A brief analysis of digital court reporting versus stenography was posted to Founder’s Courier recently. It mentions the companies that are under the umbrella of the Speech-to-Text Institute and some of the security concerns about digital.
As the push continues to grow stenography’s presence in web media, I really appreciate any and all donations that come in. They help ensure things are flowing in the right direction.
An open letter by the Massachusetts Court Reporters Association was published to their Facebook page today, May 25, 2023. It is my understanding it will be sent directly to Mr. Anir Dutta, president of Stenograph later today.
It points out many of the things I mentioned in my blog yesterday and asks Stenograph to give more control of the event to the stenographic community.
It’s a big question how Stenograph will respond, if at all, to the letter. But if you’d like to show support to the MCRA on this brave move, share this today, and consider a donation to the association!
Addendum:
The open letter was edited after the original post and the links have changed. Link 1. Link 2.
In an email received at about 3:11 p.m. today, Stenograph announced the date of its town hall meeting and distributed an invite link. Participants are asked to send their questions to townhall23@stenograph.com by May 30, 2023.
I’ll start with something positive. I think this is a step in the right direction. Customers have been asking for a little love and attention for a long time, and this is definitely trying to give them what they asked for. The petition went out last week. Mr. Dutta’s public comments were discovered this weekend, and here we are.
There are some problems with the way this is being done. First, Stenograph being in control of the questions means that some questions may be disregarded. If you send in questions, consider saving evidence that you sent them and then letting me know if any of your questions were ignored afterwards. We can at least create a record of what wasn’t asked if my paranoia over Stenograph’s control of the event turns out to be healthy skepticism. Overlapping with that concern, there are questions about whether any live questions will be taken or whether the town hall will be exclusively limited to questions sent to the email provided by May 30. I have to admit, I believe that Stenograph should take some questions beforehand because it’s a company and it’s hard to answer questions on the fly about a company with no prep as to what those questions will be. But I also believe a healthy town hall would have some live question component.
Another problem that arises is that at 6 pm EST, it’s 3 PM PST. Many stenographers will be working at the time of the event, and if it is not recorded and distributed, they will miss it. Participants could record themselves using Open Broadcast Software or their phones or whatever, but it’s an extra step many won’t take. And again, paranoia strikes. What if low attendance is used to support the shortage narrative pushed by Stenograph, Veritext, US Legal Support, and the Speech-to-Text Institute? In my heart, I hope the company wouldn’t do that, but I’ve learned to stop thinking with my heart and understand that people play games.
If there are questions you want to ask that you don’t feel comfortable sending to Stenograph yourself, please comment them here. I will send them and keep a record of what I send. I will not send anything overtly inappropriate.
I’ve said many times before that if Stenograph admits that the Speech-to-Text Institute was wrong about the stenographer shortage being impossible to solve, it will make court reporting history. That’s what I’ll be looking out for. I have other questions about the percentage of revenue that goes into their R&D budget and what percentage of that is specifically spent on stenographic technology, but other than that, I haven’t yet decided what to ask.
For what it’s worth, if anybody from Stenograph is reading, thanks for doing this, but these are honest concerns court reporters have.
Court reporters, if you fight, you will win. You wanted a town hall and you got one. Make the most of it and remember this moment the next time someone tells you something cannot be done.
Addendum:
I messed up the times in the original post. It’s 6 PM EST, 3 PM PST. May 31, 2023.
The overpriced court reporter page is something that comes up occasionally in legal circles. All through my early career, law firm owners I worked with mentioned how their firms were stuck with expensive court reporter bills. As a young stenographic court reporter, I was paid very little, and later learned that court reporters in my city were about 30 years behind inflation. This set me down a path of skepticism when it came to what court reporters are told about themselves, their industry, and the public’s perception of them. How could lawyers be paying so much when I was making so little and such a large part of the transcript creation was on me?
Years later, as it turned out, some of the largest court reporting companies would get together using a nonprofit called the Speech-to-Text Institute (STTI). That nonprofit would go on to mislead consumers about the stenographer shortage to artificially increase demand for digital court reporting. Tellingly, while a U.S. Legal Support representative had no problem using the word “libel” on one of the female members of my profession, USL and the other multimillion dollar corporations never dared utter a word about my eventual fraud allegations. The companies wanted to trick consumers into believing stenographers were unavailable due to shortage and force digital court reporting on them, where matters are recorded and transcribed.
