Veritext: Our Digital Reporters Provide Realtime…

The statement source link is found here.

We were all told realtime is the future, realtime is valuable, realtime is job security. Manufacturers, agencies, associations — everybody knew realtime was king. There were only fringe idiots like that Christopher Day guy who pointed out that if you trade away all the non-realtime work to the digital folks then the realtime reporters become more easily replaceable by virtue of having no political or pushback power. Everyone pointed and laughed at his stupid ideas and that was the end of that.

Well now I’m showing you in print that they intend to equalize you with digital court reporting. Stenograph had also made public statements that indicated as much.

I read up on enough law, science, and business to put these allegations in print and make it easy to Google the court reporter shortage fraud / Veritext fraud. The corporate fraudsters didn’t really have an answer for it. They got caught with their pants down, gave up on Speech-to-Text Institute, and ran over to STAR.

My position is growing stronger with time. My current understanding of defamation law is that pretty much anything in my state published over a year ago can never be challenged. That significantly diminishes my formerly overblown fear of a BS lawsuit. These companies have allowed publication of things that describe their fraud and lies to the public for over two years.

Which also means we’ve entered a period in court reporting history where the largest court reporting firm in the country was accused of fraud and didn’t care enough about its reputation among stenographers enough to do or say anything about it in the middle of what it outwardly professed as a massive shortage. Doesn’t seem to make much sense, does it? I wonder who could have seen this coming…

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you.

Addendum:

A Stenonymous reader gave me permission to repost their social media post.

– – –

After this post was launched, a person claiming to work in Veritext sales wrote to me, in pertinent part,

“Hi Christopher. I work for Veritext in sales. Good morning. In re your most recent post about DRs providing real-time, I can assure you of the following:

Veritext’s technology, since our DR software/hardware implementation is proprietary, as of today is not capable of providing real-time.
As someone who works in sales, I can assure that I nor any of my colleagues are telling attorneys that DRs can provide real-time. First, it’s not true and second the attorneys who want real-time also tend to want stenographers.

I cannot speak to why the website says that, but I’d imagine it was either put together by someone high up on totem pole who knows very little about the industry, or a third-party who knows even less.

Overall, your concerns about real-time being possible via DRs are real—it’s just the nature of technology. However, as of today, it’s not possible nor are we actively selling a service that can’t be provided.”

Stenographer Movie: Walden’s Emile Hirsch Assaulted A Woman at Sundance in 2015

This is all referring to the Walden movie, if that’s not clear. The main character is a stenographer. Before I embark on what I’m about to write, keep in mind I haven’t seen the movie. I’m probably not going to see the movie until December. And what I’m about to write has no bearing on whether the movie is good, and I’m going to come from a place of just assuming the movie will be good and that its star, Emile Hirsch, is also good at acting.

That said, I did find one site that gave pretty graphic detail, citing back to TMZ. It states that Hirsch grabbed Daniele Bernfeld, a producer, and put her in a chokehold after “consuming an enormous amount of alcohol.” Further states that Hirsch “pulled her across the table and onto the floor,” landing on top of her. While on top, he allegedly began choking her before being pulled off of her by bystanders. He later pled guilty to aggravated assault, receiving 15 days in jail, and admitting there was no excuse for what he did, and that it was reckless, wrong, and irresponsible. He also noted he had no memory of what had occurred. Dani Bernfeld reportedly wrote “quite simply, this punishment does not fit the crime.”

One member of the public reached out to me about it. In that person’s view, after the conviction he’s kind of minimized the incident, and that hurts his image. I can actually get where they’re coming from. Looking at some of the coverage afterwards, it was “the worst day of [his] life.” I dare say it was probably a pretty bad day for the woman he was choking too. Then again, we can look at this another way by saying “how many times does someone need to apologize for a terrible thing they did before they’re allowed to move on with their life?” Needless to say, there are going to be people with all manner of opinions, and depending on how things shake out, Hirsch’s past may impact the popularity of the movie with certain demographics.

