Hellgate’s Courts of Contempt Project

Hellgate is a worker-owned, local New York City news outlet. They recently released a project called Courts of Contempt focused primarily on New York City courts and how judges are chosen and moved around the New York State Unified Court System by the Office of Court Administration. I’m still exploring some of the material they released. It’s fairly expansive. I reserve my public comments on the meat of the piece for many, many reasons.

But there is a segment that deals specifically with court reporters. It’s obvious to me, given what I’ve reviewed so far, that we are not the focus of this piece, which led to a couple of inaccuracies, a lot of opinion, but perhaps also a window into how people really view us. And that window has such value, because it offers us a path to understanding and improving public opinion. We each choose, individually, whether to walk the path, and how we walk it, and whatever happens next in history is the culmination of our collective actions and inaction. Guess that’s how society works!

Anyway, I just wanted a place to print my thoughts on the very specific piece relevant to this blog.

As of writing, the piece starts off, “you could do worse than becoming a court reporter in New York State.” Affirmatively true. This is why I’ve written many times that I want everybody to have what I have or better. Same reason I’ve been trying most of my adult life to get a union going for the private sector, where they would have even more leverage and bargaining power due to the inherent differences for public sector and private sector unions under New York law. The so-far-unsolved problem is gaining enough traction within a company office to unionize it. And if we were really smart and combined unions, we would have more centralized power, and more ability to impact our future. And if you’ve read through this whole blog and don’t believe that by now, don’t know what to tell you. Would love to discuss where we diverge.

Then they take a jab at our vacation days. It’s cool. I get it. It’s fun to dunk on public employees. I see this online a lot and it’s the same kind of psychological in-and-out groups dynamic that gets touched on in New York’s implicit bias charge, but instead of forming a bias with regard to race, color, creed, et cetera, the bias is formed against public employees, and likely reinforced every time one is reported to have broken the public trust. The greatest tragedy of this dynamic is that we have, as people, a profound ability to help each other. Public sector employees enjoy free speech protections that private sector employees don’t in the sense that since our employer is the government, the government can’t generally censor our speech, with exceptions. So you could, in theory, create a feedback loop where public sector employees amplify private sector workers’ speech as it relates to improving pay and working conditions, or speaking out against the corporate propaganda state. In return, as private sector conditions improve, so too will public sector conditions, as more money in more hands means more transactions taxable by government, more in payroll taxes, and ultimately more revenue for the services we know residents need and the people that provide those myriad services where applicable or appropriate. Hey America, you want paid vacation time? Exercise your American right to unionize today!

As for why the system is the way it is, I leave that to people far brighter than I will ever be to consider. But I suspect it has something to do with the intersection of history, law, justice, and resolution that courts represent in America.

As to the observations or allegations made about not responding or charging arbitrary fees, I can only say such things would mirror conduct I’ve written about, observed, and sometimes denounced in the private sector, and that greed is a very human trait that, left unchecked, is factually rotting our country this very moment.

With regard to the appeal issue and bench conferences off the record, I withhold public comment.

With regard to transcripts not capturing tone, this is a valid criticism of paper or PDF transcripts, but it is much faster to read transcripts than to listen to hours of audio, so transcripts are always going to be the preferred way of doing business. You’re always going to end up with someone typing the testimony live, transcribing the audio, or babysitting the automatic speech recognition. The problems come in when you take the continuing education culture of stenographers largely facilitated by court reporting associations and trusted vendors and try to replace that with people who will be largely underpaid and unaware of the standards we tried to uphold once upon a time, and that many of us are trying to uphold to this day.

There are also inherent problems with entrusting the record entirely to corporate services. As we saw in Australia, the grass is not always greener with privatization. I am also watching the online discussion as it pertains to AI services like Claude. Succinctly, some users believe based on their own experiences that Anthropic is intentionally weakening token strength. Effectively, they are claiming that they are paying more money to do the same work. Even if such a thing is found to be false, it points to the very real possibility of a corporate technology vendor scoring a contract with the state and then manipulating the quality of the service provided downward in order to extract the most money from the state as is possible.