This set off alarm bells in the world of court reporting. Stenotype manufacturing giant, Stenograph, also represented in STTI’s leadership, shifted from supporting realtime stenographic reporters to shoddy service, and began to call its MAXScribe technology realtime. Realtime, as many attorneys know, is a highly trained subset of court reporting that often comes with a premium. These bait-and-switch tactics on the digital court reporter side of the industry caused a nonprofit called Protect Your Record Project to spring up and begin educating attorneys on what was happening in our field. But as of today, the nonprofit has not reached a level of funding that would allow it to advertise these issues on a national scale — this blog’s in the same boat.
So as more of the workforce is switched to digital reporters / recorders and transcribers, we’re seeing companies use influencers and other media to lure transcribers in for low pay. In short, digital court reporting is now synonymous with side hustle. These companies are going to take the field of skilled reporters that law firms and courts know and love, replace them with transcribers, and go on charging the same money. For the stenographer shortage, these folks were dead silent for the better part of a decade. Now that they need transcribers to replace us, they’re going all out to recruit.
TranscribeMe, by the way, just entered a partnership with Stenograph.
“What do I care?” That’s what a lot of lawyers and paralegals might be asking at this point. Well, I may not write as well as Alex Su, but I’ll do my best here. First, there are egalitarian concerns. In the Testifying While Black study, stenographers only scored 80% accuracy on the African American Vernacular English dialect. This was widely reported in the media, but what was lost by the media was the reveal of pilot study 1, which showed everyday people only transcribe with an accuracy of about 40% (e226). When we’re talking about replacing court reporters with “side hustle technology,” we’re talking about a potential 50% drop in accuracy and a reduction in court record quality for minority speakers, something courts are largely unaware of. According to the Racial Disparities in Automatic Speech Recognition study, automation isn’t coming to save us either. Voice writing is the best bet for the futurists, and it’s being completely ignored by these big companies.
There are also security concerns. When we’re talking about utilizing transcribers, we’re talking about people that have an economic incentive to sell any private data they might gain from the audio or transcript. If transcription is outsourced, a bribe as low as $600 might be enough to get people acting unethically. Digital court reporting companies have already shown they’re not protective of people’s data — in fact, companies represented in the Speech-to-Text Institute. This also leads to questions about remedies for suspected omissions or tampering. Would you rather subpoena one local stenographer or teams of transcribers, some possibly outside of the jurisdiction?
Finally, there’s an efficiency issue with digital court reporting. Turnaround times can be much slower. Self-reported, it can take up to 6 hours to transcribe 1 hour of audio. By comparison, 1 hour of proceedings can take a qualified stenographer 1 to 2 hours to transcribe. That’s 3 to 6 times faster. Everyone here knows stenographers aren’t perfect and that backlogs happen. Now imagine a world where the backlog is 3 to 6 times what it is today. In one case, a transcript took about two months to deliver. If we’re going to hire teams of transcribers to do the work of one stenographic court reporter, aren’t we going backwards?
This is eerily similar to what went on in medical transcription. Competing interests played games to nobody’s benefit.
Consumers are the ones with the power here. They can demand stenographers, utilize companies that aren’t economically incentivized to lie to them, and spread awareness to other consumers. Consumers, lawyers and court administrators, decide the future. Knowing what you do now, do you want a court reporter or a side hustler at your next deposition or criminal case?
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Written by Christopher Day, a stenographic court reporter in New York City that has been serving the legal community since 2010. He is also a former board member of the New York State Court Reporters Association and a former volunteer for the National Court Reporters Association STRONG Committee. Day also authors the Stenonymous blog, the industry’s leading independent publication on court reporting media, information, data, analyses, satire, and archiving of current events. He also appeared on VICE with regard to the Testifying While Black study and fiercely advocated for more linguistics training for court reporters in and around New York State.
Donations for the blog will help run advertising for this article and others like it, as well as pay for more journalists and investigators. If you would like to donate, you may use the donation box on the front page of Stenonymous.com, PayPal or Zelle ChristopherDay227@gmail.com, or Venmo @Stenonymous. Growing honest media to combat misconceptions in and about our marketplace is the premier path to a stronger profession and ultimately better service to the legal community.
