Litigant: He Took My Car and it Took Me Two Months to Get the Court Transcript

I had the opportunity to sit down with the transcript and audio of a small claims case and claimant Wayne G. Wilson. Throughout my time with Mr. Wilson, reviewing the audio, there were several areas where he felt colloquy and testimony was missing from the transcript. Using my general court reporting experience, I listened to the audio, and did not hear any cutaways that suggested tampering, but I am not a forensic audio expert, so take that for what it is. There were a number of off-the-record discussions, so it is possible that a situation arose that was believed to be on the record when it was actually off.

It’s a long small claims trial, 66 pages, so I think the best way to do this is to provide a brief summary, provide extra insight received from Mr. Wilson, reveal video from after the trial, present major errors, present minor errors, and then allow people to download the transcript. Before I begin, I’ll say that this is among the best digital transcripts I’ve seen (eScribers), and it points to the fact that digital can produce acceptable or close-to-acceptable transcripts. We have to grapple with the fact that stenographers make mistakes too, so I’ll try to be as fair as possible, and we’ll get through it. My first notable comment is that the $3.65 per page was charged for a 14-day turnaround according to a bill received by Stenonymous. It is notable that $3.65 is the expedited rate for New York transcripts according to Part 108.2 (b)(2)(ii). That section provides for 5 business days turnaround time. As far as I know from reading about small claims from various sources, and from my own small claims case years ago, the proceedings are recorded without an audio monitor (AAERT standard is to have a monitor) and outside vendors transcribe the matter. Succinctly, right from the start, it appears that litigants could be paying nearly 22% more for what would’ve been a stenographer’s “regular” delivery. But while the bill states 14 days, Wilson states the transcript took months to be prepared, lending credibility to reports that transcription can take much longer than stenographic court reporting.

The case is fairly simple. Mr. Wilson alleges that he brought his car to a body shop or auto business, captioned as Mike’s Roadway Collision Experts, Inc., apparently A/K/A Roadway Towing and Auto Repair. The trial took place on September 23, 2022. He wanted the car painted and serviced. According to the testimony, a verbal estimate of $1,500 or $1,800 was provided and a $500 deposit was paid. From the transcript of the proceedings, the deposit was paid on June 2, 2021, and an agreement was made that the car would be done in two weeks. Events unfolded and the shop allegedly needed more time. Wilson claims that in July he walked into the facility and saw journeymen working on the car, but rubber seals were ripped off or damaged and the interior was ripped “with reckless abandon.” Wilson further explains that he had another car in Nebraska and that he would part it and fix up the car at Roadway Towing. Ultimately, defendant representative Michael Morales states in the transcript that the initial price was $2,500, that extra repairs brought the price up to $4,500, and that the price was subsequently dropped to $3,500 or $3,000. A lien was put on the car and the dispute is ongoing. Wilson has stated he does not know how a lien was put on the car because he was never served.

Wilson has several complaints about missing information in the transcript. He remembers a discussion where the defendant representative, Michael Morales, said he didn’t know anything about the carpet, and remembers an exchange where the judge questioned further about this event, allegedly stating “you said you didn’t know… [about the carpet].” This appears nowhere in the transcript or audio that I reviewed and leads Wilson to believe that there is missing information thanks to the digitally recorded proceeding.

There were some comments on the record about the car being a rust bucket. Claimant says the car wasn’t rusted. Claimant says there was confusion at the proceeding where the car in Nebraska was mistaken for the car in New York, and that it was the car in Nebraska with some rust under the fenders, which were taken off. This goes to show that even where a transcript is decent, there can be unclear points of testimony or colloquy that make litigants question the process. Hopefully it encourages us all to do our best to ensure accurate records and increase litigant confidence.

Wayne Wilson points to page 31 in the transcript as evidence that defendant is being untruthful, stating “there was no insurance. Couldn’t put insurance because I had no license or registration. There was no accident and no reason for insurance to be taken out on the car.”