Generally speaking, from a management perspective, you only want to make that kind of leap if you’re really certain it’s going to work out in the long term. Because once you make the jump, you could be dealing with a much larger corporate entity, centralized power that has lawyers, and contracts, and can pressure you in ways you may not anticipate upon the signing of a contract. If you let go of your workforce and things don’t work out, you might not be able to go back, and now you’re locked in with businesspeople that, quite frankly, unlike many thousands of court reporters across the United States of America, understand leverage and public relations. Corporations that are not bound by the Taylor Law of New York or similar laws in other states. Corporations that can publicly commit fraud without any consequence. This is, again, as evidenced through the many years I have written personal and public accounts of my research and opinion regarding the court reporting market.

Just to rewind for a power comparison, Tyler Technologies bought For The Record for about $212 million. Tyler Technologies has posted revenues of around $2 billion a year. For contrast, the NYSUCS Budget released at around $3.2 billion. It is well documented that employer-employee power dynamics directly impact pay. What kind of power dynamic can the public and any administration expect to have with a private corporation owned by another private corporation likely able to outspend it in court should any contract disputes arise? Let’s just leave it here: They don’t have to deal with this dystopian power dynamic today because there are so many options. Whatever way you slice it, the public sector employees are financially weaker and will be, in all likelihood, easier to deal with, and more ready to negotiate. If you want some real-world examples, look at stenography software itself. The vendor pool is pretty small, all things considered, and that’s part of the reason why the big boys get to charge us the money that they do for a new machine and software. Corporations, in their modern form, are legal creations that act as wealth extraction machines. We saw what Veritext’s owner, Leonard Green, did to hospitals for poor people. A cautionary tale.

With regard to the inaccessibility of otherwise public records, it is something I have thought about from a systemic standpoint. It is not at all uncommon or unique to court reporters, and I have not come up with a great solution for us. A court system can eat the cost, people can pay privately, you can have the hybrid system you have today — all of these are choices that have pros and cons for all involved, same as any choice we could make.

I accept that it is not my position, currently, to choose the direction society decides to go. But take it from an autist that has spent a great deal of his life engaging with and later trying to detach from the group think and the illusory truth effect that all of us are inherently susceptible to, individual choices over time have far-reaching, long-lasting consequences. Even the magic word prediction machine agrees. I will close out on this issue with one of the pros of our technology. It is incredibly difficult to fabricate, alter, or generate our electronic notes, particularly without our express help and permission, as, if it were ever necessary, an attorney could call a court reporter to the stand and make them, painstakingly, line by line, read every single stroke recorded into the record and explain why they transcribed it the way that they did. In many other scenarios you are relying on audio that is, for all intents and purposes, easier to edit, and such audio can lead to inaudible portions of testimony being lost to time. There are likely ways to compensate for or correct this, but it is a serious concern, and doing it wrong can lead to more opaqueness, inaccessibility, and expense than we have today.

I suppose I’ll end with what was, to me, a most surprising error in the segment. The New York State Court Reporters Association was named as a union for court reporters. It is not. In truth, most New York City senior court reporters and court reporters are represented by ASSCR or Local 1070, respectively. Outside of the city, CSEA and its locals do most of the heavy lifting. But I respect that, not being the centerpiece of the project, the inner workings of our politics and representation were probably not their concern.

It’s noted that the New York State Court Reporters Association has a flair for self-mythologizing. And I can only say that that is likely to some extent a remnant of the Old Guard and Dom Tursi’s influence. He loved this profession and the people in it. He had done a great deal of research, pointing back to the time of Cicero and, further in time, the Sumerians, etc., making the case that humanity has a long history of preserving speech. Stenography was simply another evolution along that path, where the machine shorthand writers eventually became the dominant modality over handwritten shorthand practitioners.

Stenography became, in some ways, its own self-reinforcing, somewhat insular community, certainly by the time I arrived in 2008. I dare say that the kind of mindset that built the Gallery of Shorthand is lost to us, as more and more court reporters of every modality adopt the more modern thought process of “this is a job, not who I am as a person.” This likely means that mythologizing as a motivational technique is going to be less effective going forward, whatever the future of this workforce looks like. These kinds of conversations and emotions, I have read, are happening all over the country across many different job sectors, so there is little reason to feel alone or ashamed about it.