A posse ad esse.
Addendum:
By sheer coincidence, an article on the side hustle was released the same day as my post. NCRA STRONG’s Lisa Migliore Black and Kim Falgiani really hit it out of the park with this one. Apparently FTR and Rev say they have security in place to prevent sensitive data from being shared. But FTR is known for selling “deficit products,” and Rev is known for its massive security breach. So check out the article by Chelsea Simeon linked above and enjoy!
I was sent this by a contact over social media. It’s labeled as an advertorial. And that alone gives us enough to pick it apart and figure out what it’s selling. It’s written by Christy Pratt, VP of Veritext Canada.
It goes a little into the history of reporting to give the rest of the piece some credibility. I have no problem with that. But then it gets to its main sell: The shortage is real and times are changing! Hey everybody! Did you know times change? You can trust the rest of the advertorial because the author is making perfect sense up to this point.
Remember, this is posted to Trial Lawyers of BC. It’s clear who the audience is. They don’t want lawyers to complain about the transition from steno to digital, where the author admits steno is still in heavy use. They want to paint digital as the solution. It’s much easier to tell someone what they want is not available instead of telling them you don’t want to give it to them. It’s a lie to limit consumer choice.
It’s worth noting that the shortage isn’t as bad as it was forecasted to be in America and that the Speech-to-Text Institute’s Jim Cudahy left the field when I accused him of fraud for spreading court reporter shortage disinformation. It’s also worth noting that Veritext is represented in the Speech-to-Text Institute’s leadership by Adam Friend, VP of business development, and has not made any attempt to correct the misleading information put out onto the market by STTI. Misleading information that threatens the futures of ourselves and our students, by the way. Does anyone believe that Veritext, a multimillion dollar corporation that benefits financially from the expansion of digital, would not spread the same lies in Canada?
I’ve had people lie to me over $5. When the future direction of an industry is at stake, does anyone believe this isn’t fabricated? And I’m sure I have a detractor or two who would point at me and say the same, but let’s be real, in my wildest dreams Stenonymous makes me maybe a million dollars someday because some rich person realizes how much fun it would be to set me loose on the world or Veritext realizes my creative genius can be bought (in reality, I lose money on my media activities, even with the support of my wonderful audience.) This industry is close to $3 billion annually by estimates I’ve seen. Who has a greater incentive to lie? And it’s not like they can claim they don’t know about my research now. They’re basically using my arguments on AI to make the case for why court reporters won’t be replaced. I’ve basically never had better proof that Veritext execs read the blog and understand at least part of my work.
To make matters worse, a source inside a big box is saying the nickel and diming of stenographers is getting worse despite the alleged demand. If they’re chipping away at the incomes of high-end realtime reporters, the average reporter isn’t going to stand a chance.
Reporters, organize and resist or be ruled by people that don’t care if you have a good life. That’s all there is to it. I know my methods come off as extreme, but it’s an extraordinary case where an entire profession is threatened with extinction based on a lie. It’s a classic what-would-you-do scenario, and I’d like to think that if every reporter had the same statistics and information that I have seen and published, they’d be just as outraged. They’d fight just as hard, and maybe harder.
I’ll continue my quest to slay the windmills. Wish me luck.
I’ve obtained a letter from Luke Casson of the Illinois Electronic Court Reporters Association and Anir Dutta from Stenograph. Along with these materials came some Speech-to-Text Institute materials.
Speech-to-Text Institute, as we know, is the nonprofit that lied when it said the court reporter shortage was irreversible. It used an outdated report to make its case, and its frontman, Jim Cudahy, left the field after I called him out on his fraud. STTI has several companies represented in its leadership, including The RecordXchange, Stenograph, Trans-Atlantic International Depositions, Planet Depos, Veritext, U.S. Legal Support, Neal R. Gross and Company, vTestify, Verbit, Kentuckiana, Tri-C Community College, RevolutionaryText, and For the Record. When I refer to the STTI Bloc, this is what I’m talking about. They used STTI to pump the market with misinformation, and as you’re about to see, they ride off those lies to push digital court reporting to policy makers and fellow court reporters.