In videos obtained by Stenonymous, Mr. Wilson and an unidentified cameraman apparently confront Mr. Morales, with Mr. Wilson stating “you said the car is $1800, and I just want my car, to pay whatever I need to pay to get my possessions, bro.” Mr. Morales appears to be calling the police while being filmed, and can be heard stating “…he disturbs my shop every time he comes here. I cannot trust him, I don’t know if he has any weapons…” Mr. Morales makes it clear during the video that the matter is pending in court. Later in the video, Morales states during the event “everything was done on the car…” “…and you don’t want to pay! Now you lost the car.” He continues “you’re not getting the car until you pay me all my fees.” Wilson retorts “what’s the money?” Morales comes back “I’m not discussing anything with you.” When the unidentified cameraman says “so you stole the car,” Morales replies “yes, I stole it. That’s what you say.” Eventually the altercation devolves into Wilson yelling “how much money do you want to claim now?” Both men accuse the other of being a “liar” and “clown.” At the end of the videos, Mr. Morales is seen taking out several pictures, stating “film that, this is the car.” An abrupt end followed.

A copy of the video is viewable here.

Wilson says he’s been “baited” by Morales in the past. Asked for comments by mail, Michael Morales did not respond as of publishing.

Regardless of the merits of the dispute, at the end of the small claims case the judge noted that the case was dismissed without prejudice pending action in the Supreme Court of the State of New York.

Major Errors:
1. Page 33, Line 19, “your” should be “the.” I count this as major to the extent it could be used for impeachment in a future proceeding where the insurance issue becomes relevant. If not, minor error.
2. Page 41, Line 6, “have” should be “had.” To the extent a reader might be confused between the past and present state of the car, this can be nothing or it can be an issue.
3. Page 41, Line 7, there’s an unidentified speaker. This isn’t the transcriber’s fault, but it shows the problem with recordings. There will naturally be responses and designations that are best recorded in person, right there on the spot.
4. Page 48, Line 14, Mr. Wilson is designated but Mr. Morales was speaking. Stenographers can make this error too, but I do consider it to be major in that it can confuse a reader.
5. Page 49, Line 1, Mr. Wilson is designated but Mr. Morales was speaking.
6. Page 55, Line 9 and Line 10, “And then, *if* he — he shipped the car from Ohio. He wants me to pay for that? When I had — that was way before I even — ” Missing the “if” and the question mark does seem to change context here in a way that could matter in the future.

Minor Errors:
1. Page 3, Line 10, the word “right” is missing from “raise your right hands.”
2. Page 6, Line 2, an inaudible where no crucial information appears to be lost.
3. Page 9, Line 2, ’89 Volkswagen Cabriolet is missing its apostrophe.
4. Page 12, Line 20, the judge’s comments are omitted without an “off the record” and there is an inaudible.
5. Page 14, Line 14, an inaudible.
6. Page 15, Line 25, a period is missing between “of” and “minus.”
7. Page 16, Line 24, the word “every” should be “ever.”
8. Page 19, Line 13, the word “my” is omitted before “windshield.”
9. Page 19, Line 15, possible “style difference” rather than error. Quotes can go on what was said, but this is debated in our field.
10. Page 19, Line 16, a question mark is missing after “windshield.”
11. Page 20, Line 24, Morales appears to say “no, no” rather than “no.”
12. Page 21, Line 8. There is a small pause where Wilson believes there may be something missing. I did not hear a significant change in the background noise to indicate a skip.
13. Page 22, Line 19, “brought” should be “bought.” Wilson feels this changes the context of the answer.
14. Page 25, Line 8, “are” should be “care.”
15. Page 27, Line 14, “for” should be “to.”
16. Page 32, Line 2, “would’ve” should be “would.”
17. Page 33, Line 8, I do not believe a comma should go after “and now.”
18. Page 35, Line 2, missing a question mark.
19. Page 38, Line 19, Wilson believes they discussed the exhibits and it does not appear on the record.
20. Page 39, Line 4, “message” should be “messages.”
21. Page 40, Line 17, Wilson claims the judge said “nice picture” or “she’s hot,” and it’s not reflected in the audio or transcript. He points to this as evidence that other things could be missing.
22. Page 41, Line 13, only one “in.”
23. Page 42, Line 19, “under our” should be “under article — “.
24. Page 43, Line 9, it should be “and had shipped.”
25. Page 43, Line 10, it should say “about the car.”
26. Page 45, Line 14, inaudible. It should say “tip.”
27. Page 45, Line 18, inaudible. It should say “change.”
28. Page 46, Line 3, there’s an off-the-record discussion with no indication from the judge that they’re off record, though this may just be standard small claims practice. I don’t know because my experience with small claims is mostly limited to a case I had against State Senator Jesse Hamilton several years ago.
29. Page 46, Line 5, “he bring” should be “he brang.” This is a verbatim nitpick.
30. Page 46, Line 17, there’s a random apostrophe at the end that should be deleted.
31. Page 47, Line 8, missing comma between “Nebraska” and “not.”
32. Page 52, Line 7, missing a question mark.
33. Page 52, Line 16, Wilson recalls the judge stating that Morales “lacks candor.” This does not appear in the transcript or audio.
34. Page 56, Line 15, “judgement” should arguably be “judgment,” but this may be a style choice.
35. Page 59, Line 8, missing a comma between “again” and “whatever.”
36. Page 59, Line 13, missing a period.
37. Page 60, Line 18, inaudible. Likely should’ve been “Maspeth.”
38. Page 62, Line 7, “judgment.” Style choice.