It’s interesting for me, because I know that many people, including myself, have things in their past they’d rather not have dragged up after every achievement they make. But I also end up reflecting on my past. Had a pretty serious dispute with a woman in 2014 – 2015. Did I hurt her? Nope, I sued. Maybe about half a decade ago, a woman attacked me in my home while I was sleeping. In the dispute after waking, didn’t hurt her either. Then when I had my medical incident in 2021, I erroneously and wrongly believed a woman was trying to kill me. Did I hurt her? No. More than anyone, I know that alcohol can morph people into monsters. I’ve watched it happen to people I’ve loved. But when I used to drink heavily, I still managed not to hurt anyone. Is it just luck of the draw or is there an underlying mindset that helps to prevent violence? I don’t know.

And I think that’s where the anti-Hirsch crowd is coming from. Plenty of people drink or have other things happen to them, and they do not assault people. That’s why I’m writing today. We have to be cognizant of the fact that dependent upon the size of that crowd, the movie might flop. If it does, movie makers are bound to blame the stenography instead of the actor’s past, potentially limiting our representation in movies, music, and TV.

I’m able to separate the art from the artist in very much the same way you are all able to separate the writing I do from the professional work I perform. I look forward to seeing how things shake out and how the past might impact the future of this movie and steno itself in film/media. And overall, I’m excited to see Walden.

P.S.

Thank you, Anonymous, for raising this issue with me. Anonymous taught me a lot with relatively few messages, including just how privileged I really am. Unemployment for autistics is rumored to be somewhere between 50% and 90%, so the fact that I hold a full-time job is really a blessing, more so than I understood before today. Whether it’s luck or divine intervention, I intend to use that power for good.

Trey Perez Lawsuit Dismissed Against TCRA, et al. November 2023

53 – Order granting in part and denying in part Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss.pdf Download

Trey Perez’s lawsuit against many defendants has been partially dismissed. Notably, it seems that plaintiff Depo Notes lacked standing because it was not complying with the law. For many of the defendants, insufficient facts were pled to allege group boycott or illegal anticompetitive behavior.

The case against the Texas Court Reporters Association is done.

The case was also ended against Kennedy Reporting Service and Lorrie Schnoor; Sonia Trevino and Sherri Fisher; Shelly Tucker; Court Reporters Clearinghouse.

Lexitas and Southwest are still stuck defending against claims.

I want to note that the study I always mention, Racial Disparities in Automatic Speech Recognition, was also mentioned in the order.

Texas Federal Court acknowledges the Racial Disparities in Automatic Speech Recognition (Western District)

I see no mention of the Speech-to-Text Institute, so I’ll have to check PACER, but as of my last update, they were still in the case and hadn’t made a proper motion to dismiss, instead opting to send a “response to civil action.” I may not be a lawyer, but I previously believed that a response to civil action was an “answer” or a “motion to dismiss.”

I can’t help but continue to strongly believe that non-digital providers might be able to make a claim stick against Speech-to-Text Institute and many of the corporations that were represented on it, including Veritext and US Legal Support. Think about it.

STTI Bloc 1) Engaged in a conspiracy to manipulate the market toward digital reporting. This is all but assured considering they’ve been unable to write an effective cease-and-desist letter, or any letter, or even make a comment stating these allegations are untrue, for over two years of me publishing about it. 2) This inherently restrains trade. If you’re collectively using your considerable market power (Veritext alone may be more than 16% of the market’s revenue) to push out non-digital providers and then using your considerable market influence (there are only like five “nationals”) to convince consumers those non-digital providers don’t exist, what can it be called but a restraint of trade? You’re trying to destroy those non-digital businesses or force them to buy digital tech from your buddy, fellow STTI conspirator, Stenograph. 3) in a particular market. Well, court reporting.

And that’s just looking at those elements for group boycott. I’m quite sure if I went through all the law in the United States, I’d find other things that make it illegal to get together, publish substantial lies about a market, and mislead consumers, jobseekers, and other small businesses. Maybe there are laws against deceptive business practices and false advertising. Maybe. Who knows?

(NOTE: Facetious. Those laws exist.)

And the best part is that to claim they didn’t know the information they were publishing was wrong, the multimillion dollar corporations have to go under oath and say they never did the math on the statistics they published and it didn’t seem odd that they were projecting a shortage constituting a third of the field by 2023 with likely less than five percent of their business going uncovered, a number that existed before the 2018 “tipping point.”

