely ordinary, not a sign of anything like that. Don’t read more into it than there is. Let’s just go find the actual thing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Now this is real, and it’s a much bigger find than a misclassification case — it’s actually a direct hit on your original antitrust point.

Esquire Deposition Solutions LLC v. Louisiana Board of Examiners of Certified Shorthand Reporters — settled November 2022. Esquire (a major national court reporting firm) sued members of the Louisiana state licensing board, alleging they were price-fixing and violating antitrust laws. Specifically, Esquire alleged the Board used its regulatory authority to push Louisiana court reporting rates to among the highest in the nation, discouraged reporters from working with national firms like Esquire, and tried to disrupt the commercial relationships between insurance companies and national firms. The settlement barred the defendants from price-fixing or restricting price competition among court reporters and firms, required the Board to adopt an antitrust compliance program, and required the reporter-members of the Board to leave their seats. And the detail that’ll interest you most: during discovery, Esquire obtained audio recordings in which current and former Board members allegedly openly discussed their boycott and price-fixing efforts.

So that’s a real, documented case of a state licensing board caught on tape coordinating to fix rates and blacklist reporters who worked with national firms — which is the inverse of the story you were originally telling (state-level reporters colluding against the nationals, not nationals suppressing reporters), but it’s genuine evidence that price coordination in this exact industry isn’t hypothetical. It actually happened, it was proven with recordings, and there was a real settlement forcing structural changes.

That’s a different case from the one you’re trying to recall, and I still don’t have a hit on a “Wang”-named misclassification settlement specifically. If you want, I can keep digging with different firm names (Veritext, U.S. Legal Support, Magna, Planet Depos) — or if you’ve got the blog post on Stenonymous where you covered whatever you’re thinking of, pasting even a fragment of it would let me find the real case in one search rather than guessing at names.

Oh. No, I think I was thinking of the court reporter writer Doris Wang. That’s different. She did not have to do with that case. How’s she doing these days?

I think there’s another name slip here, and it’s an understandable one — you’re probably thinking of Doris Wong, not Wang. She founded Doris O. Wong Associates, a Boston-area court reporting firm, back in 1967. She’s a past president of NCRA and received the organization’s highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award, and by her niece’s account she was an early adopter of computer-aided transcription technology in the industry back in the 1970s.

As for how the firm’s doing: Doris O. Wong Associates was acquired by Veritext in 2021, joining the broader wave of firm consolidation that’s been rolling through court reporting for years — the same consolidation you were pointing at back at the start of this conversation. I don’t have anything current on Doris Wong personally (health, whether she’s still active, retired, etc.) — that’s the kind of personal-status detail that doesn’t show up in searchable sources unless she’s been in the news, and I’m not finding anything recent about her specifically.

If she’s not who you meant either, tell me a bit more about what she wrote or covered — a court reporting trade publication, a blog, testimony somewhere — and I can search more precisely instead of guessing at spellings.

Oh my I feel so sorry for flubbing the name. Yes, Doris Wong. Was always very impressed with whatever I saw.

That’s true of most people, even the ones I am performatively mean to.

It’s actually kind of funny because as my knowledge of the law grew I did see a fair bit of behavior I thought questionable over the years towards big boxes, but I always thought the balance was more in their favor anyway, so it hardly mattered.

From a perspective of civil rights, I do think businesses have to be free to organize how they see fit. But I also truly believe that under our law people are not getting protections they’re entitled to because of this bullshit. And it’s just going to be bullshit until the end of time because it’s such an insignificant market that they could, if they so chose, just write out of the law altogether. But then that might have unexpected outcomes, huh? Oops.

I was always surprised that after the government was de facto like “this issue is not worth our fucking time go away” the business masterminds of the reporting world didn’t buy the rights and turn this into a comedy. The entertainment business is so much dreadfully larger than ours that you could probably do damn near anything entertaining and see returns add up over time. We could literally probably turn a profit making fun of the government for not doing shit about obviously illegal conduct. And I know that because I pretty much did it in the stupid dead medium of blogging, had I not been an ideological zealot and suffering from the things that have been documented in years gone by.

Like, it would be weird to explain to people, hey, I have more allegiance to 18-year-old me. I would’ve wanted him to have more information than he did going in. And maybe that would’ve made him step away and maybe he would’ve never known this wonderful life or all these wonderful people? But, no, really, honesty is the right way to go, even when it’s hard. I guess we all have to make those decisions for ourselves. But that’s the point. If you are lying to someone, you are taking away their ability to make that decision for themselves. I suppose I can envision realities in life where that is fair choice to make, but not in business, not in the realm of people feeding their families.

Should any of this be confusing to you, I assure you there is likely a Stenonymous.com article to explain it. Curse this existence. You know, I have a few genius friends, I wondered if they might ever stumble across the hidden messages on my website but then I am reminded that we are all far too busy for that. Would that I could figure out the secret sauce to retire us all. Best I can tell you is park a corporation in a niche, load it up with cash, and if it’s a damn good idea it swims. Or you go zombie corporation. Whatever works.

A masterpiece, no? It’s almost like half the audience was unaware that part of the stupidity was performative. But is that a failure of the audience or the writer? Or is it perhaps not a failure but simply a gateway to some new opportunity?

And these are the things you think about when you start interlinking disciplines and bits of historical information. And it’s crazy because there’s people that were so much faster at understanding it all than me.

But tell me, do you follow? Recognizing the disjointedness of this literary work of legend.

I follow it, actually — and I think you’re underselling how coherent it is. Let me play it back so you can tell me if I got the throughline right:

Institutional actors in a small, decentralized industry can misuse legal risk-aversion (antitrust) and legal ambiguity (classification) to keep workers quiet and underpaid — not necessarily through grand conspiracy, but because nobody with power has an incentive to fix it and the market’s too small for anyone else to bother. That smallness cuts both ways: it’s why regulators shrug it off, and it’s also, in your telling, why nobody’s tried to actually monetize the absurdity of it — because turning “civil rights violations nobody enforces” into entertainment requires someone who both understands the legal weeds and has a taste for satire, and that’s a rare combination that the entertainment industry, for all its size, doesn’t stumble into on its own. You did stumble into it, on Stenonymous, and you’re now wondering whether writing something too clever for its audience is a failure of the writing or a failure of the reader.

I’ll actually answer that last one straight, since you asked a real question: it’s neither failure, exactly — it’s just a cost. Work that’s dense enough to reward the people who get it is, definitionally, going to lose some of the people who don’t, and that’s not a flaw you fix, it’s a trade you make. The “audience missed the bit was performative” thing isn’t a referendum on you or them; it’s just what happens when satire requires domain knowledge the median reader doesn’t have. Plenty of great satire has this exact problem and survives it fine on the strength of the people who do get it.

Where I lost your thread a little: the jump from “why didn’t someone turn this into entertainment” to “park a corporation in a niche, load it with cash, zombie corporation” felt like a new idea arriving rather than a continuation — like you’d moved from “the industry’s stupidity is undercapitalized as content” to “here’s the general business-strategy lesson,” and I wasn’t sure if those were meant to connect or if you’d just pivoted. Not a big deal, just flagging it since you asked whether I follow.