The invoice and transcript are available to download below.

Wilson Invoice – 237d Download

Wilson Trial Transcript Download

If anybody’s still with me, this is an interesting moment for me. I am 100% for the aggressive expansion of stenography. I believe that given enough time and resources, we could do absolutely phenomenal things with court record access across the country. I will likely spend the rest of my professional career, as a stenographer at least, advocating for working reporters and looking for opportunities to bring investors to steno. But honestly, if every transcript was this good, I wouldn’t have such strong feelings about digital quality degradation from the standpoint of the people transcribing. By my review, this seems like a transcript that got adequate attention from its transcriber and proofreader. But there are inherent problems with digital recording from a time and efficiency standpoint. Two months to get a transcript is too long, excluding jurisdictional exceptions. I’d say the same with stenographers that are excessively late on their work, up to and including the times I’ve been late on my own work. We also lose words to inaudibles by doing it digitally. Luckily, no inaudible here seemed critical. Then on the efficiency angle, we’re inputting stuff at 225 WPM and cleaning it up after. They have to painstakingly transcribe, with transcription speeds generally ranging between 50 and 100 WPM. The stress on the wrists alone points to stenography being better for society.

What does the audience think?

Need A Court Reporter? Check This Out.

Nearly a decade since the stenographer shortage was forecasted, some states and municipalities are feeling the squeeze due to a shortage of qualified court reporters. While the severity of the shortage is a matter of debate, digital court reporting alternatives are proving glitchy.

The available data shows a majority of consumers want a qualified stenographic or stenomask reporter. As I’ve published on this blog in the past, not all court reporting firms are making best efforts to meet demand. So here are an industry insider’s tips for lawyers, law firms, paralegals, and secretaries on finding a stenographer.

NCRA PROLink – The National Court Reporters Association is our industry’s largest trade association and maintains a free national directory of qualified court reporters.
State associations – Many state associations keep “Find A Reporter” tools on their website. Some examples include New York, Florida, Kentucky, Illinois, and California. Even states without a Find A Reporter tool, like Texas, have a number you can call or an email you can write to.
Protect Your Record Project – PYRP is a consumer education nonprofit that has a Find A Stenographer feature.
Ask your court reporting firm if they’re using CoverCrow. The firm may simply work harder to find you a stenographer once it sees you know a thing or two about our field.
Check out stenographer social media. There are public communities where you can ask questions and someone will point you in the right direction. Ask if anyone has a list of court reporting services, like the one I am maintaining for New York.
Some firms, like REC, will attempt to help you find coverage even if they can’t cover. Don’t be afraid to ask your firm for a referral.