I write as an individual and not a representative of any government or organization. I write with good intentions, accepting that though history is unlikely to remember me at all, the time we’ve just spent together mattered. Thank you for reading.

Does Coalition to Capture the Record Really Have An Access-to-Justice Mission?

The Coalition to Capture the Record was brought to my attention.

First interesting thing to note, the website doubles down on the shortage narrative of the Speech-to-Text Institute Bloc, the group of corporations I identified as having joined in a fraud.

Note that then-NCRA-President Jason Meadors had previously noted the Ducker Report that had forecasted the shortage had been pretty well debunked. This is following NCRA STRONG’s assertion that it was outdated. I guess I played a role there too.

The Coalition to Capture the Record doubles down on the court reporter shortage fraud despite a president of the largest court reporting association in the country admitting Ducker was debunked and a committee of the National Court Reporters Association more or less describing it as defunct.

They also conveniently sidestep the access-to-justice issues previously brought up by stenographers. Digital and AI could cause more harm than good.

There’s also an implication that it’ll bring down the cost of litigation. This long-running lie was called into question by a 2009 study.

So once again, it’s that same behavior we saw Speech-to-Text Institute engaging in. “The shortage is the shortage and we can’t beat it so we must go digital.” This is being done despite the overwhelming evidence that localized shortages can be beat. For example, in New York City, a localized Bronx shortage was recently plugged in our courts. Turns out when we actually try to fill these spots, we’re successful, and the political machinery that stops us from filling spots is the problem.

There’s also a pull from STAR’s playbook, the organization a lot of the fraudsters ran to in order to legitimize their positions again (they also went AAERT). They call for unity.

If digital court reporters and stenographers are equal, why aren’t they paid the same? I know that bothers my audience. But let’s ask that question out loud and often, because eventually digital court reporters will start asking for more — and then this whole song and dance becomes moot, because it’s about replacing our workforce with a workforce that’s easier to abuse and control. It has never, ever been about shortage.

Ever.

This next gem led me to conclude that this is not a serious organization, but a potential propaganda front.

Why does the Coalition to Capture the Record care about whether digital court reporters will replace stenographers?

Think about it. If your mission is access to justice, what does anything else matter? All this stuff about shortage and “we won’t replace you”, and all that nonsense, it’s not a message you would write to people interested in access. It’s a message you would write to stenographers you are trying to placate so that they don’t take a stand against their own elimination. A narrative to disarm and demoralize. “Give up, there is nothing you can do, join us.”

I believe in access to justice. I signed up for more information. And with time and evidence, my views may change.

But does anyone see what I’m seeing?

P.S.

I’m going to write about something on my mind. You’re not expected to read it.

The Max Azzarello thing happened outside my courthouse. Luckily for me, I wasn’t there, but I did see a brief video clip.

He’s been described as this gentle soul, intelligent guy that went downhill after his mother, who he had a close relationship with, died.

I wondered how many people might say the same about me, if I passed away. Admittedly, my relationship with my mother was not close, but we loved each other deeply. But how many of you would come out of the woodwork to call me a conspiracy theorist in my death? And despite not a peep while I’m alive and well to defend myself and my beliefs.

Of course, I’m never going to hurt myself. It’s not going to happen. Maybe that’ll be the deciding factor. And should anything suspicious occur, I hope my loved ones don’t accept a false narrative.

There’s also the fact that what I write about was real and what he wrote about was a distorted version of the truth. Yes, big money interests are using their wealth and power to influence markets, governments, and consumers. Yes, the government has serious problems because it’s woefully ill equipped to deal with lawbreaking businesses in the quantity and on the scale that they exist today.

But I can’t help but empathize. I know how it feels to scream into the void and hear nothing back.

If someone finds this corner of the internet and you’re in a dark place…

…I’ve been there too.

Hurting yourself isn’t the way. Certainly not self-immolation. The future will be brighter with you in it.

A better tomorrow needs builders. If your story ends here, how can the world change for the better?

I’ll tell you what most people told me.

You are not alone.