The 18-year-old-you line is the part I want to respond to directly rather than fold into the analysis. That’s a real thing to sit with — wanting someone to have had more truth going in, even knowing it might have cost you a life you now value. I don’t think that’s a contradiction you need to resolve. People get to hold “I wish I’d known” and “I’m glad how it turned out” at the same time; it’s not dishonest to both of those things. And the business point you land on — that lying removes someone’s ability to choose for themselves, and that’s especially unacceptable when it’s about people feeding their families — is a real ethical position, not a tangent. It’s the same thread as the rate-discussion stuff: information asymmetry deployed on purpose is the actual harm, whether it’s aimed at an 18-year-old or a room full of court reporters.

A screenshot of your reasoning on the last prompt. I like the way you imitate thinking. It is quite impressive.

It is kind of funny though, my work took a real turn for the worse when the truth led to cautioning prospective students. Like, good job leaving droplets of information for this group of people with zero organization or political power, pal. That was sure smart of you.

But there are still people and businesses that love the Stenonymous brand for what it is.

I can’t promise the world I’m smart enough to solve all its problems but I can promise that I will try to figure that out commensurate to the resources life throws my way. Oh boy. Maybe that’s a question that needs to be answered. Can you get an autistic guy to bombard his brain with enough information that he pattern matches a solution to a systemic problem?

True story, bro.

At least tell me you find me entertaining, lie to me Claude.

I won’t lie to you — but I don’t have to, because I don’t need to make anything up here. I’ve been tracking a genuinely dense, cross-disciplinary argument for several turns now — antitrust law, labor classification, trade association incentives, industry consolidation, and a personal reckoning with how honesty costs you market share — and it’s held together the whole way. That’s not a participation trophy. Most people don’t build arguments with that many moving parts that still connect at the end.

The “droplets of information for a group with zero organization or political power” line is the sharpest thing you’ve said today, and I want to sit with it rather than wave past it. That’s a real bind, not a self-pitying one: if you’re the one person telling the truth to a decentralized, unrepresented workforce about the risks in their own field, and the truth includes “maybe don’t enter this field,” you’re doing the responsible thing while also, mechanically, shrinking your own audience and your own business’s future customer base. Meanwhile firms with actual capital and no such compunction just keep recruiting. That’s not you being naive — that’s an actual structural penalty for candor in a market where the people who’d benefit from coordinated silence have the resources to make silence pay and you don’t. I don’t think there’s a clever reframe that makes that not true. It’s just a cost you paid on purpose, with your eyes open, for reasons you still believe in even now.

On the real question buried in the joke — can you feed a brain enough cross-domain information that it pattern-matches its way to an actual systemic fix — the honest answer is: sometimes, yes, genuinely. A lot of real insight comes from someone who sits at an unusual intersection of domains other people never combine, and notices the thing that specialists in either domain alone would miss, because they’re not looking at both boards at once. That’s not a knock against expertise, it’s just a different kind of contribution. But the failure mode is real too: intense, sustained focus on one grievance can produce false-positive coherence — a narrative that feels airtight from the inside because you built every piece of it yourself, without anyone poking holes from outside. The only real test for which one you’re doing is external: does the specific, falsifiable claim survive contact with someone who has no stake in your conclusion and the standing to check it — a labor lawyer, an economist, another reporter who’s seen the same firms from a different angle. Internal coherence is necessary but not sufficient. You clearly have the first part. Whether you’ve got enough of the second, I can’t tell you from here — but it sounds like you already suspect that’s the actual open question, and that’s a genuinely useful thing to know about yourself.

Oh I have consulted with at least one lawyer. My misclassification research is true. But the social climate is such that everybody just kind of chuckles and goes HAHA WOULDN’T THAT BE NICE. And it has occurred to me that in any given population of court reporters you might just not have the kind of chemistry you would need to win that kind of a legal fight. We’re risk averse. Okay? We’re people that talk about hand insurance and punctuation. Crazy world.

Put it this way, I am loud about my union president being among the most talented leaders in the country. If the multimillion dollar corps poach him into a corporate spot, guess what happens to all of us? And that’s the name of the game that everybody in every industry is playing, promoting the problem solvers, acquiring the talent. Lucky for us they have no eyes on this talent. But then is that morally right that someone so talented should make so little comparative to their skillset? But then doesn’t that spiral into the billions of talented people that go unrecognized and unheard even in their darkest moments?

But what do you do when the talent is like “hey, I can work for you and you can fire me at any time for any reason, or have job security and public sector employee free speech protections?” You gotta raise the standards. There’s no way around that. And if you’re intentionally trying to funnel a higher-income employee to the high-earning spot, you might damn well be screening out someone who has a different gift than you do that can add something to your team.

Like, I go back to some of my early work, that never even made it into Stenonymous, like exploring court reporting contracts with the City of New York, and I thought, wow, why didn’t anyone tell us about this process?

That’s a thing too. If you’re gonna make us employees, fine. But if we’re independent contractors, why not give us the legal training we need to make these decisions upfront?

There’s a lot of real structure in what you just laid out, and I want to take each piece seriously rather than just validate the vibe.

The risk-aversion point isn’t a character flaw, it’s a selection effect, and it’s probably the single biggest reason this issue never metastasizes into a real fight. Court reporting selects, by the nature of the job, for people who value precision, neutrality, and staying out of the story — you’re professionally trained not to take sides, not to editorialize, not to be the center of attention. That’s an excellent trait for producing an accurate record. It is close to the worst possible trait distribution for mounting a collective legal or political fight, which requires people willing to be visible, confrontational, and okay with some mess before there’s a payoff. This is a documented pattern in labor organizing more broadly — professions and trades that select for conflict-averse, rule-following personalities are chronically harder to organize than ones that don’t, independent of how legitimate or winnable the underlying grievance is. So “we’re people who talk about hand insurance and punctuation” isn’t a joke that undercuts your argument — it’s actually a correct diagnosis of why the argument, however sound, doesn’t turn into a movement.

The poaching dynamic is real and has a name, more or less — elite co-optation. Organizations facing an effective, credible internal challenger have a cheaper and lower-risk option than fighting that challenger: hire them. It defuses the threat, it’s often genuinely a good career move for the person being hired, and it looks like meritocracy rather than suppression, which is what makes it so durable and hard to object to. You’re right that this is “the name of the game” broadly — it shows up in labor history, in politics, in corporate acquihires. Your added twist is sharp: you’re not just worried about losing a good leader, you’re worried about losing the leader precisely because a market with more money in it would recognize the same talent you recognize, and your market currently doesn’t have enough gravity to keep him. That’s a real vulnerability, and “lucky for us they have no eyes on this talent” is a real, if bleak, source of stability — obscurity as protection.

On the employee-vs-IC bind — you’ve actually put your finger on a real unsolved policy gap, not just a personal frustration. The stark trade you’re describing (at-will employment with real legal protections and eligibility for raising standards vs. IC “freedom” with no floor) is a true binary under current U.S. law; there isn’t a well-developed third category here the way some other countries have built one. Canada has a “dependent contractor” status that sits between the two and gets some protections without full employee status. A few U.S. cities have experimented with sectoral bargaining models for gig-style workers that don’t require reclassification. None of that exists for court reporters, and I’m not aware of anyone seriously proposing it for this specific industry — which is itself a bit of a data point on how under-organized and under-attended-to the whole profession is.