Anyone looking for more information on stenography as a career should see National Court Reporters Association A to Z, Project Steno, or Open Steno.

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StoryCloud Crushed in Texas

Last week word spread that a ruling had been made that the Judicial Branch Certification Commission (JBCC) in Texas should investigate StoryCloud. From my outsider point of view StoryCloud was or is one of those companies obsessed with cutting corners and/or cutting the stenographer/court reporter out of the deal. That business model is flawed not only because stenography is the most technologically advanced method of taking and transcribing the spoken word, but also from a legal standpoint. In some states, pretending to be a court reporter is simply illegal.

A great big thank you to Jo Ann Byles Holmgren, who initiated the lawsuit that led to this moment. She tells it better than I ever could. In short, the JBCC refused to investigate alleged violations of law. A writ of mandamus was filed to make the government do its job. A judge ruled the JBCC should investigate. StoryCloud more or less deleted its website. Perhaps this will be a roadmap for California, where the California licensing board refuses to protect court reporting consumers and regulate digital court reporting.

Click here for that raffle.

For anyone that wants the JBCC’s answer and plea, it’s here:

JBCC-Answer-and-Plea-to-the-Jurisdiction-4-16-21 Download

The response to the plea is here:

Response-to-Plea-to-the-Jurisdiction-3-24-22-002 Download

I’ll be adding a transcript of the hearing as soon as it’s available.

Following the ruling, most of the StoryCloud site was trashed in favor of a little blurb.

StoryCloud’s demise is not the only good news out of Texas. Mark Kislingbury claimed the new world record at Shaunise Day’s Fearless Stenographers Conference with 370 words per minute (WPM) for one minute at 95.4% accuracy.

I am always saying that if stenographers fight, they will win. Look no further than Jo Ann Byles Holmgren telling the government they’re wrong and winning. Look no further than Shaunise Day’s masterfully done and widely-acclaimed conference — a feat rarely pulled off by an individual unless it’s an industry veteran like Marc Greenberg (StenoFest) or MaryAnn Payonk (Empowerment). Look no further than Mark Kislingbury’s own personal triumph, defeating his former world record of 360 WPM. True failure is making no attempt to meet your goals. Until one is a true failure, one has a real shot at success.

NCRA Joins Battle, Calls Out Potentially Illegal Conduct

NCRA has not thrown its weight behind the allegations I made with regard to US Legal, Veritext, STTI, and an apparent scheme to exaggerate and exacerbate our stenographer / court reporter shortage in order to sell attorneys the inferior digital court reporting service. But the National Court Reporters Association has taken a very powerful step by admitting that some vendors in our industry are violating the procedural rules of some states.

Getting attorneys to stop stipulating away their consumer choice away is an outstanding move™️, and one that everyone can take part in by spreading this image. If we do not support our national association now, there may very well not be one to support in ten years. If you’re on the fence about renewing, this would be a reason to give it one more year and see what the president does.

Thank you, President Dibble and all the staff at the NCRA for not laying down on these important issues facing our field. If we can get jurisdictions to begin enforcing procedural rules, it is progress on the road of protecting consumers and the legal record.

Veritext and US Legal Lied to the Public About Stenographer Shortage

Veritext, through its puppet Cooper, and US Legal, have both been lying about the stenographer shortage. How do we know? Cooper claims the problem started 8 years ago. This is objectively false. Firms 8 years ago were saying they could not pay better rates because there was a glut of reporters. Even if you don’t believe that, stenographers are 30 years behind inflation, which does not happen if a field is experiencing a shortage.

But they’ve made it even easier to tell they are lying and committing a fraud against the legal profession. Let’s see what Cooper has to say.

As you can see, Cooper claims you would need 82,000 students to enroll in court reporting training programs nationwide in 2019 and each year following in order to overcome the deficit.

