Tell The FTC How Mergers Have Harmed Competition in Court Reporting Today!

As sent to me by a valued court reporter. Let me know if you want your name here!

I am preserving my public comment below. You can comment here, I believe. My comment tracking number is lzh-8ij7-4wuf. Feel free to comment yours!

“In the court reporting industry several large companies, including the biggest player, Veritext, have been buying up smaller firms at an alarming rate. The result is chaos. Consumers don’t know if they’re buying from a Veritext company or not. “Independent contractors” don’t know if they’re working for a Veritext company or not. Small businesses don’t know if they’re networking with a Veritext company or not. Repeat that for the four or five national companies, and you have a complex network of companies where it can be hard to find quality service at an affordable price.

The problems with this are well-documented. Companies like Veritext add outrageous charges to consumers’ bills in the hopes that they won’t dispute it. Where a court reporter might be sourced for $4.00 per page or thereabout, a final bill to a client might be worth the equivalent of $37 per page.

Worse yet, these companies are all able to openly work together without any interference from law enforcement. Several large companies, including Veritext, U.S. Legal Support, and Stenograph, got together under the fraud nonprofit, the Speech-to-Text Institute, to propagandize the market and make the stenographer shortage seem larger than it actually was. Using their subsidiaries and purchasing power, they systematically deleted information that consumers would’ve found helpful and promulgated information that was misleading at best. This was documented on my blog Stenonymous, and reported to the FTC and NYS Attorney General, but the situation is apparently too small for law enforcement to care about, since the industry is only $3 billion annually. The Speech-to-Text Institute, after being called out for fraud, was sued and shut down its website. It has yet to defend itself in court and has defaulted. Succinctly, called out for their illegal conduct by a hobbyist blog, they’re in full retreat and will never answer for the misinformation they spread.

But this has grave impacts on consumers, workers, jobseekers, and students. These companies are able to work together to box out anyone that disagrees with their egregious behavior using their market power. Consumers are paying higher prices than ever. Workers live in fear that they will be blacklisted. Jobseekers are left not knowing what path to take in terms of acquiring court reporting work. Students are sinking money into promising stenographic education while the companies work together to create an influx of workers and systematically reduce rates/wages.

Worse yet, there is a rampant misclassification problem in the business. These businesses could not exist without their “independent contractor” court reporters, and yet still somehow they are able to get away with not withholding taxes as required by law.

This has also impacted buyers of court reporting businesses. In a conversation with one businessman, I was told that the overvaluation of court reporting businesses due to the purchasing strategies of the so-called “big box” corporations left it impossible to buy into the business. So again, people are boxed out of competition by inflated values.

Even supposed bastions of ethical conduct in court reporting such as the National Court Reporters Association are terrified to speak out against the illegal conduct occurring in our field. Given the collapse of the STTI and its propaganda network, it would be easy pickings for the organization to capitalize on its mission of promoting lawful and proper professional ethics, as stated in its bylaws. It instead has pointed toward potential legal liability as the reason for its “deafening silence.”

Again, it cannot be understated how consumers, jobseekers, workers and small businesses have been failed by law enforcement. The conduct of these corporations has undoubtedly steered investors away from investing in stenographic education and caused massive disruptions to the hiring practices of courts, who have long trusted stenographers, stenographic education, and stenographic services.

It’s with sincere optimism that I comment and make a plea for law enforcement to come up with something to address smaller industries. This impacts the lives of at least 30,000 workers and innumerable consumer law firms, courts, etc. Veritext parent company Leonard Green was allowed to loot hospitals for poor people. Do not let that happen to the legal records in the United States.”

Bulletin: A Friendly Reminder that Associations Misled Court Reporters for Decades…

“You can’t discuss rates!”

You were told that to limit associations’ legal liability. In fact you can discuss rates lots and lots. I made a rates discussion group on Facebook, and surprise, it’s been rolling along for over a year. The FTC and big boxes don’t care.

In truth, trade associations are explicitly allowed to collect and gather price data. They’re allowed to release the aggregated data too.

There have been some forward-thinking associations. I can’t deny that. I have lots of association friends.