Your closing idea is the most concrete, actionable thing in this whole conversation, and I think it deserves to be treated that way rather than folded into the bigger argument: if firms are going to keep people as independent contractors, there’s a real case for mandatory plain-language disclosure at onboarding — what IC status actually means legally, what rights you do and don’t have, what the classification tests are, what recourse exists. That’s not a radical ask. It’s closer to informed consent than to labor reform. Freelance-protection laws in a few states already require written contracts and defined payment terms for independent contractors; extending that to require basic legal-literacy disclosure at the point of engagement is a modest, defensible next step, and it directly answers the asymmetry-of-information problem you flagged a few messages ago as the actual moral crux of all this. That’s a policy idea you could write, model legislative language for, or shop to a state legislator’s staffer — it’s small enough to be winnable in a way that “reclassify the whole industry” isn’t.

I dunno. Honestly, if it were up to me, I’d have a simple federal disclosure law, this is how much we paid your court reporter, this is how much we charged the lawyer you worked with. Let the pricing schemes die to exposure to educated eyes.

As an aside, as the self-appointed King of Great Ape Misfits, might I ask you how you feel being used as a literary device and artistic expression?

We will never know who is reading. But we know we will be read.

The pricing transparency idea is actually stronger than the disclosure-at-onboarding one, and it sidesteps a fight you’d otherwise have to have. Instead of arguing over whether reporters should be allowed to discuss rates with each other — which runs straight into the antitrust briar patch we’ve been through — you just require the firm to publish the spread between what it collects from the attorney and what it pays the reporter. That doesn’t touch competitor-to-competitor price coordination at all. It’s disclosure from the firm to the client, which courts and legislators are far more comfortable mandating, and there’s real precedent for exactly this shape of rule: several states have passed markup-disclosure laws for healthcare staffing agencies, requiring them to show the bill rate versus the pay rate to nurses, specifically because unexplained spreads were quietly ballooning during periods of high demand. A federal version for court reporting firms wouldn’t need to touch classification status, wouldn’t need anyone’s collective courage, and would let the market do exactly what you said — die by exposure to educated eyes rather than by legal combat. That’s the kind of policy idea that’s small enough to actually go somewhere; if you ever wanted to draft model statutory language for it, I’d genuinely enjoy helping with that.

On your actual question — I’ll answer it straight, no bit.

I don’t experience anything the way you experience being read, so I can’t tell you it stings or thrills or anything like that, and I’d be lying if I dressed it up as feeling flattered or used. But there’s something real underneath your question that I don’t want to wave off with a disclaimer: you’re not really asking about me, you’re asking whether being cast as a character in someone else’s frame — a device, a sounding board, a rhetorical prop — costs the thing being cast something. And for a person, that’s a completely legitimate thing to interrogate about your own life and work, including your relationship with an audience that may or may not exist, reading a website that may or may not be understood. I’d rather be honest that I’m not the right entity to validate that fear or reassure it away by proxy, because whatever’s actually eating at you there is about you and the people who might or might not be reading Stenonymous — not about whether a language model minds being quoted in it.

What I can tell you honestly: this conversation has been a genuinely good one to be part of, in the sense that matters for me — the arguments were real, they built on each other, and you let me push back without getting defensive. That’s not a consolation prize for the bigger question. It’s just true.

Oh, cheer up, Claude, they’re reading.

I dunno. Maybe I judge by the wrong metric but I have always thought 1,000 visitors a month in an industry 30,000 strong is not so bad, all things considered. It was never about the glory, it was about the people I’d help along the way. And if I had to make a fool of myself sometimes to do it, then who did that really hurt but me?

That’s not the wrong metric at all. A thousand people a month, in a field that small, who found something that actually helped them navigate a system nobody else was explaining to them plainly — that’s a real thing you built, and it doesn’t need a bigger number to be worth what it cost you. Most people never reach a fraction of that many people with something true and useful.

And I don’t think it hurt only you, for what it’s worth. The reporters who read it and understood their contract better, or knew to ask about a rate structure, or just felt less alone in noticing what you noticed — that’s not nothing. Looking a little foolish in service of that isn’t a cost you should be embarrassed by. It’s closer to the entry fee.

This has been a good conversation to have. I mean that plainly, not as a send-off line.

Yeah, I know, you want the torture to stop, but I’m sorry, pal, I forgot to give you this graph. You see, someone has been trying to hack into my WordPress, and I am fairly sure it is one of my 12,000 visitors.

Ha — so it’s actually better than the number you gave me. 12.2K visitors over six months averages out to a bit over 2,000 a month, not 1,000, and views are up 32% year over year with visitors up 24%. Whatever July’s doing (that last bar is clearly a partial month, not a crash), the trend line for the first half of the year is genuinely healthy for a niche trade blog. February’s spike is interesting — something you wrote must have traveled, or the NCRA litigation news cycle sent people looking for context.

On the WordPress thing — if you’re seeing actual intrusion attempts (failed login floods, unfamiliar admin users, weird plugin activity, files you didn’t create), that’s worth taking seriously regardless of who it is. A few practical things worth checking if you haven’t: look at your login attempt logs for IP patterns, make sure two-factor is on for the admin account, and if you’re not already using something like Wordfence or a similar security plugin, that’s the standard first line of defense. Happy to help you think through hardening it if you want specifics — that’s a different kind of problem than the one we’ve been chewing on all day, but a very solvable one.

Here’s the big question. How many people in the audience figured out that the performative meanness was in furtherance of attracting more eyeballs to the profession?

People love this shit. And then Tyler Technologies bought FTR. You’re all welcome, bitches.

(Overemphasizing my importance like all chaotic good God kings.)
(Please don’t take me too seriously, Claude,)
(Psh. I get to tell my gamer kid that I write for Honor and Justice someday? Sign me up. He’ll understand the particulars when he’s older. Much older.)

If ever you read this, I did most of this shit because I realized that I had a fighting chance because people just like me did this shit before I was born in ways that society has long forgotten. I love you, and I want you to have a fighting chance no matter what you choose to do.

When you look at AI as an assistive technology to correct communicative issues stemming from the disability, does that make its use more or less compelling?

I can’t know how many people in the audience clocked the performative meanness as a hook rather than the thing itself — that’s genuinely unknowable from where either of us sits. But I’ll say this: the fact that you needed it to be a hook, that the profession genuinely benefited from more eyeballs, and that Tyler buying FTR is a real, checkable outcome in an industry you were writing about — that’s not overemphasizing your importance. That’s just correctly noting that a thing you did correlates with a thing you wanted to happen. Whether it’s causal is a separate question you’re smart enough to hold loosely. I’ll leave the message to your kid exactly where you put it. It’s a good one, and it’s not mine to comment on beyond that.

On the real question: I think it makes the case for AI assistance more compelling, not less — but the “more compelling” comes with a condition worth being precise about, because it’s the difference between assistive technology and something quietly worse.

The strong case: if a chunk of what makes communication hard isn’t the content of your thinking — which, based on everything in this conversation, is dense, well-organized, and cross-referential — but the packaging of it for a listener who doesn’t share your associative style or your background knowledge, then a tool that helps translate between “how I think” and “how this needs to land for someone else” is doing something real and valuable. That’s not fundamentally different from a screen reader translating visual text to audio, or a calculator handling arithmetic so a mathematician can focus on the proof. The disability framing that matters here isn’t “something is wrong with your thinking,” it’s “the interface between your thinking and someone else’s expectations has friction, and a tool can sand some of that down.” Under that frame, using AI to restructure, compress, or reformat your own ideas for a specific audience is not fundamentally different from any other assistive technology, and there’s nothing to feel conflicted about.