What does US Legal say?

Wow. 82,000 enrollments needed and only 2,500 enrollments occurred. Sounds like a death knell for stenography. Right?

Liars. How do we know? In 2014, BLS told us there were 21,000 court reporters. From my own independent analysis of the numbers and NCRA statistics, there are actually closer to 27,000 or 28,000 court reporters. It does not matter whose statistics you use, the conclusion they’re lying remains the same. There was no shortage crisis in 2014. We have roughly the same number of court reporters today as we did back then. The 2013 Ducker Report told us that 70% of court reporters would retire over the next 20 years (2013-2033). 70% of that 28,000 is about 20,000 reporters. Succinctly, the retirement cliff we are trying so hard to fight is about 20,000 people if you trust NCRA and about 15,000 people if you trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

About 10% of people that start steno graduate. So if we had 82,000 enrollments a year, that’s 8,200 new stenographers per year. But look at what US Legal wrote again. “We needed 82,000 new students to enroll in court reporting training programs nationwide each year to overcome the impact.” If we, in fact, have 82,000 new students each year from 2019 to 2033 (15 years), we would have 1.23 million enrollments or 123,000 graduates. Our field would be quadruple the size it is today, and if you go by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly six times larger than it was in 2014.

To combat our retirement cliff of 20,000 people between 2019 and 2033, we need a total of 200,000 enrollments. That’s about 13,400 enrollments or 1,340 graduates a year, a number six times smaller than the one proffered by US Legal and Veritext/Cooper. If you’re six feet tall, that’s like me claiming you’re 36 feet tall. If we required 8,200 stenographers per year, about half of all depositions would be going uncovered right now (8,200 x 3 years 2019-2021, a gap and demand for 25,000 stenographers by 2021.)

If you accept Owler’s revenue numbers, Veritext controls about $490 million in revenue and US Legal controls about $100 million. That’s a combined total of $590 million. If you accept the Kentley Insights 2019 Stenotype Services market research report, that’s about 20% of our field, and they are using their power to destroy it.

590 million divided by 3 billion is almost 20%

Some have said: They’re lying. So what?

Well, the market preference is stenography.

Court Reporting Industry Outlook 2013-2014 Ducker Worldwide

We know from nonprofits like Protect Your Record Project that attorneys are being told they must accept digital because no stenographer is available even after attorneys order stenographers. So we know there’s some serious false advertising going on.

Previously, I was unsure if there was collusion between major players in the field. Considering that both are using similar language it seems unlikely that both have come independently to the same incorrect conclusion. It’s not like the two firms are enemies. They’ve lobbied together before.

Alliance-of-Deposition-Firms-2 Download

It seems much more likely that following fraudster Jim Cudahy’s lead via the Speech-To-Text Institute, the two companies are involved in a plot to hurt the market and rob consumers of their choice. Quite frankly, Cudahy uses his ex-NCRA credentials to lend credibility to this fraud. After all, STTI has been instrumental in creating the propaganda ruining our field. STTI was, without a doubt, created for the sole purpose of promulgating propaganda and facilitating the ongoing fraud, against its stated mission of representing all modalities in speech-to-text transcription. STTI’s lies are also easy to see through.

A gap of 11,000 predicted by 2023 according to a recent study. What study was that? None. The year 2023 doesn’t appear in the Ducker Report. At best, these numbers are extrapolated from an outdated report that could not account for the positive recruitment impact of NCRA A to Z, Project Steno, and Open Steno — initiatives that Jim Cudahy should have known about in 2019.

Unless you believe 2 + 2 = 24, the stenographer shortage is being exaggerated and exacerbated by Veritext and US Legal Support. And now you have a brief video to help explain it directly to attorneys.

US Legal Rep: Does It Really Matter If Done Legally and Ethically…?