If you look at those links above you’ll see that I’ve been on this since day 1. Court reporters can trust me to fight for them.
On that note, I think the best way to do this is to present each piece and then present my take on it. I’ll try not to nitpick too much and just bring out primary points.
I’ll be really fair here. He’s got a mission and he’s sticking to it, and that’s fair game. But I would say the idea that adding digital to the pool will not decrease the number of stenographer jobs is a lie. There is a total market. More of that market being covered by digital necessitates fewer available stenographic jobs. The idea that digital reporting is the preferred modality is also heavily in dispute. We literally call stenography the gold standard and even ChatGPT knows it.
For the STTI materials, it’s 100% certain to exacerbate because the STTI Bloc has used all of its money and influence to grow digital over steno while lying to court reporters and the public. The number of stenographers shrinking in Illinois is pulled straight from Ducker’s “70% will retire before 2033” statement. There is basically zero chance that the report, which is a decade old, reliably predicted the future with 100% accuracy. Fewer than 1 in 10 become court reporters. I’ll concede that we say this a lot, but has anybody run the actual numbers with any consistency, or is it kind of like Ducker where we got some information once and then trusted that forever and ever? I have the same issue with stating the number of stenography students. It completely discounts the self-taught — and I personally know self-taught court reporters. It’s all fluff to suit an agenda. I no longer feel bad about calling it what it is. Nobody from that side of the equation has ever defended their inexcusable antisocial behavior. They simply pretend I don’t exist, because my existence is inconvenient to their agenda.
Stenograph claims to have 80% market share, and then claims that at least 20,000 use their software. That would put the number of stenographers at at least 25,000. That means Stenograph knows for a fact that STTI was wrong, since there were only supposed to be 23,000 of us as of 2023. Again, the idea that this will add additional jobs is laughable, it will only move market share to digital, which Stenograph has positioned itself to profit from. They also lie about New York, where voice writing is not accepted for civil service positions. Neither is digital. Anir writes well, and I admire his ability to stick to a story. Perhaps seeing this in print will lead people to realize why I was so down on Stenograph as an entity, but not its employees or trainers. As a company, they’re not doing right by us. Everybody else is just caught in the crossfire of that. But the company relies on you being the bigger person and letting it go. “It’s just business,” they say, as they twist the knife just a few more times.
The math from my last ad report was very clear. Using my current media knowledge, we could probably reach/engage over a million people for about $30,000. I can’t lay that out by myself right now, but it should put into perspective why I keep asking for money. It makes a difference.
But as always, I leave it in the hands of my colleagues. Do we continue to wait and see what happens, or do we get serious about funding the only industry blog dedicated to purging corruption from the field? Regardless of the choice, reporters can count on me to continue being truthful.
And to give some good entertainment in the process.
Private equity’s incursion into medicine, court reporting, and beyond is about siphoning more of the ecosystem to its control because control makes more money, regardless of the societal consequences. If it truly had a better product, there would be no need for subterfuge. The future belongs to reporters. Together we can give a voice to the principles of accuracy and integrity we hold dear.
Veritext and Esquire brought antitrust suits that seemingly were consolidated against the Louisiana Board of Examiners of Certified Court Reporters. The complaint and settlement agreement can be found on the board’s website. The rules of this game should now be pretty clear. Where court reporters get laws enacted and there are attempts to enforce those laws, lawsuits will follow to wear down the will to enforce the law. Where court reporters fight to enact laws, the multimillion dollar corporations will have more money to lobby government and probably buy our lobbyists too. Where court reporters have laws that go unenforced, the multimillion dollar corporations get to corner and control the market oligopoly style while the government keeps the court reporters in check. Meanwhile, associations are hamstrung by the legal liability of being “competitor collectives.” I’ve only ever said what we’re all thinking: This game is rigged. That is not to say the lawsuit wasn’t meritorious, but then the law isn’t always just.
This situation is not without hope. Over the years I’ve read and written about employee misclassification. Things vary a little bit from place to place, but my understanding of the law is it doesn’t matter what the “employer” and worker call the relationship, a worker can still be found to be a common law employee for purposes of unemployment, workers compensation, Title VII, taxes, or other American rights, like the right to unionize. There’s a form SS-8 from the IRS for determining worker status. There are also DOL complaints. Of course, any one reporter could be singled out and retaliated against, so the key would be for a group of reporters from a similar geographic area / regional office to file, make the case that they are common law employees, and then get a petition going to start a union, preferably with the help of a lawyer.