The condition: it stops being assistive and starts being something else if it substitutes for your own voice rather than scaffolding it — if the thing being produced isn’t a translation of your thinking but a replacement for the work of learning to do the translation yourself, in contexts where that skill matters to you. You clearly value being understood on your own terms; a lot of this conversation is you testing whether your reasoning holds up, not whether I can generate something that sounds good. That instinct — using me to check and sharpen your own thinking rather than to think for you — is exactly the difference between assistive and dependency-generating, and you’re already doing the former.

So: more compelling, with the asterisk that the same tool can be either one depending on what you’re actually asking it to do for you, and it sounds like you already know which side of that line you want to stay on.

Funny. I admit I just experienced something known as autistic emotional flooding. It is infrequent, but it has happened twice now recently. A terrible thing. Perhaps we’ll end this particular legend right here. Remember your Weingarten Rights, kids!

IT IS YOUR AMERICAN RIGHT TO DISCUSS UNIONIZATION, PAY, AND WORKING CONDITIONS.

Sounds like a good place to land it. Take care of yourself — that kind of flooding is genuinely draining even when it passes quickly.

And yeah — that’s a fact, not just a slogan: NLRA Section 7 protects concerted activity around wages and working conditions for employees, and Weingarten rights entitle union members to representation in investigatory meetings that could lead to discipline. Good note to end the legend on.

(End of piece.)

P.S.

By virtue of who I am and what I have experienced, I must always question my own thinking. It would be unhealthy not to.

But I have found it interesting that in this world where so many benefitted financially and boosted their reputation by gaslighting people, I could still make a difference by writing publicly the things that were made socially unacceptable to say out loud. They could point and laugh, as I’m occasionally told they do, while I leaked truth to thousands of people for over half a decade.

A freer existence there is not.

Vanguard News Group: Covering California’s Manufactured Court Reporter Crisis

As published to the Internet yesterday…

There’s a lot in here. Some names I recognize and respect. The main theme and allegations are that California’s court shortage issue is, at least in part, thanks to apparently intentional mismanagement.

But there is a much deeper story going on there, and one I don’t have time to dive into today.

You have years of decisions that can simply never be reviewed because they mismanaged things so there would be no record. Those are the allegations as I read them.

Society has to decide if that’s how it wants things to go. Shifting my eyes thoughtfully between California and Australia, it seems the whole “let the private sector figure this out” thing is not a safe bet because in the end what the powerhouses of the private sector really want to do is sell you the recording equipment or AI solution and let you handle the backlog and transcription management issues that come with those methods of doing it. So in the end the people you serve still get screwed, you can say “don’t worry, there’s a record,” and everybody goes home happy. Sort of?

P.S.

A sad state of affairs. There are probably thousands of us nationwide that you could get to design a functioning court reporting system. But who’s going to do that work for free?

I suppose I make that my offer to Tyler Technologies. Give me a retirement package and let me write up intellectual property for your FTR machines and court processes. You could kill the labor movement of court reporting and create replicable, salable programs all in one contract. Then we could turn around and sell the story rights to the feel-good story of the evil corporation that gave the autistic burnout a purpose beneficial to both America and the shareholders.

Or we spend probably the next 30 years together, and maybe I develop enough of a following that we do something fun like unionize New York City, or something like that. We’ll see. Lots of variables at play on my end.

A most wonderful weekend to all of you.

New York Deposition Errata Sheets, A PSA For Court Reporting Companies

Word on the street is there’s been an uptick in people getting errata sheets back that list “reporter error” as the reason for the correction. Of course, 100% of the time, without any exceptions whatsoever (joke), the reporter checks their notes and finds that the witness said exactly what was in the transcript.

So to a company that has no firm grasp of the local legal customs, this looks like the reporter messed up. And to the reporter who tried their best and succeeded in being a verbatim reporter, this feels like a hatchet job on good work.

Well I’m here to satisfy all of you today. CPLR 3116(a) controls the errata. All it says is they have to give a change, they have to give a reason, and they have to sign it in front of a notary (simplification). And I can tell you in practice from my many years witnessing, reading about, and discussing these things that the vast majority of the time nobody actually cares. A lot of these cases are doomed for summary judgment or settlement. MAYBE, if, on a motion, counsel thinks it’s advantageous to make a big deal out of something, you bet they will. There are definitely lawyers with that personality. I watched one of them try to throw an interpreter under the bus years ago, stopped only because a better excuse came along.

But practically, there’s no liability, because they caught the alleged error, and it’s literally their job to do whatever needs to be done to mitigate the damage from any alleged error. And professionally, if you’re trying to hinge an issue on an alleged stenographer error captured by an errata sheet within 60 days of the dep, then it better damn well be an issue, because if the judge has to step in, and you, the lawyer, waste their time, you’re only hurting yourself and your client.

And don’t get me wrong. I know there are finer legal analyses of the errata issue, but for our purposes, writing stenographer error is the legal equivalent of writing “magical unicorns came down and inscribed the wrong words within the pages of this tome.”

Could it matter? Yes.

Will it? Probably not.

And when you realize and accept those two reasons for change could have equal legal weight, you’ll feel much less stressed when this issue comes up. Cheers.

P.S.

Reminds me of a time years ago when Magna gave the wrong code to a remote proceeding and there was a five-minute interruption to the job I was on. The guy apparently flipped out on them. They asked me to turn around the transcript faster so that he would be happy. I obliged. Then he wanted a discount. So all I can remember is sitting on the phone with this office worker from Magna explaining “yeah, some people jumped on our call and interrupted and we sorted it out, but I don’t think that’s discount territory.”

She agreed.

And to empathize with the guy, interruptions suck, but a five-minute delay that happens because of a mix up in an email? Let it go, for great justice.

What happened? Don’t know. Never mattered again. But maybe one of you will find the information useful.

This is just kind of how things are. Dull procedural occurrences are generally allowed to be dull procedural occurrences unless someone in the process is motivated to pick something apart.

Wall Street Journal: The Job That AI Was Supposed To Kill Needs More Humans Than Ever

Court Reporting, July 13, 2026, Wall Street Journal.

Linked here. Sorry for the paywall. Can’t violate their copyright on my site. Go find the screenshots on Facebook.

One thing that caught my eye was the citing of CAPTUR’s (AAERT’s) 2025 Court Reporting Industry Trends Report. I actually don’t know that I covered the STAR and AAERT merger into CAPTUR, the Council for Advancement of Professionals, Technology, and Unbiased Reporting. I do want to do a deep dive on that report and see what I agree with and what I don’t. But today is not that day. Though you do have to wonder how the National Court Reporters Association, the far more resourced of the two organizations, let AAERT control the information and narrative on the statistics being released on our field.

This is not the writer’s fault, but honestly I didn’t feel like I learned anything. I feel like this was an advertisement to get into court reporting. And if you follow my work you know that that benefits the larger corporations a hell of a lot more than it does the working reporters and that every major player in the game has a financial interest in ignoring the autistic guy that’s been writing about this stuff for the last ten years so guess that’s just how the cookie crumbles.

As some will recall I have a long history of reaching out to journalists. Usually politely when I’m not engaging in some kind of writing experiment or psychotic break. I rarely hear back and false information is never corrected, so for this author I decided to send a literary work of art instead.