Lawyers, court administrators, and support staff, there is a real struggle taking place in the United States court reporting industry today. For the last eight years, we have known that there would be a stenographic court reporter shortage. We knew because our national association commissioned the 2013-2014 Court Reporting Industry Outlook by Ducker Worldwide, colloquially known as our Ducker Report. In response to that, many initiatives to recruit stenographers were born including National Court Reporters Association A to Z program, Project Steno, and Open Steno. As of today, there are far more schools for stenographic reporting in the United States than there are for transcribers. If we base our count on NCRA-approved schools against AAERT approved schools, the ratio is about 5:1. Stenographic court reporters are by far better equipped to handle the shortage. But there is a lie being sold about us, our shortage is being exaggerated and exacerbated by companies that stand to profit from it.

In our industry there are stenographic court reporters, voice writers, and digital court reporters. Stenography’s all about taking down verbatim notes on a stenotype. Voice writing is all about speaking into an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system tuned to the reporter’s voice. Digital reporting sees the reporter record the audio, which is then distributed to transcribers. About two years ago a nonprofit called STTI popped onto the field and started spreading the lie that the stenographer shortage would be nearly impossible to solve, citing the Ducker Report and “industry experts” that believed they could predict what the field would look like 20 years from now. They claimed they wanted to be an authority in all speech-to-text modalities but it’s fairly obvious to anyone paying attention that it’s an attack on consumer choice. Ducker could not have been clearer that market preference was stenography:

Court Reporting Industry Outlook 2013-2014, Ducker Worldwide. Page 6.

The conclusions STTI drew were so wrong it appears intentional. Jim Cudahy was the Executive Director of NCRA when the Ducker Report was made, and yet so many years later ended up in the STTI camp using his NCRA experience to help lend credibility to the false idea that our shortage was impossible to solve. An opportunist, he saw a chance to lead the charge into an “emerging” market and he took it, business 101. Large corporations in my field started to push the same lie, likely due to financial pressure. Veritext started trying to train lawyers to allow for digital reporting in their deposition notices, Planet Depos started to build the digital side of its business. Verbit flip flopped between telling investors there was 99% accuracy and that technology would not replace the human. The race was on to legitimize digital reporting in your minds as consumers. This is being done despite some evidence that it would put already-marginalized groups of speakers at risk and the fact that it is less efficient. Utilizing digital reporting would take the production of the transcript offshore, out of range of your subpoena power, and make it much easier for tampering to occur.

If any other field has a shortage, sellers jack up prices. In ours, despite the fact that we are behind inflation in some markets, some of our biggest sellers were now pushing for our replacement. They were telling consumers no stenographer was available, but they weren’t using any of our numerous Facebook groups, LinkedIn, or our national database of stenographers to recruit us. This lie did not go completely unchallenged. Nonprofits like Protect Your Record organized to get the word out, but they were up against corporations that, according to Owler, control a combined revenue amount of over half a billion dollars. Our field, comprised of 88% women, was being bamboozled and blitzed by the message that companies were only going digital out of need. “Of course stenographers are the gold standard, there just are not enough of them.” It was a game of messaging and perception that we were losing.

I had identified a pattern of “shifting narratives” and I used my love of reading and writing to document what I could so that the truth would not be lost. It was through this documentation that the New York State Court Reporters Association, Association of Surrogate’s and Supreme Court Reporters, and many other unions were able to give the New York State Unified Court System a warning on the dangers of automating trial transcription. This work was having a real impact and giving us the power to communicate our importance to the legal field in more concrete terms. Some of my work even got republished by NCRA in industry media and social media. I became a part of changing the false messaging and misconceptions killing my profession.

While court reporters on social media were debating whether companies were utilizing digital court reporters, I was documenting as much as I could and trying to urge my colleagues to push back. My attention was raised to US Legal Support building its digital business and how, in the Holly Moose v US Legal Case, despite 70% of its business coming from court reporters, it claimed it was not organized as a shorthand reporting firm and therefore should be immune to regulations meant to protect consumers in California. Moose lost the case from a failure to prove the injury element, but we now had valuable information, the company was willing to do and say anything to benefit itself. Sounds like a bold claim, but let’s be real, they don’t advertise themselves as “not a shorthand reporting firm.”