I suppose it is what it is.

You’re dealing with someone that thinks, “but what if it wasn’t?”

Take the jump and stand against our systemic herding and misinformation campaigns. It’s a lot of fun.

Ask me how I know.

Enjoy your weekend!

Jon Stewart on AI: They’re Already Having an Arms Race to See Who Will Be the Monopoly.

More Perfect Union posted a clip of Jon Stewart talking to Federal Trade Commission Chairperson Lina Khan.

This was so incredibly moving to me that I had to transcribe it. Lina Khan masterfully puts into words what I’ve been trying to communicate for a long time. Government is just one area where we must worry about the concentration of power and the looming threat of autocracy or autocrat-like power. The knowledge that we need to guard against the rise of “economic autocrats” has existed in this country for over 100 years. I feel there are parallels to our field. We are merely on a lower level in terms of the money at stake.

It still pains me to believe our issues are too small for the FTC to care about and too big for the state agencies to want to look at. But I acknowledge the good work it’s trying to do after decades of minimal antitrust enforcement.

I provide a plain text version below and then a download of the PDF:

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Partial transcript of Jon Stewart speaking to Lina Khan, Chairperson of the Federal Trade Commission.

Transcribed by Christopher Day, Stenonymous.com.

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MR. STEWART: It’s already being consolidated. Apple has bought 30 AI models. Microsoft has probably bought ‑‑ Google has bought ‑‑ they all buy AI startups and put them behind their paywall. And they’re already having an arms race to see who will be either the monopoly or this will be oligopoly.

I’ve got to tell you, I wanted to have you on a podcast, and Apple asked us not to do it, to have you. They literally said, “please, don’t talk to her.” Having nothing to do with what you do for a living. I think they just ‑‑ I didn’t think they cared for you, is what happened. They ‑‑ they wouldn’t ‑‑ they didn’t ‑‑ they wouldn’t let us do even that dumb thing we just did in the first act, on AI.

Like, what is that sensitivity? Why are they so afraid to even have these conversations out in the public sphere?

MS. KHAN: I think it just shows one of the dangers of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision making in a small number of companies.

I mean, going back all the way to the founding, there was a recognition that in the same way you need the Constitution to create checks and balances in our political sphere ‑‑

MR. STEWART: Right.

MS. KHAN: ‑‑ you also needed the antitrust and antimonopoly laws to safeguard against concentration of economic power, because you don’t want an autocrat of trade in the same way that you don’t want a monarch.

MR. STEWART: But then it took them ‑‑ I mean, it wasn’t until the Sherman Act in, what, 1890 something…

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End of clip shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, by More Perfect Union on April 2, 2024.

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DOWNLOAD:

Jon-Stewart-Speaks-to-Lina-Khan Download

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Now for some creative musing:

Educated by my country,

I could only watch in horror as

the knowledge of the past was swept aside.

They called us the most educated generation.

Then did not heed our words.

Our keepers said we could be anything.

Then voted for those that would leave us nothing.

The generations before us? Conditioned.

Conditioned to believe hard work is virtuous.

From a time when you could trust the television.

From a time when you had the television.

A time when hard work was rewarded better.

Loyalty ran both ways.

Was that a lie too?

Hard work is the only thing I’ve ever known.

Indeed, every person should know what it is to reach down deep and try hard.

Because otherwise the heart does not beat.

Because before I did, but after my birth, I was not alive.

But letting others harm your children is wrong.

The television did not tell or envision the real dangers.

Allowing predators to prey upon our American Dream.

And I understand. The world is different from when you walked it.

And I will miss you.

Those children you fought for?

I will fight for them in a way society never let you.

Because one day I may have my own.

They will have to learn to live and love alongside the other children.

They will have to play and grow in the world that we design.

Design by our action.

Design by our inaction.

Design by our empathy.

Design by our psychopathy.

They will know their father tried to change the country that would educate them.

For the better.

They will know their mother wanted their American Dream to be lucid.

So that they could be anything.

To those that would deride those like us:

“Though our songs may never be sung,

our stories will echo into eternity.”