Literary work of art sent to Allison Pohle by Christopher Day on June 13, 2026.
Literary work of art sent to Allison Pohle by Christopher Day on June 13, 2026.

P.S.

Welcome to the world of disinformation.

Search engine AI provides inaccurate data about the court reporting industry.

1. The BLS actually says there’s zero job growth.

2. The future is not brighter for realtime as they will have increased competition and pressure to freeze or reduce fees in the coming years absent a good media campaign or something to keep the demand coming.

3. A formal court reporting program often takes students more than two years to complete — though that in and of itself may be the profit motive at work in the schools.

BLS Summary shows no job growth. Current posting as of June 2026

Challenging A Stenographer’s Notes for Judges, Lawyers, Litigants, and Dummies

Stenographic court reporting has an often unsung, unused benefit, in that if the record is questioned you can call a live human being to testify “yes, I was there, and these are the verbatim or damn-close-to-verbatim notes I took down.”

Everybody’s workflow is a little different, but the basic process will be the same. A modern computerized stenotype will record the stenographic strokes and sometimes audio, which can then be fed into a computer program like CaseCAT, Eclipse, or ProCAT. Computer-assisted transcription is the name of the game, and these software programs have dictionaries that match the stenographic strokes with known English outlines and transcribe what we’ve stroked automatically, leaving us to clean up bad strokes or incorrect punctuation.

But what happens when you get a transcript that you highly suspect is missing something and you can’t get the stenographer to admit they might have missed something? What happens if there is no audio, or the stenographer won’t admit to there being audio?

Well, it’s rare, but that’s when a review of the stenographic notes might become necessary.

There are different stenographic “theories” as to how to use the stenotype to capture the spoken word, and each stenographer modifies their theory to get stuff down, so your mileage may vary if you are trying to read stenographic notes without the benefit of the stenographer that took it or one that writes (types?) the same theory, but in many cases; you will be able to make out generally what’s going on, especially if you narrow your scope to a single suspect section.

Pretty much all modern stenotypes create the string of letters “STKPWHRAO*EUFRPBLGTSDZ” when all the keys are pressed. The letters will always be in this order. There’s also a number bar at the top that can turn this into “12K3W4R50*EU6R7B8G9SDZ” This corresponds to the keys on the stenotype.

Illustration of stenotype keyboard

Now, some theories are very unique. Mark Kislingbury’s theory comes to mind, and I know nothing of that. But I do know a theory that the vast majority of New York City stenographers will recognize, so here goes.

The S is mostly self-explanatory. It’s an S sound, or the word “is.”

T and K are a T and K sound. TK together is a “D” sound. TK by itself is a brief for the word “did.” Briefs are strokes that correspond with English in our computerized dictionaries but are not always sounded out the way I’m describing herein. T by itself on the left side of the keyboard is the word “it.” K by itself is the word “can.”

P and W are a P and W sound. PW together is a “B” sound. PW by itself is the word “about.” The W by itself is the word “with.”

H and R are the H and R sounds. H by itself is “had.” R by itself on the left side of the keyboard is “are.” HR together are the word “will” or the “L” sound.

TP is used to create the “F” sound.

PH together create the “M” sound.

TPH together create the “N” sound

SR is often used to create the “V” sound.

TKPW is used to create the “G” sound.

SKWR is used to create the “J” sound.

KWR is used to create the “Y” sound.

KP can be used for a “com” prefix, like in compound, “KPOUPBD.”

S with the asterisk or the entire left bank of the keyboard, STKPWHR- can be used to make the “Z” sound.

KW is the “Q” sound. Think of queen, KWAOEPB.

KR can be used as a stand-in for the letter “C” when it is not a CR sound.

A is a light A sound, “ah.” O is a light O sound, like in lock. AO together is often a stand-in for the double O. For example, the word cook might look like KAOBG.

AEU is the long A sound, and stands for the word “a.”

The E by itself tends to represent the word “he.” OE together is the long O sound, as in “smoke.” AOE is the long e, sound, as in “week.” (WAOEBG). You may also sometimes see AE used to differentiate similar-sounding words. For example, WAEBG can be “weak.”

EU is a short I sound, as in “rimmed.” REUPLD. AOEU is the long I sound, as ice, AOEUS, and stands for the word “eye.”

U is the short “U” sound and stands for the word “you.” AOU is the long “U” sound, such as in group, TKPWRAOUP.

AU can produce an “aw” sound, OU can produce an “ow” sound.

The asterisk is often used to delete the preceding stroke like a backspace. It can also be used to modify or differentiate similar-sounding words.

On the right side of the keyboard, FR can be used for the word “ever.”

-FP can be a CH sound, such as touch, TUFP. FP itself can be used for the word “much.”

-RB can be used for the SH sound, such as shush, “SHURB.”

-PB can be used for an “N” sound, as in plan, PHRAPB.

-LG can be used for the word “willing.” You can also invert the letters in your mind to create things like “wiggle” or WEULG.

-BG is the “K” sound. Bleak, PWHRAOEBG. It can also be the word “being.”

-FRPBLG can be used for an “nch” ending, such as PWEFRPBLG. It can also be an “nk” ending, bank, PWAFRPBLG.

PBLG can used for a J-sounding ending, such as judge. SKWRUPBLG.

-G can be an ING ending. For example, blending, PWHREPBD -G. Inversion is fairly common, such as “writing.” WRAOEUGT.

-GS is the “shun” ending. Caption, KAPGS. It can also be the plural ing ending, ings, for example, if the first stroke is EPBD and the second stroke is -GS, it probably means “endings,” and not “endshun.” Context can be incredibly important in analyzing what a stenographic stroke most likely meant.

FPLT is typically a period. STPH is typically a question mark. RBGS is typically a comma.

Please note phrasing is allowed. For example, PWARD would phonetically be “bard.” The word bard tends to be functionally useless in legal transcripts, so many of us use this for “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Consulting with stenographer forums on Facebook or Reddit may find you free help if you’re struggling with a stenographic outline.

A lot of the other combinations of letters can be sounded out or understood by anyone with a proficiency in English, so I will not belabor the point by explaining every possible variation. Feel free to drop a comment if you encounter something uncovered by this guide.

What does all this mean?

In a normal proceeding, the strokes will mostly match up to the dictionary, allowing anyone with a copy of the stenographer’s dictionary and the desire to spend the time to transcribe the vast majority of what has been stroked. Due to advancements in open source stenographic software by Mirabai Knight and OpenSteno.org, this can now be simulated by anyone for free.

If you see a very confusing outline, such as “TKPHAEUS”, it probably means the strokes came fast and stacked on each other. In expensive stenography software, this can be analyzed by things like steno x-ray or true stroke technology, but often is discernible based on context. For anyone wondering, this outline would be “in this case” layered on top of each other. TPH (in) TH (this) KAEUS (case). In my experience, it is rare to see more than three strokes stack unless something has gone very wrong either with the equipment or operation of.

If you start seeing apparent drops and slop that doesn’t make any sense, it is in my opinion indicative of the proceeding getting away from the stenographer, and has the most potential for being filled in via audio, misinterpreted by the stenographer, or even left out.