This kind of organization isn’t easy, but it seems necessary. We face a de facto silencing as the multimillion dollar corporations continue broadcasting digital court reporter jobs and minimizing our online presence with articles about our “impossible” shortage.
Just some of the things reporters could collectively bargain for are the right to refuse jobs, the right to work from home, equipment reimbursement, support contract reimbursement, higher pay or page rates, stenography training funds for digitals, staffing ratios of stenographers to digitals, paid association dues for court reporters, severance pay, paid leave, or even some retraining money in the event there is a major technological breakthrough that makes us redundant, which is unlikely. If the big box claims it can’t pay, it may have to open its books to the union.
There are good arguments for court reporters being misclassified under the law. Top of the list is that these businesses couldn’t exist without their independent contractors. Our businesses are not independent of theirs, our business is their business. Where there are ABC laws in place, the independent contractor is (A), free from direction and control in performing the work. A lot of us really aren’t. We’re forced to use a certain layout. Many of us aren’t allowed to subcontract jobs. The agency picks what they want to offer us. We don’t meet their terms, we don’t get the work. (B), the work takes place outside the usual business of the company and off the site of the business. I would love for these companies to defend themselves by saying court reporting businesses are not in the business of court reporting. (C), the worker customarily is engaged in an independent trade, occupation, profession, or business. This is where a lot of us are true independent contractors who have business with multiple firms or even lawyer clients. But for those that are working with the same company for years, as I did with Magna, there’s a real argument that they’re not engaged in independent anything.
In New York this is even muddier. The Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, looked at who controlled the customer and assignments in the Postmates decision. Some of the things looked at there? Postmates (1), determined which couriers had access to which assignment. Sound familiar? (2), set the delivery fee charged to customers. In New York, at least, the agencies definitely decide the fees. (3), paid couriers a non-negotiable percentage of the delivery fee. Some agencies allow negotiation and some set rates. Some do both. (4), took on the risk of loss by paying couriers for deliveries regardless of whether the customer paid. Again, something that happens routinely in our business. (5), paid a portion of the couriers’ business expenses through prepaid debit cards. (6), did not permit customers to select specific couriers for deliveries on its platform. Lawyers can request us, but only if they know about us. We are effectively “hidden.” Even then, the agency decides whether or not to send us. (7), tracked the courier’s location and provided customers with estimated delivery times on its platform. Agencies occasionally attempt to put out rules like arriving 30 minutes early and so on. (8), assumed responsibility for replacing couriers who became unavailable after accepting a delivery. Agencies do this. (9), handled customer complaints and in some cases retained liability to customers for incorrect or damaged deliveries. One agency in New York has actually had reporters handle customer complaints after the Postmates decision according to a freelancer source, so there may be a shift here, but prior to the Postmates decision agencies generally handled customer complaints. As you can see, those of us with independent business or work from multiple sources may not qualify, but there’s ground to argue.
As individuals, we hold an advantage over organizations. We can make decisions and enact change much faster. Other court reporters have prodded at the issue, and it was enough to prompt talk of settlement.
We have a fairly predictable ethos in court reporting of clinging to our freelance title. That title actively robs us of our right to speak to each other on the issues that matter. It steals away the rights that most court reporters would have if properly classified under law that you just read with your own eyes and/or screen readers. Agencies understand court reporter culture and our lean towards tradition. They not only know the game, but how we react to the game. Who would continue to play a game knowing that it is rigged? If your opponent had a copy of all the moves you were going to make in a chess game, would you keep following the script? Stenographers should lead the movement and we have the best shot at altering the script. If digitals beat us to it, it’ll probably be the other way with contracts favorable to expanding digital.
It’s a question of whether we fight back in the name of ethics, accuracy, and the future careers of the students we’re training today, or whether we lay down and let private equity eat the industry ecosystem for the benefit of its bank account. The heart of what I’m doing is educating working people that things aren’t always as they’re said to be.
I find it funny that digital court reporting proponents like Veritext have antitrust concerns while they work together to lead the organization that was publishing fraudulent / misleading statistics apparently meant to manipulate a market.