Arizona Asked for Public Comment on Recording and We Responded

Arizona has been, as best I can tell, trying to deal with stenographer shortage. This is not surprising. The 2018 opportunity number from the Ducker Report and forecast was just over 30% of the forecasted supply of stenographers.

Trying to raise our numbers by 30% is impossible, if you ask some dopes in our field.

Of course, the first thing that they think about is electronic recording. This is not surprising either. Many people believe automation of our work is imminent. They don’t work in the field. They haven’t seen my video on the court reporter crisis. They likely haven’t even considered the possibility that modern automation is actually a misnomer and that much automation is carried out by people, as published under this Bloomberg Opinion. They don’t think about the likelihood that electronic recording has existed for decades and that if it were truly cheaper or more efficient, it would’ve beat us a long time ago.

Well, Arizona asked for public comment on this proposal to use electronic recording. I decided that the best thing to do was let them know exactly what they were walking into. Check out the text of my public comment below and check out all the other public comments there. If you’re ready to support Arizona, also consider becoming a member of the association for this year. They need our help right now and holding the line there is step one to recruiting enough people to save our field.

“OPPOSITION. My name is Christopher Day. I am a court reporter in New York and creator of the Stenonymous blog. I have recently released a video explaining some very nasty things going on in my field. There has been a push by several companies, big national names in our field, such as Veritext and US Legal Support, to build digital court reporting as opposed to stenographic court reporting. Summarily, these companies are telling the legal profession no stenographers are available, but they are generally not making good faith efforts to recruit stenographers. We know that because they have failed to attempt to recruit stenographers from Sourcebook/PRO Link, a national directory of stenographers. Their push towards digital recording is not one of genuine need, but one of agenda. In fact, the chief strategy officer of US Legal, Peter Giammanco, wrote in an email regarding adopting digital reporting versus stenographic reporting, “does it matter if done legally and ethically…?” The legal profession is, without a doubt, being bamboozled, and courts with it. Because images are not allowed, I will link the article containing the image of that email. It is my contention that the court should be very aware that very large and powerful players in our industry could be acting with an intent to deceive. Similarly, there are nonprofits in our field, such as the Speech to Text Institute, which claim to be for all modalities of taking the record, but are a thinly-veiled attempt to give legitimacy to digital reporting, which is, as I will explain, wholly inadequate.

Digital court reporting is often painted as modernization, as this current change proposes. “Modernize the law.” But, in fact, all available data points to digital reporting being an inferior modality to stenographic court reporting. There are studies such as Testifying While Black (2019, pilots 1 and 2), and Racial Disparities In Automatic Speech Recognition (2020) which show that stenographic court reporting can be over three times as accurate as digital reporting with the African American Vernacular English dialect dependent on whether one is using record and transcribe method or automatic speech recognition. One has to wonder what the results might be if similar studies were done on other dialects and accents and how the justice system will be automatically discriminating against minority speakers by adopting digital recording.

Our efficiency lies in the way our system works. Our stenotypes are chorded. When we press on the keys we can take down a word in one or two hand movements. Sometimes an entire statement in one hand movement. The average word being about five characters, the average person needs at least five hand movements and the space bar. Simple math tells us that either 6x the number of transcribers will be needed to fill each court reporter’s seat, or 6x the amount of time will be needed to transcribe. Courts that have moved towards digital recording in the past, such as Massachusetts and New Jersey, have started to recruit stenographers again because they learned what my colleagues and I already know, that they were sold a lie.

Not only that, digital reporting proponents, such as Verbit, have shown an utter disregard for the quality and care standards of the court reporting industry. I recently exposed that they had posted Kentucky family court proceeding audio from Kentucky on the internet, as well as a template transcription that they offered. Thanks to my investigation, the audio was taken down. Because images are not allowed, I will link an article explaining the situation and with an image of the transcription template. The errors are horrifying, numerous, and egregious. Some of the least dangerous ones? “Point” is spelled with a zero (p0int) and “virtually” is spelled with an SH (virshually).

There has also been some evidence that digital reporting companies are dishonest. I recently raised $5,000 for a consumer awareness campaign and one woman claiming to be a digital reporter stated they were not paid enough to care [about the transcript] and trained to obfuscate, presumably by typing tag or guide files during the proceeding. This is not a direction which the courts should allow legal records to go under any circumstance.