Maybe this is a runaway train at this point. Maybe some stenographic and other non-digital providers are going to realize they have standing and take a crack at STTI and the corporations that were represented on its board. I reached out to Lex Ferenda a long time ago and they basically said that if we could find an appropriate claimant and lawyer, they’d consider funding the litigation. At the very least, perhaps people that have suffered damage will reach out to the FTC and their state attorney general and let them know to Google the court reporter shortage fraud and that this fraud has hurt their business, or how it has hurt their business.

If you’re reading, Trey, good luck against Lexitas and STTI. If you’re able to get to discovery, you may very well uncover the things that I was hoping to uncover through my media publishing strategy and get a nice fat settlement when their lawyers realize they don’t want that stuff to be public. And if they broke the law… why not?

NOTE: Some dismissals are without prejudice, so the complaint could conceivably be amended to allege facts satisfactory to sustain a claim against some of these defendants. I’ll continue to check the case on PACER periodically for documents.

NCRA Releases STRONG White Paper November 2023

The National Court Reporters Association released a white paper, Emerging Ethical and Legal Issues Related to the Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Voice Cloning, and Digital Audio Recording of Legal Proceedings.

There was a past blog post complaining about how I felt my work on this white paper was mothballed. I suppose I have to retract that now that it’s been released.

Thank you to everyone that took part in drafting the white paper. It’s something I submitted quite a lot to during my time in STRONG and was very important to me.

Contributors to the NCRA November 2023 White Paper

P.S. for anyone that follows the social media antics, I lost way worse than I thought I was going to, so I’m going to keep this one brief 😂.

Veritext Holding Company Leonard Green & Partners Is Reportedly Good With Looting Communities for the Bottom Line

I’ve written a bit about the private equity model and its impact on medicine before. Basically these larger parent companies can load up their held companies with debt, sell them off for profit, and the result is that the rich get richer, the companies get weaker, and the stakeholders — consumers, workers, and communities, suffer. There’s also that whole Take Med Back Movement with Dr. Mitch Li where they’re saying there’s a doctor shortage as an excuse not to staff doctors in emergency rooms because “expensive.”

Eileen O’Grady, then with the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, and who I’d really love to talk to someday, put it out in the open that Prospect Medical Holdings’ parent company, Leonard Green & Partners, basically loaded the company up with debt, sold it off, and left it in a position of needing to cut corners to survive. It was called “raiding the safety net.” Looting the hospitals meant to help the poor.

This is a legitimate way of making money. Where many court reporters lead lives of professional excellence and high standards, there are forces looking to make money off of effectively crippling companies with debt. Your lifelong career is a number on a sheet to some people. That’s a reality I don’t run away from. We need to own it if we are to control our own destinies and destinations.

Healthcare, court transcripts, doesn’t matter. The end is the same: Using a held company to make money, no matter the cost. No matter who it hurts. No matter whose job is on the line. No matter that the science and public opinion says and implies that impacts would be worse for minorities and the poor.

This is, in part, why I publish. If we can get to a point where legislators are able to openly acknowledge that certain things businesses are doing is harmful to the long-term health and stability of society — for example, weakening the financial condition of hospitals for profit — we might be able to get legislatures to act and put guardrails on this business activity, or fund executive agencies that investigate rampant fraud and misinformation more aggressively. We might be able to go from lawsuits after the fact to preventative measures.

At the end of the day corporations are wealth extraction machines. They have a legal duty to make money for their shareholders. Sometimes violating the law is the cost of doing business. Has Leonard Green & Partners itself or its subsidiaries violated the law? Seems likely.

This behavior is profitable and will continue for as long as society allows.

Addendum:

I was later told that CVC acquired Veritext sometime in 2010. This seems plausible because Leonard and CVC seem familiar with each other. It’s also possible they did what they’ve done in the past and maintained some stake while selling the majority.

To Slay The Beast: Veritext Assigned B Rating By Fitch Ratings in August 2023

A Stenonymous reader came through for me and shared that Fitch Ratings assigned Veritext a B rating with eyes on about a billion dollars in debt / credit.

First thing, what is a B?

Veritext Assigned a B rating by Fitch Ratings, Highly Speculative.

This B IDR (issuer default rating) means the company’s meeting its financial obligations, but if bad things happen, like attorney customers leaving the business because it’s been accused of fraud and has nothing to say about that, it might not be able to repay its debts.