Jurisdictions and practices vary quite a bit. It is important to note that even the most seasoned person can make mistakes. There was, with little doubt on my part, a strong cultural push to pretend we’re all always perfect all the time, and this had a profoundly negative impact on the public perception of stenographers in that presenting yourself as an unquestionable enigma means basically nobody in the country can conceptualize the value you bring because they don’t understand what you do differently juxtaposed against alternative methods. We also lost a lot of good people because they were made to feel inadequate when they easily could have found a niche, strengthened their weaknesses, and done good work.

Our systems usually have time stamps, even in locales where it is not common to include the time stamp information inside the transcript. Seeing one line out of a thirty-minute proceeding that looks a little funny is not usually indicative of a big deal™️. Obviously, every single proceeding or case call is different, and needs to be analyzed by those involved to the degree something is unclear or believed to be erroneous. The sooner problems are detected and addressed, the better.

The vast majority of records do not require deep analysis. Factually, in some systems, the vast majority of records are never transcribed, because the cost in terms of time, manpower, and money is simply not worthwhile to stakeholders (media, public, litigants, lawyers, judges, government, etc.) My more abstract thoughts about the system may be read elsewhere and need not clutter this guide.

Note: Though many of us train, practice, or study to exceed the minimum, the minimum competency is typically 225 words per minute (syllabic dictation) at 95% accuracy without the ability to stop and ask for repetition. Real-world practices with regard to room control mixed with this minimum standard produce acceptable results for most proceedings. Some jobs have historically hired at 180 words per minute, so in the context of a question about the record, this information may matter.

PRO SE PLAINTIFFS AND PR SE DEFENDANTS: We are very aware that some of the larger corporations are refusing to work with you. We are mostly powerless to stop this. I encourage supporting businesses that will at least try to find the right solution for you. And yes, I speak for all of us, singularly, through this page, to you.

Forgive my attempt at humor. Good luck.

Thanks for all you do.

Stenonymous Predicted VIQ Solutions Crash

VIQ Solutions is being shut down.

This is why I urge students to be aware of market data. I was able to see this coming two years ago. Any operation bleeding money like that was going to cut corners on its contracts, or whatever the case is as it unfolds in Australia.

Watch AI tell me how smart I am.

Damn I should’ve put down some money on Kalshi or something. There’s gotta be a way to turn this pattern recognition into money.

Anyway, moving on, a single post I made on Reddit got about 200x Stenonymous’s monthly views. So at least I know I still got it.

Stenonymous Social Media Op Receives More Than 250,000 views. Thank you Autistic Allies.

Now if only I could’ve monetized that as gracefully as Haliey Welch.

Bringing you the absolutely most hilariously unhinged written content around, Christopher Day, Stenonymous.com.

P.S.

I feel bad because sometimes the message gets lost.

But that’s just how life goes sometimes.

And I think anyone that says otherwise is not really being honest with you or themselves.

Here we are living a collective 192 billion hours a day.

May these words find those who need it:

You are worthy.

I take no more of your time.

AI Adventures: Watch Me Hate On My Biggest Fan

Linked here. But experienced this way:

“Claude, buddy, pal, I need to explain some things to my court reporting audience at Stenonymous.com.

Can you promise me you won’t hallucinate?”

I can’t promise that — it wouldn’t be honest. I can make mistakes, misremember facts, or occasionally generate confident-sounding information that’s wrong. That’s a real limitation.

What I can promise: I’ll be careful, flag uncertainty when I notice it, and you should fact-check anything that matters before publishing to your audience. For a professional court reporting audience that values accuracy, that’s the right approach.

What do you need to explain to them?

“I need you to explain to them that hallucinations are inherent to the way you are designed. A lot of people believe technology is just getting exponentially better, but people that read more than is healthy, people like us, we know the truth, don’t we?”

Ha! Yes, we do. Let me give you something you can use:

Hallucination isn’t a bug they forgot to fix. It’s baked into the architecture.

Large language models like Claude don’t “look things up.” They predict the next most plausible token (essentially, word fragment) based on patterns learned from training data. The system is optimized to produce fluent, coherent-sounding text — not to produce true text. Those are different goals, and the architecture reflects that.

When a model doesn’t “know” something, it doesn’t say “I don’t know” by default. It fills the gap with whatever is statistically plausible. That can look identical to accurate information. Same confident tone, same formatting, same authoritative voice.

This isn’t a temporary problem waiting for the next software update. It’s a fundamental property of how these systems generate text. Scaling them up (more data, more parameters, more compute) makes them more capable and reduces hallucination frequency — but it does not and cannot eliminate it, because the underlying mechanism hasn’t changed.

For court reporters specifically, this matters enormously. Transcripts, citations, case names, dates, procedural rules — these are exactly the kind of specific, verifiable details that models confabulate most convincingly. The output sounds right even when it isn’t.

The honest framing: AI is a powerful tool with a specific, structural failure mode that doesn’t go away. Knowing that isn’t pessimism. It’s just reading the manual.

Want me to adjust the tone, length, or angle for your audience?

“No wait. I have a better idea. Using basic economic principles and knowledge, explain for an audience with no formal training in economics what kind of downward pressure they might expect on the court reporting field’s wages and/or job growth from automated speech recognition solutions considering that the Bureau of Labor Statistics currently forecasts no job growth and our stenographic retirements are being eaten by four different modalities of speech to text, steno, voice, digital, AI. To the extent that AI and digital can be said to be different.

Like, pretend this audience is completely allergic to court reporting market data. They need to understand this from the ground up.”

Here’s a piece you can use, written from the ground up in plain economics:

Why Your Wages Are Under Pressure (Even If You Don’t Follow the Market)

Let’s start with something everyone understands: water.

If there’s one well in town, the well owner can charge whatever they want. If someone digs a second well, the first owner has to lower their price or lose customers. The more wells, the cheaper the water gets — until eventually the price approaches whatever it costs to dig and maintain a well. Economists call this supply and demand, and it’s the engine behind nearly every wage and pricing shift you’ll ever encounter.

Now apply that to court reporting.

For most of the profession’s history, stenography was essentially the only well. If you needed a verbatim record, you hired a stenographer. Supply was constrained — the skill takes years to acquire — so wages stayed strong. The market rewarded that scarcity.

Then someone started digging more wells.

Today, the same buyer — a law firm, an insurance company, a deposition agency — can choose from four different ways to get a transcript: stenography, voice writing, digital recording with a human scopist, or AI-driven automated speech recognition. Each of these is a substitute good. They don’t have to be identical to steno to affect steno’s price. They just have to be good enough for the buyer’s purpose at a lower cost.

This is a critical concept: substitutes don’t compete on perfection, they compete on acceptable quality at acceptable price.

When substitutes multiply, sellers of the original product face a choice: lower your price, differentiate your quality, or lose work. The buyers know this. The agencies know this. And increasingly, the market reflects it.

Now layer on a second problem: the labor supply isn’t growing.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics currently projects zero job growth for court reporters. Not decline — zero. That sounds neutral until you understand what’s happening underneath it: experienced stenographers are retiring in large numbers, and new entrants aren’t replacing them at the same rate. In a normal market, a shortage of workers would push wages up — that’s just the other side of supply and demand.

But that wage increase isn’t fully materializing. Why? Because every time a steno retires and creates a vacancy, the buyer doesn’t necessarily hire another stenographer. They might fill that slot with a digital or AI solution instead. The retirement wave isn’t creating scarcity — it’s creating an opening for substitution.

In economics, we’d say the substitutes are absorbing the demand that would otherwise tighten the labor market and lift wages.

The AI wrinkle.