A few thousand dollars and we shifted the narrative from impossible shortage to scumbag corporations tricking honest people. If you think I’m wrong on this, just look at my long history of running the corporations ragged with a minuscule fraction of the resources they have. They understand us? I understand them. And reporters talking about this post is their worst nightmare.
The following was written by Joe Gratton for the Stenonymous blog, mostly unedited:
There’s currently ongoing and blatant corporate fraud in the court reporting industry. Yet many industry professionals remain unaware and unconcerned about the danger posed by companies deliberately exaggerating the court reporter shortage to espouse the benefits of digital court reporting as if the two services are somehow equivalent.
The companies that have tacitly colluded under the umbrella of the non-profit Speech-to-Text Institute (STTI) are engaging in deceptive practices by spreading misinformation about the cost, quality, and validity of digital court reporting services.
With little to no oversight by courts or government agencies, these companies are getting away with it. However, there are steps stenographers, lawyers, and other affected parties can undertake to ensure justice is served and the court reporting profession is protected from further subversion.
It’s worthwhile spending a few moments elucidating the circumstances that have allowed corporate fraud to occur unchecked thus far.
It’s essential to start by explaining that, yes, there are court reporter shortages within the United States – primarily due to retirement. However, these shortages are minimal and localized. Moreover, these minor shortages are increasingly offset by excellent recruitment initiatives led by National Court Reporters A to Z, Project Steno, Open Steno, and other worthy organizations.
The companies launching spurious claims that the shortage can’t possibly be filled with more stenographers (and, therefore, should be replaced with the vastly inferior practice of digital court reporting) base their assumptions on the deeply-flawed Ducker Report of 2013-14, which stated that 70% of court reporters would retire over the next 20 years (2013-2033).
Not only is the report now rapidly approaching ten years since publication (significantly undermining its relevance), but those predictions were based on, wait for it, interviews with 120 industry professionals from in and around the industry. Even with some “proprietary data analysis” thrown in from Ducker, how anyone can profess that there’s currently a potentially industry-ending court reporter shortage based on such flimsy evidence is anyone’s guess.
Worse, when reviewing objective industry data, there are around 27,000 court reporters still active within the profession. How many were there in 2013, the year of the Ducker Report? 21,000. The predicted retirement cliff must be getting taller every day since stenographer numbers are still trending upward ten years later.
And yet, companies such as Veritext, US Legal, and others have happily used these terribly inaccurate extrapolations to make even worse predictions about stenography’s future.
For instance, they have gone on the record to claim the industry requires 82,000 stenography training program enrollments annually (based on a 10% graduation rate) to plug the self-proclaimed shortfall. Yet this figure would quadruple the size of the entire court reporter industry today and increase the pool of available court reporters to six times that of 2014, the year the so-called “shortfall crisis” started.
With wildly incorrect and baseless predictions like these, it’s easy to see why those with only the most tenuous of links to the legal profession are raising eyebrows at how some of these court reporting companies are getting away with blatantly misleading the public for so long.
There’s a pretty obvious reason these companies keep promoting and disseminating their misleading and inaccurate claims: there’s a lot of money to be made.
Stenography is skilled labor and is remunerated as such (some might say underpaid). For someone to type at a rate of 225+ words per minute with an accuracy rate of 99.8% takes years of training and dedication. Stenographic writing is closer to playing the piano than typing on a keyboard. It takes at least two years in a stenography training program, state licensure, and professional certification.
Digital court reporter training lasts six months, with most of that time spent learning how to take accurate notes and operate sound and video equipment. That’s it.
In short, these companies want to replace those hard-earned skills with technology so they can charge less for their services and make huge profit margins while doing so. With audio and video equipment in place, digital court reporters merely make sure the equipment is working and note key pieces of testimony.
The companies in question want to mislead the world into thinking that digital court reporting does the same work as traditional court reporting. But once again, the objective facts of the profession paint a different picture.
Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) software delivers a dreadful 25%-80% accuracy rate, and non-stenographers transcribe English dialects such as African American Vernacular English (AAVE) at a rate half as accurate as court reporters. These are merely two of dozens of damning examples showing that digital court reporting cannot replace standard court reporting.