Luckily for us, the news talks a bit more about why that IDR was assigned and what the big money types think about the company.

Comments about Veritext’s Issuer Default Rating.

First, hold that comment about growing its revenue organically as opposed to “through acquisitions.” Organic would be running a marketing or sales campaign that brings in customers. Acquisitions is buying companies, which we can expect Veritext to continue to do with its “leading position.” We’re also told that they’re probably going to focus on return on equity rather than paying down the company’s debts. They anticipate leverage (debt) to be maintained close to current levels. In other words, Veritext will be in comparatively large amounts of debt, and paying that interest, for the foreseeable future.

The next paragraph abandons talking about Veritext’s organic growth and admits the company’s plan is to grow through acquisitions.

So in March 2023, shareholders, presumably the holding company, threw in $132 million to fund acquisitions. The rest was funded through debt and cash.

Now, I take this with a bit of a grain of salt because nobody has great data on our industry. But the claim here is that Veritext controls about 16% of revenue in the field — a field which is in the wide ballpark of $3 billion. That’d place Veritext at a wide ballpark of $480 million per year in revenue.

This part tells me why they’re pretty confident in Veritext being able to repay its debts. It would require a bunch of customers walking out at once to damage its revenue because it’s not heavily reliant on any one customer.

I question the accuracy of the statement that digital is more profitable. Digitals are rapidly sharing my work and beginning to ask for more money. The long con is losing ground by the day. But this gives us an important look into the minds of the people holding the money. They think it’s more profitable, so Veritext has gotta keep pushing that to keep that sweet, sweet financing.

Don’t really understand the part about capex intensity enough to comment or share a belief. But then we get to the assumptions made.

To me, this all boils down to “yeah, this looks like it’ll work out, but they could go bankrupt and we could be left with only 51% recovery of the debt.” Not to be too forward, but if you let me take out hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, you could say the same about me. “Yeah, this might go well, if he doesn’t die holding the bag.”

So we know that Veritext is loaded up with debt and there’s no plan for that debt to be taken care of any time soon. We know that the creditors aren’t brimming with confidence. We know that a significant exodus of customers could cause a drop in revenue that further tanks the IDR, making it more expensive to refinance or take on new debt. We also know that same exodus could fling the thing into bankruptcy, where only about two thirds of the debt will be recovered.

As I see it, we press the advantage through PYRP-style discussions that make the Veritext fraud more widely known or we press the advantage through Stenonymous fundraising and advertising that makes us unignorable. When these folks were in a position of power, they used that power to illegally mislead students, consumers, and small businesses. They used it to lie to you. Now it’s quite public that that power is, in part, an illusion fed by debt and circumstance. And the people that have spent their lives serving those students, consumers, and small businesses are in a position to be advocates for truth.

What happens next?

NVRA Board Members Resign: “This President Seems to Prefer to Work in the Shadows…”

MEETING BEING HELD TONIGHT. SEE LINK BELOW.

National Verbatim Reporters Association members were recently alerted to three board resignations.

Notice to NVRA members about resignation

Members from the voice writing community came onto social media to discuss the occurrence.

Message posted on Facebook regarding recent resignations

A letter from Amy Armstrong was made public.

Letter related to National Verbatim Reporters Association board resignation by Amy Armstrong CVR-RVR

Donald Scott, formerly a board member and president of NCRA, offered his perspective on the event.

Donald Scott’s reply to the post made about NVRA board resignations and Amy Armstrong’s letter. NOTE: These are Mr. Scott’s personal thoughts and not a statement by NVRA.

This culminated in a meeting being called by members of the community.

Meeting called by members of the voice writing community after resignations from the board of NVRA occurred.

The link to the meeting is here.

I don’t know that I can say much. I’m a relatively new member of the National Verbatim Reporters Association and am fairly distant from its politics and leadership. But I can honestly say that as a blogger I’ve now had quite a few people come to me about obfuscatory or suspicious things in various court reporting associations, so it doesn’t surprise me too much that NVRA is also having issues. On the best of days, leadership is tough. Being a leader at a time when some of the biggest names in the business can get together under a shell nonprofit and pump the market with lies, and with impunity, is probably worlds tougher.

For what it’s worth, when I read the bit about digital entry, my mind wandered to that piece I did about the cost of corruption. Again, no direct evidence that NVRA or any association is “corrupted,” but they wouldn’t be particularly hard to corrupt.