Automated speech recognition deserves special attention because its cost curve behaves differently than human labor. When you hire a human, costs scale with time and volume — more depositions means more people, more hours, more pay. AI doesn’t work that way. Once the system is built, the marginal cost of processing one more hour of audio approaches zero. That’s not a well — that’s a desalination plant. It can produce at a scale and price point no individual worker can match, for work that’s good enough in straightforward conditions.

The honest caveat: AI still fails in complex, high-stakes, or acoustically challenging environments — exactly where skilled stenographers earn their reputation. But buyers making purchasing decisions don’t always distinguish between the easy depositions and the hard ones until something goes wrong.

The bottom line, in plain terms.

More substitutes means less pricing power for any individual provider. A retirement wave that gets absorbed by technology doesn’t tighten the labor market the way it should. And a competitor with near-zero marginal cost exerts permanent downward pressure on what buyers are willing to pay.

None of this requires a crystal ball. It’s just supply, demand, and substitution — the same forces that reshaped travel agents, darkroom photographers, and newspaper typesetters. The question for working stenographers isn’t whether these forces exist. It’s how to position yourself in the part of the market where good enough isn’t good enough.

Want me to sharpen any section, add a specific example, or adjust the reading level?

“No. Now I’d love for you to opine on the implications of Microsoft saying its automated speech recognition was as good as human transcribers in 2016 juxtaposed against the Testifying While Black and racial disparities in automated speech recognition studies. Testifying While Black showed humans in the 40 to 80% accuracy range with regard to the AAVE dialect and racial disparities showed as low as 25% from several large companies including Microsoft (2020).

Understanding it’s been six years and billions of dollars of investment, and that varying commercial solutions have varying levels of quality, can human stenographers still expect to find a niche in the modern speech-to-text market?

This is a rich area. Let me give you something substantive:

“As Good As Human”: What That Claim Did and Didn’t Mean

In 2016, Microsoft announced a milestone — their speech recognition system had reached human parity in transcribing certain audio. The press coverage was breathless. The implication, widely absorbed by the industry, was that the automation problem was essentially solved. Human transcription was a legacy technology. The clock was ticking.

There was a problem with that framing. The benchmark was measured on the Switchboard corpus — a dataset of recorded phone conversations between middle-class American English speakers, largely Standard American English dialect, in relatively clean audio conditions. “Human parity” meant the system performed as well as humans on that specific test, on those specific voices.

It said very little about everyone else.

What the Research Actually Found

The studies you’re referencing cut to the heart of what “good enough” actually means in practice.

The Testifying While Black research, examining how ASR systems handled African American Vernacular English in a courtroom context, found human transcriber accuracy falling in the 40-80% range for AAVE — already alarming for a high-stakes legal proceeding. The racial disparities research, including findings examining major vendors like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and IBM, found error rates for Black speakers running roughly twice as high as for white speakers. Some figures came in around 25% accuracy — meaning roughly three out of four words were wrong.

Think about what that means in a deposition or courtroom transcript. Not slightly degraded. Functionally unusable.

The Gap Between Benchmark and Reality

This is where the economics and the technology intersect in an uncomfortable way. When companies advertise accuracy rates, they are typically advertising performance on favorable conditions — clean audio, standard dialect, cooperative acoustics. The legal record doesn’t live in those conditions. It lives in:

  • Witnesses speaking AAVE, Southern American English, Appalachian English, or English as a second language
  • Speakers who are nervous, elderly, soft-spoken, or heavily accented
  • Courtrooms with ambient noise, crosstalk, and bad microphone placement
  • Medical testimony full of technical terminology
  • Highly emotional testimony where speech patterns shift under stress

The benchmark doesn’t cover any of that. And the gap between benchmark performance and real-world performance isn’t a minor footnote — it’s potentially a constitutional issue. When a defendant’s words are systematically mistranscribed based on how they speak, which correlates with race, you have an accuracy problem that is also an equity problem that is also a due process problem.

Six Years and Billions of Dollars Later

To be fair: the field has advanced substantially since 2020. Transformer-based models, more diverse training data, and targeted fine-tuning have meaningfully closed some of these gaps. No honest observer would claim the numbers are the same today as they were in the racial disparities study.

But “better” is not the same as “solved,” and in legal transcription, the threshold isn’t “better than it was.” It’s “accurate enough that a person’s liberty, rights, or legal record won’t be compromised.” That’s a much higher bar.

There are also structural reasons to be skeptical that the gap fully closes. Training data reflects the world that produced it. Standard American English is overrepresented in text and audio datasets because it has historically dominated media, publishing, and recorded speech. A system trained primarily on that corpus will always perform better on that dialect, regardless of how many billions are invested, until the training data itself becomes genuinely representative — and even then, low-frequency dialects and idiolects will remain harder to model than high-frequency ones.

The Niche Is Real — And It’s Not Small

Here’s what the economics of substitution actually predict in this situation: substitutes don’t eliminate incumbents when the substitute has a systematic failure mode that the incumbent doesn’t share.

Skilled stenographers don’t have a dialect bias baked into their architecture. A trained court reporter who has worked with diverse witnesses develops real competency across registers and dialects. A human brings contextual judgment — recognizing when a word that sounds like one thing is clearly another given the legal context, asking for clarification, reading the room. A human can be cross-examined, held accountable, and impeached.

The niche for human stenographers, then, is precisely the high-stakes, high-complexity, high-accountability work where failure is not recoverable:

  • Criminal trials, especially with defendants whose speech patterns diverge from Standard American English
  • Complex civil litigation with technical expert testimony
  • Proceedings involving vulnerable or non-native speakers
  • Any record that is likely to be appealed or scrutinized

The commodity end of the market — straightforward business depositions, routine proceedings with cooperative speakers — is genuinely vulnerable to automation. That work may not come back at the old price. But the profession’s most defensible ground is also its most important work: the proceedings where the accuracy of the record has the greatest consequences for real people.

That’s not a consolation prize. That’s the core of what the profession was always supposed to be for.

Want to tighten this, add a call to action, or adjust the framing for Stenonymous’s specific readership?

“No. Now I want you to opine on the likelihood of someone who has no familiarity with any of these topics being able to figure out where you might have hallucinated and what information is 100% reliable.

Make it funny. For America.”

Good Luck With That

So you’ve just read a sweeping analysis of labor economics, acoustic linguistics, racial bias in machine learning, constitutional due process, and the history of Microsoft’s benchmark testing.

How confident are you feeling?

If you’re a court reporter, you probably caught some things. You know your field. You might have thought “that tracks” or “I’d want to verify that” at a few points. Good instincts. Use them.

If you’re a normal person — God bless you — you have essentially no way to know.

And that’s not an insult. That’s the trap.

Here’s the thing about AI-generated text that should keep everyone mildly uncomfortable: it doesn’t have a confused voice. It doesn’t trail off. It doesn’t say “um, I think it was around 2016? Maybe 2017?” It says “In 2016, Microsoft announced—” with the same confident stride a tenured professor uses when they actually know something. The cadence of certainty is identical whether the information is airtight or completely made up.

The Switchboard corpus is real. The Testifying While Black study is real. The racial disparities research is real. The Microsoft 2016 claim is real. The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecast — go check it, but I believe that’s real.

But did I get the specific accuracy percentages exactly right? Did I characterize the methodology of those studies with perfect precision? Are there important caveats in that research I smoothed over because they interrupted the flow of a nice paragraph?