Beyond that, there is reason to believe that digital reporting companies are operating beyond their means. I must point to VIQ Solutions, a company which last quarter lost over $10 million despite its $8 million in revenue. It is possible that companies operating in the digital reporting sphere are zombie corporations. Therefore, should they succeed in pushing stenographic competition out of the market, the costs of transcription and digital recording will rise dramatically. And we know from a study done by Justice Served on the Californian and Floridian courts that digital recording and stenographic reporting costs were already close. (https://www.cal-ccra.org/…/Justic…Dec09.pdf)

It is also notable that our stenographer shortage is used as a justification to do away with us. But transcribers are experiencing a similar shortage because they are poorly paid. The situation is so dire that the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity noted in its FAQ as recently as 9/24/21 that the shortage of medical transcribers was being compensated for through automatic speech recognition. This means that the transcription will almost certainly be offshored outside the subpoena power of the courts. This is not theoretical. Digital reporting companies have already employed or contracted transcribers from India, the Philippines, and Kenya, and if asked, I would gladly provide evidence collected of that. Again, with this rampant dishonesty perpetrated by digital reporting company owners, do we really want a world where the person that prepares the legal record cannot be brought in to testify if there’s a question or issue?

In the sake of brevity, I will largely skip comments about the audio failing to record or being unclear. But reliance on electronic recording would create a storage issue. Our raw stenographic text files are many times smaller than audio files. Take whatever the court pays for computerized storage of steno notes and multiply that by eight. If the court currently pays nothing and the responsibility of retention is on the court reporter, then imagine how those costs will now be shifted directly to the court.

And finally, this move creates the illusion that the stenographic court reporter is no longer in demand. Instead of broadcasting the need for the reporter, it will be assumed that the reporter is replaced, and make it even harder for my field to recruit via NCRA A to Z, Project Steno, Open Steno, and other initiatives. I have to ask this court not to contribute to the death of my profession. We have served yours for so many decades and spend so much time and energy training young people to take our place. They need confirmation that their hard work and training will provide for them. A rejection of these changes will serve as a broadcast to entrepreneurs across your state: Keep our courts efficient, build steno schools and businesses.

Though I am not from Arizona and though many of the things I point to occurred outside of Arizona, I must ask Arizona to take its blinders off and consider the mountain of evidence that points to recording being an inferior modality for taking down the legal record. The continuing education and ethics first culture of stenography and the National Court Reporters Association is simply unmatched. It is mimicked by digital reporting agencies and organizations so that they might have some of our $3 billion industry. The harm to minority speakers and the potential for runaway costs related to digital recording is too great to ignore. Keep stenographers on as guardians of the record and commit to the training of many more stenographers; the civil and criminal justice systems will only benefit. Your procedural rules, in their current form, defend the integrity of the record far more than the proposed amendments will. Thank you.”

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Addendum:

Arizona later passed this despite my public comment, my personal email to Director Byers, and the fact that it had more public comments against it than any other measure by a lot.

The Layperson’s Guide To Why Stenographic Reporting Is More Efficient Than Digital Reporting & ASR

Simply put, stenographers have integrated digital recording into their own technology. The option to record and transcribe has been around for 30 to 50 years depending on whether you want to start the clock at digital or analog. We stenographers have not been supplanted, which is an easy argument for our superiority as a modality.

Our detractors scoff and say that has to do with our political power. That’s a lie. We have very little political power. Most of our money seems to flow to our continuing education requirements and not lobbying. Our associations only recently sprang into action when we realized consumers were in danger. Even then, the associations routinely hamstring things that might make associations “too strong,” like abolishing term limits for effective association presidents.

Available data also shows that automatic speech recognition is 25 to 80% accurate and not the 99.999% sold to some people by dishonest companies.

Digital’s not cheaper. It allows the offshoring of very valuable private data to poor people who will have an incentive to sell it. It’s more taxing on the transcribers’ hands. How? It takes over 20 keystrokes to type “beyond a reasonable doubt” on a QWERTY. Steno does that in one.