Shameless plug for Patriots Against Corporatism, a concept that would unite left-leaning and right-leaning folks into a movement that defends our freedom against “autocrats of trade.”

Addendum:

I was later sent this TikTok with more from Jon Stewart on AI.

Meta Claims Federal Trade Commission Structure is Unconstitutional

“Meta respectfully requests that this Court declare that certain fundamental aspects of the Commission’s structure violate the U.S. Constitution, and that these violations render unlawful the FTC Proceeding against Meta.” Reported by AP.

U.S. Senator Edward Markey (D) reportedly stated “In the face of a potentially massive fine, Meta’s adoption of extreme, right-wing legal theories to challenge our country’s premier consumer protection agency reeks of desperation.”

The political bullshit aside, this is a serious problem. We now have mega corporations openly attacking the legitimacy of the agencies meant to regulate them. What fucking nerve. Corporations are people? When was the last time you saw a regular person have the balls to argue in court, through a LAWYER, that an executive agency created 109 years ago is unconstitutional? Who does that? Usually the sovereign citizens. The free men of the land. The people that have no respect for the law, society, or the various mechanisms available to effect change under the current system.

The scary thing is this could fly. Legitimization and power is a tricky thing in human social dynamics. It doesn’t matter if you’re the strongest, the smartest, the bravest, or anything else. All that matters is people’s perception of you. For example, with my wild-man publishing strategy, I made it possible to get all this information out into the public in such a way that it silenced the other side’s lies. After the incident in 2021, I decided to incorporate what had happened to me into the strategy, and decided we could “coin flip” it, and if people accepted what I was writing and pumped me up with support to go fight the fight we really need to fight in our field, I could make real ground very rapidly (math omitted). The alternative was things could go very, very badly and everybody could laugh off the mentally ill man making the “ridiculous,” albeit true, claims. So I set the stage such that if things go well, yay for stenographers and small businesses. If things go poorly, you can all just outcast me so it doesn’t stain you 🤷🏻‍♂️. My strongest supporters, consciously or subconsciously, realized this is the case and threw in money and time to help — still do to this day. But there is a percentage of people who mock and deride me, mostly quietly away from my ears, but sometimes within earshot of my 1,000-person network. I’ve given up on the spitballers. They are too stupid to identify the coin flip or understand how it benefits them. There’s still a pretty huge middle ground that hasn’t heard of me or doesn’t care right now, so who really knows what the future holds?

But the point on legitimacy: Anything could’ve happened. Anything can still happen. And it stops people from opposing me publicly because in the end they’re not sure which way the coin will land. This is a microcosm of our larger political situation in the United States and this Meta situation. It’s a coin flip. If enough people, or the “correct” people (judges), accept Meta’s arguments, we may very well see a crushing blow to the FTC in our lifetime. Alternatively, people could freak on Meta for attacking their country’s legitimacy and Meta would be forced to backpedal to keep its legitimacy, if it even could. Of course, the truth is that a lot of people haven’t heard of this Meta situation or don’t care right now, so who really knows what the future holds?

This is all further complicated by the fact that humans are not persuaded by facts, they are persuaded by propaganda. Something that Martin Luther King, Jr. likely understood. Something that science is beginning to understand. This is just how our brains work. Even mine. You can build truth seeking into your worldview to help diminish susceptibility to propaganda, but in the modern world we’re bombarded with information all day, every day, so if even just 1% of that tricks you because you are very smart, you get tricked at least 3 times a year, and most of us don’t think about it.

I’ve thought a lot about power dynamics over the last few days. Our community’s very own James McAllister, someone that has worked tirelessly to bring steno into more languages and recruit more stenographers, an amazing man, wrote me something last night I’d like to close on and share with all of you, because I believe that all of you should see it:

“We Are Power!”

(Inclusive of everyone reading.)

The Plot to Control America’s Courts*

The Associated Press reported on Thursday that the companies that control the court reporting industry have been bought out by KKR and Blackstone, each now representing half of the country’s current court reporting workforce. The FTC’s Lina Khan stated in a recent press conference on the issue that court reporters were “pretty much on their own” because helping such a small industry is a “colossal waste of time and resources.”