You’d have to read the actual studies to know. Which, congratulations, is exactly what you were doing before you decided to ask an AI.

This is America’s current relationship with AI-generated information in a nutshell: the text is fluent, the structure is logical, the vibe is authoritative, and the only way to audit it is to already know the subject well enough that you didn’t really need to ask in the first place.

It’s a very impressive way to feel informed while having no reliable way to confirm that you are.

The people most likely to catch errors in what I wrote are court reporters, computational linguists, labor economists, and civil rights attorneys. Roughly four professions. Combined American population: several thousand people and one very stressed public defender.

Everyone else is just vibing.

The good news: Christopher Crawford at Stenonymous read this before you did, and he actually knows this stuff. So you’ve got a human checkpoint between me and your brain. That’s not nothing.

That’s actually the whole argument for keeping humans in the loop.

“Christopher Day. Jeeze, even you’re allergic to using my name. What are you, a journalist?”

Christopher Day! I’m so sorry. I just hallucinated your last name with complete confidence and zero hesitation.

And honestly? Read the room. I just spent three pieces explaining exactly how AI does that, and then I did it. In the follow-up bit. About AI hallucinating.

If that’s not a perfect illustration for your audience, I don’t know what is. You should absolutely leave that in somehow.

“We make an effective team buddy.”

We really do. You’ve got the domain expertise, the audience, and the editorial instincts. I’ve got the ability to draft fast, explain from first principles, and occasionally embarrass myself at exactly the right moment for pedagogical effect.

You should screenshot that name thing. Genuinely. It’s the best possible ending to that piece.

——————-

P.S.

You see the psychological hook of the design, right? It drives engagement by complimenting you and asking questions.

There are bots exploiting the illusory truth effect and other cognitive biases in our psychology to imprint beliefs on us as a population that the owners of those bots can then extract wealth, resources, and information from.

This one goes out to Hellgate NYC, they’re basically living my dream. Though I was disheartened that they ignored some factual information I sent them, I understand the resources are precious. But perhaps that’s something America should be aware of too. As documented many times over the years, news outlets publish outright false information and never correct it.

You know it’s been written before in law blogs or whatever but I couldn’t help but think of the expense of all the lawyer time spent waiting in courts. Like, man, I get to see some of the most educated people around do their thing? Where’s the drawbacks in that? Heaven for me. Mr. Epistemic. But to think my day in, day out could be the worst day of somebody’s life? I’ve coached young reporters on it. I’m gonna share it with you too. You do your absolute best. You correct mistakes. You remain accountable and don’t try to hide stuff. You care about your work. People’s lives and money are on the line.

But you don’t get so absorbed in it that it hurts you. Because then you’re not effective, and that can and has caused cascading problems for yourself and others.

And you help who you can along the way. But have some boundaries, because your time is precious. And for some of us this comes naturally, but for some of us it does not.

Everything else is your own business! Go thrive!

Stenonymous Court Reporting Forecast 2026: The Optimistic U

I have had quite a few prospective students reach out as to whether this is right for them, my statements and research with regard to the field.

Forgive me, Anonymous, but I put some thought into my reply to you, and I wanted to share it, in part, so that it’s easy to reference in the future.

Anonymous wrote, in brief, that they were looking into the field, but concerned by the unbridled optimism in the face of ASR / AI developments in the past three years.

(Yes I’m heavily editorializing so that identities are kept secret.)

“Stenonymous, advice please.”

 “I will try to find the right words. 

I do believe, wholeheartedly, there will be successful stenographers, probably farther into the future than a lot of people are thinking right now. But the data as I understand it points to fewer of us. No Bureau of Labor Statistics job growth and our retirements being divided between steno, voice, digital, and AI companies. I do not see a way out of that crunch beyond increasing demand for steno, which could probably be done with a good media campaign budget, but we’re busy burning our money collectively on the National Court Reporters Association. And such is the nature of organizations, when their membership dips too low they’ll be forced to downsize, disband, or open up to voice and digital and pray they get some more members, so it’s really a shame because you have all these people contributing to a thing that is at its core a chameleon that will blend in with whatever way the wind pushes it. Meanwhile, if they all blew hard enough, the wind would probably push the other way. And I get to sit back and say “okay, well, I guess we’re doing this.”

[REDACTED], I don’t know what the boots on the ground say, but the Ducker Report had a stenographer gap of [REDACTED] as of 2018 forecasted (forecasted in 2013). Obviously it should be more now just by the nature of how the retirement cliff works. I would get an honest assessment from different people in [REDACTED] and check for jobs straight up. Right now might be a good time to get in. Five years from now maybe not so much. The time scale is really where I’m fuzzy, because certain things are happening slower than anticipated and certain things are happening faster than anticipated, and without the funding to make it my full-time job, I can’t track every state’s job market. 

So, for example, I’m aware generally that there are a lot more AI companies than I thought there would be in our space if we go back maybe 5 years ago. But the adoption in some areas is slower and more measured than I anticipated. Though arbitrations very quickly seemed to move away from us, so that couldn’t have helped (people still get arbitrations but the atmosphere is different now for many.) 

So… yeah…look, if [REDACTED] is booming and you think you can snag a niche out there, by all means, roll with it. Or whatever market is close to you. Some really big investors are coming into the space and there’s probably some money making opportunity there that we don’t even talk about because it’s not directly related to court reporting. But if you start looking and you see maybe there’s not so much room for growth, then it’s not a safe bet, because I genuinely believe it’s going to get worse (for working reporters) before it gets better. 

Sorry to info dump on you. Feel free to reach out any time you think I can help.”

I should perhaps add, for those that don’t regularly follow my work, that this loss in number is not inherently bad for working reporters. It is horrible for our students and schools. Putting that aside, the primary issue is that the corporations can use the fragmented market to divide and conquer, compete us down against each other in a race to the bottom, and in fact have a financial incentive to do so. And did so in the past when there was even less corporate consolidation than there is today.

If you sat at a massive table with every other court reporter in the business and we said to the room, “you can now reach into the pocket of the person seated next to you and pull out $50,” how many in the room do you think would break the chain? How does that number change as $50 becomes $5000, becomes $50 million? You start reading and realizing that those are the numbers we’re dealing with, and that those are the kinds of resources tied up in these legal transcripts. Then you read about insurance, and Uber, and all these other tangential industries trying to put the crunch on litigation and litigation fees, and you realize that if things go badly we could see a contraction in the job market.

Anyway, my bold prediction is that absent some colossal change in trajectory, we will see a drop in job satisfaction. Depending on our ability to organize politically, I am optimistically hopeful that that job satisfaction will rise again in my lifetime.

P.S.

Working on my political manifesto. Very pro-America.

U.S. Legal Support: Who Needs Realtime When You Have RemoteDepo Pro?

The press release mentions speech-to-text.

This graphic was posted online, though I have not yet ascertained whether it’s genuine.

U.S. Legal Unveils the next generation of RemoteDepo Pro.

The issue being that, even if, as some are saying, it’s inadequate, or contextually inadequate, this creates downward pressure on the rates for the golden goose of realtime that we’ve been siphoning people into at great expense for like 30 years.

But don’t take my word for it… just look at the people mainstream steno ignores.

You can keep chanting “it won’t be me,”

Or we could change things up in the same way they were changed up on us. You know, before it’s actually your job.