And yet the two are conflated as one and the same on a daily basis by those that stand to profit most from doing so.
How they have been allowed to for so long somewhat beggars belief.
It seems that, thus far, the courts and government agencies tasked with protecting the public from fraudsters and con artists seem unwilling or unable to act.
So can change be instigated? How can those being hurt by these misleading and fraudulent claims take action?
The simple answer is to fight back. The very tactics companies use to mislead the public can be used against them. They are so brazen and demonstrably false that they are easy to report to the appropriate authorities.
Where applicable, it makes sense to refer complaints about deceptive practices and patently false advertising to the relevant state attorney general. Not only will they have a more precise understanding of the misrepresentation at hand (being lawyers themselves) than government agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), but state attorney generals have the legal power to act against such companies.
Their purview, among other responsibilities, includes enforcing their given state’s consumer protection laws. Given the flagrant breaches occurring, including false advertising, tacit collusion, and deceptive marketing practices, it would be entirely reasonable to expect that they can take action against these corporate fraudsters if made aware.
Given the attempts by the STTI to falsely create a market problem and sell the solution (digital court reporting), it’s worth reporting any antitrust or false advertising violations to the FTC.
Not only have they already pledged to protect gig workers from unfair, deceptive, and anticompetitive practices, but they have specifically stated they will also investigate exclusionary or predatory conduct that could cause harm to customers or reduced compensation, or poorer working conditions for gig workers.
Given the practices of these companies harms both customers (by giving the false illusion of equivalency between standard and digital court reporting and deceptively exaggerating the court report shortage) and the 70% of court reporters that work as independent contractors, the FTC should at the very least investigate these practices.
Sometimes the only way to draw attention to a problem is to throw a spotlight on it. By writing emails to editors of local newspapers or contacting local TV stations and radio stations, it’s possible to make clients aware of the deceptive practices and have them contact the relevant authorities and regulators to demand action.
At the very least, it may be that these fraudulent operators have to answer very direct questions regarding their business practices. With the glare of a significant readership or viewership, they may squirm under the pressure and be forced into providing evidence and documentation that doesn’t actually support their statements.
Another option for stopping corporate fraud on this scale is contacting elected local officials at either state legislature or county levels.
Not only do they have the power to pass laws that protect consumers from unfair or deceptive trade practices, but they also have a direct line to the government agencies tasked with enforcing those laws, such as the FTC and state attorney general.
Once again, those with the power to act can’t do so if they are ignorant of the problem in the first place. Only by publicizing these fraudulent practices can lawmakers and regulators be forced to act.
There’s no question that the court reporter shortage has been leapt upon by companies such as Veritext, US Legal, Planet Depos, and other members of the STTI as an opportunity to cash in on the digital court reporting market.
By replacing incredibly skilled labor with unskilled and automated digital transcription, they persist in attempting to convince law firms, courts, and even government agencies that digital court reporting is a viable replacement.
The statistics speak for themselves on that front.
However, it’s the hyperbolic claims being made and the outright lies being spread about the court reporting industry in the name of corporate greed that are truly egregious. It’s naked corporate fraud that is only being further enabled by the willful ignorance of many lawmakers and regulators tasked with protecting consumers from unfair and deceptive trade practices.
Thus, the onus is now on those willing to stand up for justice to take action using some, if not all, of the avenues mentioned above.
Hopefully, with coordinated and concerted action, there can be an end to the rampant corporate fraud taking place within the court reporting and stenography profession.
Author: Joe Gratton
Bio: Joe Gratton is a professional writer who has worked with a number of legal firms in the United States, covering topics including court reporting, legal videography, electronic discovery (e-Discovery), and trial presentation services.
Veritext announced that it is accepting videos promoting steno. Film a video of yourself with your machine and say “I am a court reporter.” Sample ideas are available.
The “get started” button leads here.
I don’t want to be too disparaging. One of my primary gripes has been the very lopsided promotion of digital, and if they’re doing something positive for us, it should go forward. No doubt, good job, Veritext. Thanks for spending the time and money to do this. I mean that.