All of this happened simultaneously with a change in state law that would allow court reporters in California to work in Texas. Opponents of the bill said that the lack of mutual reciprocity was concerning.

Local court reporter Jim Jones said “wow, my association could’ve done something about this, but all the board members were making money by selling off their businesses to the perpetrators. Who could have seen this coming?”

After the news broke, enigmatic blogger Al Anonymous posted to popular court reporting blog Steno Imperium that the wholesale purchasing of court reporting firms and ousting of professional court reporters from courtrooms was done to sway the record in big money’s favor. “Think about it,” Al wrote. “When you have transcribers that are paid pennies, desperate to keep their jobs, they’ll change anything for a buck or if they’re ordered to by their boss. Those pressures exist even in traditional court reporting circles. What hope do we have if you trade that responsibility away to a culture without ethical boundaries?”

Shortly after, a Staten Island home was raided by police and the Steno Imperium blog went offline. There are no further updates at this time.

Court Reporting Company of the Year, Veritext, through its representative Jane Doe, stated, “We are pleased with this outcome. Now nobody will have to bribe judges to win appeals. They can just bribe us. All profits matter.”

*None of this is true. It’s part of Stenonymous Satire Weekends. I used to use these to expose corporate fraud in court reporting, but this time I’m doing it as more of a cautionary revisiting of the leadership vulnerability issues that I raised in the Cost of Corruption article.

The private equity model has dug its claws into everything from court reporters to emergency medicine physician staffing. If KKR and Blackstone are giving DOCTORS a run for their money, you can bet we’re all going to feel it sooner or later. But use this as a creative thinking exercise. If you continue to allow the corporate consolidation of court reporting and the alleged massive shifting of the workforce to people they’re going to pay less and treat worse, how easy is it going to be for the wealthy to influence transcripts? At least with stenographic notes, you can’t easily alter the stenographic strokes, so any lawyer could hire another reporter to read the notes and see if stuff was left out or filled in from a source other than the stenographic notes. With audio, as we know, court audio goes missing and court administrators in other states hide it by omission. Audio’s also far easier to edit than stenographic strokes.

Till next time.

More Graphics for the Stenographic Legion

As I went into in another post, pictures get several times more engagement than text pieces. But it’s difficult to cram what’s going on into small bites.

I’m going to try a hybrid approach and run the newspaper image below as an advertisement. Hopefully it will shock consumers into action. If you’d like to contribute to the ad campaign, feel free to use the front page of Stenonymous .com to donate.

Feel free to spread these images if you think there’s somewhere they belong. I’m only one person. I can only post so much. There are like 30,000 of you.

Cartoon commissioned by Stenonymous.com to stop corporate fraud in court reporting by the Speech-to-Text Institute

Cartoon commissioned by Stenonymous.com to warn consumers about digital court reporter training by BlueLedge. DCRs have less career mobility/flexibility.

Satire created by Stenonymous.com to explain the likely outcome of corporate fraud in court reporting, which goes unabated thanks to government’s failure to enforce existing law, including the FTC and New York Attorney General.

How To Stop Corporate Fraud in Court Reporting by Joe Gratton

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.

Background to the Corporate Fraud Currently Occurring in the Court Reporting Profession

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.

Why Corporate Fraud in Court Reporting Continues Today

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?

How to Fight Corporate Fraud in Court Reporting

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.

Report Antitrust, False Advertising, or Deceptive Business Practices to the State Attorney General

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.

Report Antitrust Violations and False Advertising to Federal Trade Commission

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.

Sending Information to Local and Corporate News Outlets

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.

Contact Local Elected Officials

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.

Court Reporting is Under Attack from Those Standing to Benefit from Its Demise: It’s Time 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.

FTC to Crack Down on Companies Taking Advantage of Gig Workers

The FTC seems very conscious of gig workers, a label that freelance court reporters almost certainly fall into. Our industry was doing gig work before it was popular.