Digital court reporting companies, groups, and associations talk a good game. This is because investors are burning money on them in the misguided belief that they’ll be first in on a new market. The reality is the modality has been around decades and fails to deliver. Just look at VIQ Solutions and its 2021 loss of over $13 million. Personally, I can’t wait until investors realize that these companies know this and took their money anyway.

For all the people who wonder how positive cash flow with negative income happens, check this out.

In brief, digital reporting and its derivatives such as “active reporting” or “AI-assisted reporting” are not cheaper. They aren’t a good investment. All available data says progress on automation has been mostly stalled for 20 years except where the automated program is configured to a speaker and their microphone. Unless we are going to force every litigant and defendant to train ASR for how they personally speak, we are going to need people to do this job. Since a stenographer is anywhere from 2 to 8 times faster than a transcriber, it makes good sense to invest in the expansion of stenotype services.

Also, generally, stenographers don’t support worker exploitation.

Of course, what do I know? I’m “just” a stenographer.

April Applications 2020 (Jobs Post)

Obviously, this goes up during the COVID-19 outbreak, and many of my colleagues or their families are impacted health-wise or economically. It’s serious stuff. Some of us have lost people or been in danger of losing people. This is a time when mostly everything has slowed down, and for many it may not feel like there is an end in sight. That said, I assure you there is an end in sight, and when this is all over, we’re going to need to pick up the pieces, move forward, and help each other move forward.

There’s a lot of fear and a disruption in our normal lives. So to keep with some semblance of normality, I’m going to move forward with a jobs post. Keep in mind that with this outbreak, many places are running on a skeleton crew, so they may not be actually hiring right now, but when things start to speed up again, stenographic reporters are needed all over the city, state, and country. They’re needed outside the country too, but I’ll let the experts handle that. Remember that if you’re a student or a newer reporter, there are also programs out there designed to find you a mentor. Mentors are no doubt having difficulties too, but they may be able to offer advice or ideas nonetheless.

Running along, NCRA has a good number of job listings up for reporters. They’re also looking for a certification & testing program manager. I know here in New York we have some reporters who are extremely gifted and passionate about certification and testing, so if that’s something you think you’d put down the machine for, take a look. Looking at the federal judiciary jobs page, there are openings in New York, Nevada, Washington, Oregon, Iowa, Missouri, Massachusetts, West Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Federal courts all over the country want stenographic court reporters.

The NYS statewide provisional court reporter application remains open to anyone with the guts to step up and give reporting for the state judiciary a chance. The courts in this state need people that care about the record and want to do a good job. If you’re looking for a steady job with paid time off, this is a first foot in the door while we wait for the civil service exam together. Before this outbreak and mess, I had a brief e-mail exchange with Michael DeVito, whose contact information is on the bottom of that application. Paraphrasing what he said, any employment prospects are encouraged to contact him. You have someone in the system to reach out to in addition to the unions that represent New York City court reporters and senior court reporters.

Last, but certainly not least, the Bronx DA has a posted position for grand jury stenographer. The DCAS Reporter/Stenographer test remains postponed.

Try to remain positive. I know there has been a marked drop in freelance work. You are not alone. At the beginning of this, several of NYSCRA’s officers and board members, Joshua Edwards, Diane Salters, Karen Santucci, and Dominick Tursi, got together to show our community an example of a remote deposition. The full video is available. Many members asked additional questions, which I tried to address via this video, and wrote some more information in the description box. If you’re a NYSCRA member or a potential member, don’t be afraid to send e-mails to board members. We can’t wave a magic wand and make everything better, but we can try to use the association’s resources that we all pay into in a responsible way. Remember that you are integral to those resources, and that even if you can’t get a membership right now, you can still throw in support later when work starts booming again. And we are not alone. Many state associations, and the NCRA, have been promoting ways to get reporters back to earning a living for themselves and their family. Many reporters have independently taken the time to host webinars or put up videos to help each other. Many CAT trainers are scheduling remote appointments to help people with their software. As an example, I personally follow Dineen Squillante and Anthony Frisolone. Some help is free, some help is for fee, and the bottom line is that we’re going to get through this together.