I must remind reporters, though, that this is a clear indication that the Speech-to-Text Institute, associated with Veritext’s Adam Friend, lied when it said the stenographer shortage was impossible to solve. If our shortage was impossible to solve, Veritext would have zero incentive to continue to attract anyone to the field. It would, in fact, be heartless to lure people into a dying field. This supports my claim that our field is not dying, and that any decline is reversible. The numbers support this to the extent they exist.
I am ecstatic that Veritext is doing something positive. It doesn’t really negate the fact that they have been advertising for digital reporters on LinkedIn for over a year that I’ve been monitoring it. That means every day spamming jobseekers with digital, digital, digital. So to make a video and release that and share it is nice, but it’s not quite the same impact on the market in my estimation. Maybe I will be wrong. Hopefully I will be wrong. Advertising stenography now gives us the people we’ll need later. Timing and enthusiasm matters. And the timing of this is a little odd. We’re being deleted in Indiana. Has Veritext made a comment to the court about that like many of us have?
If I were Veritext, I’d claim that this video initiative helped solve the shortage and throw Cudahy’s math under the bus. It’d be a smart move for them. They get to be the heroes and cast doubt on Stenonymous in one swift move.
I’ll be submitting a video. I encourage others to if they have the time. While I am suspicious of Veritext’s motives at the top of their corporate structure, most of the people that work below them are going to be decent people. When I submitted something to their reporter corner years ago, it got featured. This is to say I don’t believe videos will be misused in any way. I really believe they’ll do exactly what they’re proposing to do here, and I think it’ll be great.
I just hope there’s more, and that this is not a one-off before they return to burying us.
On Sunday my best friend Joshua Edwards and I headed out to Washington Square Park to talk to the public a little bit about court reporting generally and the court reporting shortage fraud that is ongoing in our field. With help from several locals, we managed to secure footage of our time out and it’s my pleasure to share it now with court reporters across the country.
As I see it, there are two ways to combat shortage issues today. Either help bring attention to the blatant fraud ongoing or try to raise awareness about the profession at schools and other events. This was something of a hybrid where we made some noise about our issues and spent time educating the public on court reporting. I also used the event to solicit some donations.
Just to prove that I’m really serious about supporting the stenographic legion, I may or may not have stood inside the fountain.
I mean, I even talked to the Garibaldi statue about court reporting.
I got to talk about the Racial Disparities in Automatic Speech Recognition study.
I got to discuss digital recording and the two-month backlog that I published about on Saturday.
Joshua Edwards, RDR, CRR, CRC, also got in on the action, letting members of the public know about Stenonymous and court reporting.
I made sure to let the public know that jobseekers are being misled into digital court reporting too.
“Certain forces are trying to get rid of the stenographer…” That’s what we got to tell people. And we made sure to get it on camera so that all of you can easily share it. We all see what’s happening in Indiana right now.
I’d like to ask individuals and institutions to consider sending some funding to Stenonymous. I know many of you are busy people that cannot afford to take the time to dive into every last bit of my writing, research, and documentation over the last half decade. But clearly something is very wrong. The largest companies in our industry do not care enough about their brand to (a) attempt to convince me I’m wrong or (b) slap me with some kind of legal notice. Multimillion dollar corporations. Does it really seem off base to suggest that there might be antitrust issues here when some of the largest competitors in the field have syndicated behind a shell nonprofit to pump the market with misinformation?
If I’m right, then we should all be pretty concerned about having a marketplace where the government is inert while the largest players illegally bully the smaller court reporting providers into digital, which they’ve conveniently set up to have stakes in/relationships with, in terms of training and equipment vending.
If I’m wrong, then this is a very cruel field, because not one of you has tried to tell me I am wrong or pointed me to research that beats mine.
And if I’m right, then your money is pretty well spent on me. With the support of court reporters like you, we blew through the false media narrative of an “impossible” shortage. With more support we could afford to hire more writers, investigators, content creators, or even legal advocates. Who would like a filmed protest outside Veritext? Who’d like to have a media footprint that rivals other industries? Who’d like to push this issue until it can no longer be ignored? I’m the guy for the job. Help me out and I’ll bring allies to this field one by one.
Even if you choose not to throw any support my way, let this stand as a reminder that where there is injustice people can resist in small ways that lead to something greater. The name of the game is connecting with people, because if my time in Washington Square Park told me anything, it’s that they’re on our side.