Maybe associations need these squabbles to stay competitive. If you don’t run the risk of some of your members breaking off and starting a competing association, what motivation do you have to improve?

Addendum:

11/9/23:

Bulletin: NCRA Ends Live Proctors for Online Testing

The National Court Reporters Association announced that testing procedures will now be a self-launched/self-authenticated process. I suspect this is a good thing. From my talks with people over the years and even slightly from my own experience I could see the pitfalls of the old way. Proctors were people given general training to administer general tests, and our testing process was reportedly facing problems because proctors were disconnecting or making unreasonable demands.

This doesn’t give you license to cheat though. Security issues are still going to be flagged and sent to NCRA for review.

I’m happy the NCRA’s responsiveness to members is going up. I wonder what “precipitated” that…

California Court Reporters Board: U.S. Legal Violated the Board’s Practice Act…

A Stenonymous source has given me access to a letter from the California Court Reporters Board.

A letter from the California Court Reporters Board stating that the CCRB determined a violation of the board’s practice act by U.S. Legal Support

Quite frankly, I think this is great. We’ve had a real problem with licensing authorities shirking their responsibilities generally in the field of court reporting. And in fact, when I wrote to the Attorney General of California about some suspicious activity, they replied more or less that they wouldn’t be investigating because they’re tasked with defending the board. So it was kind of this bizarre world where, theoretically, if the people on the board were directly taking money from a big box, nobody would investigate anyway. LOL.

That was pretty distressing to me that something could be set up that stupidly and that none of the players in the game have the self-awareness to look at it and say “gee, that’s a stupid design. It makes corruption unassailable if the thing meant to investigate crimes won’t investigate crimes because it defends the thing handing out the licenses. Just bribe the thing handing out the licenses and it’ll never be found out by operation of the way this is designed.” Better yet, the players in the game would probably defend the stupidity of the design by insisting there haven’t been problems so far. But the bright side is that if the licensing board is doing its job now, my talking points from other blog posts about possible corruption in our field generally are moot. Sort of? I guess?

Special thanks to the CCRB for realizing that we’re not laying down on these important issues until we’re all retired, which was 2033 by Ducker’s best (outdated) estimate. Odd that the companies started the celebration a decade and a half earlier, all unanimously agreeing that digital was the only way forward. If only we paid dues to a large national organization that had the ability to read the report that that national organization itself commissioned and let everyone know that what some companies were saying about the shortage was untrue based on that organization’s own recruitment efforts. It would be a shame if a hobbyist blogger got around to doing all that before the multiple multimillion-dollar entities and net worths in the field of court reporting.

Anyone from Protect Your Record Project or California in the audience? What are your thoughts?

P.S.

For non-court reporter readers and my extremely slow-growing revolution of anti-corporate activists bewildered by my capitalist leanings, we do have a national organization. My jokes don’t always land, especially via text, but I try. Oh, my God, do I try.

Deep thanks to my Stenonymous source. I don’t say it enough, but without you and people like you, I’d have nothing. No information. No artistic/autistic vision of how to get from point A to point B. No brand. This is my bond with everybody, the more support I get, the more I’ll use it to do the right thing. The more we can speak out against and call for the redesign of stupid systems.

Happy Halloween!

Page Padding (phonetic)

Stenonymous source Jackie Mentecky comes through with a digital example. It speaks for itself.

Digital court reporting transcript apparently page padding.

For most of my career it’s been a bit of a witch hunt against page padding, that is, doing unnecessary things with formatting and transcription that result in more pages. So when I see things like this, where nearly every name is followed by phonetic, it pains me. Some of us have allowed ourselves to feel guilty over using parentheticals like “whereupon.”

Look, who hasn’t shifted a line down in the name of readability, right?

But writing phonetic after every single thing is inane. To any of you digital executives reading my work, you can wrap this up by using (names phonetic) on the first phonetic name you do. I like to think I made that up. But let’s face it, parentheticals have always been a matter of trying to say a lot with as little as possible. I can’t be the first one. My whole audience is going to hate me for helping you, but this is just too painful to watch.

P.S.

My criticism no longer applies should it come to light this is something that varies jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Seriously, do it my way.