While nothing in the statement linked above specifically mentions our industry, it does show that they have a very good understanding of how markets like ours operate. It talks about the concentration of markets. In ours, this is similar to how the private equity brigade is quietly buying everybody out so that it’s an open secret they own dozens of smaller firms and are using that power to turn around and dictate rates to court reporters. This becomes illegal if and when they start agreeing with each other to fix prices on us, at least as can be inferred from this bulletin.

The FTC is more or less coming out for the workers here. That’s the “freelancers” that might be subject to the illegal conduct described below.

Court reporting companies should take note. This reads to me like a warning shot. “Clean up your markets and treat your people well, or the government gets involved.”

We made a lot of noise at the FTC back in January. While I can’t guarantee that this action is related to the concerns raised by us and other antitrust activists, I’ve got a feeling our industry is on their radar despite its size.

This also makes the deceptive actions of companies like Veritext risky. How long before consumers are aware that the company has used its market power to limit consumer choice? Can the company guarantee that not one consumer has been denied a stenographer under the guise of shortage? And if the company can, then it calls into question shortage claims, because the statistics say 20% of the jobs should be going uncovered. If I had some advice for the private equity brigade, it would be to stop squeezing the people that perform the work. It’s not a good look for you. It’s only going to shake consumer confidence when they find out that instead of helping to grow and develop the existing processes, you sought to make money off of worker turnover — virtually guaranteeing a workforce of amateurs, exactly what every lawyer asks for at their legal proceeding! Even if there isn’t some kind of suit and direct losses, the loss in reputation will be phenomenal, and in this business, reputation is everything.

For now, this is a solid case of “let’s see what happens.”

Pre-Launch: Stenonymous’s Project Phoenix

By my estimates there are 20,000 freelancers and 28,000 court reporters total in this country. We do not receive much formal legal education beyond the terminology we might hear. This has left many of us confused on our legal rights. Even the agencies that hire us, schools that train us, and the members of the bench and bar we work with every day lack basic information about important concepts we are dealing with. This puts court reporters at a serious competitive disadvantage against anyone with the funds to hire a lawyer.

It’s time for change. If you are ready for that change, please take some time to answer this 8-question survey. I encourage you to share it with anyone you feel might answer it honestly. Every single honest answer will pave the way for taking this from concept to execution. This survey allows me to gauge interest and expand the project. I will release more information as soon as it is appropriate and safe to do so.

We must keep recruiting and sharing information. But I would like to remind everyone to take care of yourself this holiday season. If the stenographic newswire or some other issue is causing you to feel down, take care of yourself. Try to reach out to a support system. Humans are communal. You are not bad, wrong, or alone. You are human. You will be okay because all feelings change over time.

A very special thank you to every single one of my readers. Your readership has made this moment possible. Let me just note that Sound Professionals’ Chris Carfagno has let me know about their latest product announcement. I have always heard good things about SP; I have a great impression of Chris and have no problem recommending them. I will state that I do not believe I’ve personally used their products. When I used to use audio, I think I was using a mic sold by Stenograph at the time, which probably explains why I don’t use audio anymore. I have also started transitioning to Eclipse in honor of the Stenograph boycott. It feels great to be learning new skills and technology in my field and I would encourage every single reporter in the industry to give it a try. Eclipse provides robust training resources on top of its Anytime Support. I even had to call them recently (weekday, business hours), and they returned my call in under three minutes. Switching isn’t easy, but Eclipse has done all it can to make my transition pleasant. I have a feeling that once I am done, I will be able to honestly tell readers which software I prefer from a performance standpoint. Stay tuned.

PS. Stenograph reached out to the Texas Court Reporters Association board. My understanding is that there will be a future meeting in 2022 where members will be allowed to ask questions. This is why I called for the boycott. The more pressure we apply, the more urgent it is for them to curry favor with our associations and make us happy. It would make me personally happy if Stenograph acknowledged that digital court reporting will likely hurt minority speakers’ transcript accuracy. I give my word that if Stenograph makes such an acknowledgment, I will call off the boycott. Until then, let’s see how far those revenues can fall for 2022 and 2023 renewals as people continue canceling support. This profession will endure. Stenograph’s endurance relies upon its service to this profession.