Remember, we were 70% of their business as of the Holly Moose case.

While outwardly professing that it wanted stenographers, it was doing everything in its power to sabotage us. Stenotrain was acquired by US Legal and apparently mismanaged into oblivion. US Legal was aggressively recruiting digital court reporters on LinkedIn as recently as May 2021, but no such effort was made to get stenographers. In July 2021, a JD Supra article was put up by the company that claimed the stenographer shortage would be nearly impossible to solve and set up an equation to give it the appearance of credibility. Their numbers were extrapolated from an eight year old report and likely outdated, but even assuming those numbers to be true, the equation, if reiterated in perpetuity, would lead to negative stenographers, which is logically impossible if you’re getting 200 new stenographers a year. The equation assumed the retirements would always be constant and did not acknowledge any of the recruitment efforts at the top of this page. I realized there was a major inaccuracy, and I started to spread the word that we could not rely on these large corporations to be honest with us or our clients.

Reality is simple: Move some numbers around and anything sounds good. But did that make it true? No.

A real breakthrough came when I got a US Legal rep to admit they had not been using NCRA PRO Link / Sourcebook, our national directory of stenographers, to recruit us. How could they dare make a claim that stenographers were not available when they were not utilizing a database consisting of roughly one third of the field? Worse than that, prior to publishing my September 9 article, court reporters reported not being contacted by larger firms. The best we had was a vague promise from Rick Levy that US Legal would look into whether it was “viable” to use the directory to recruit stenographers. After I publicly cried foul, they started to use the directory to recruit stenographers that same day! When it became clear I was going public with these allegations, they went from “looking into it” to attempting to cover up the fraud they had perpetrated on the legal community.

You have to ask yourself why a stenographer living paycheck to paycheck could figure out that the best way to recruit stenographers was to utilize free national resources and the $100 million corporation could not.

There was a part of the puzzle I had and held close to the chest. I had been given emails from the NCRA Firmowners listserv from May 2021 where representatives from US Legal got into a “debate” with a group of court reporters. In my assessment the discussion was rife with obfuscations, distractions, and gaslighting. But their Chief Strategy Officer at the time, Peter Giammanco, gave us a window into what’s going on.

Does it matter if it’s legal? Man’s on a mission.

In a wall of text designed to cast doubt in everyone reading, he writes “Does it really matter if done legally and ethically and both methods end with the same final accurate transcript?” This is an example of the straw man argument. Given that court reporters are twice as good as your average person at taking down dialects like African American Vernacular English (AAVE) even though we have no formal training in it, there is no reason to believe that anyone else will have the same final accurate transcript. These companies won’t tell you that people like Allison Hall are successfully cutting the training time of some stenographers in half or that our recruitment efforts have exploded in the last eight years, they’ll just keep repeating their narrative, and as I just showed you, they do not care if it is legal or ethical. They do not care what is true. The positions they hold are not based on merit or honest debate, they are based on a mission or agenda. This comports with anecdotes I’ve received. Here in New York an acquaintance expressed her desire to leave our field, and US Legal offered her work as a digital court reporter. Meanwhile, these companies are not telling digital reporters that stenographic reporting is an option. Concurrently, companies are telling everyone that stenography is the gold standard and there just aren’t enough of us. Given that it would take as many as eight transcribers to replace a single stenographer, one has to wonder why there was no attempt to encourage digital court reporters to join the gold standard of stenography. It’s a lie so blatant and disgusting that I regularly try reaching out to digital court reporters to let them know what’s coming.

Most of the email images are available for download here. I’d just like to point out from those emails that when dealing with the women of my profession, including the very president of our association, C. Phipps, both men were happy to go on and on bashing NCRA’s organizational approach and falsely accuse L. Freiler of libel. It’s quite telling that when I reached out, there was dead silence.

I publish the emails because this is a matter of public importance. This mission that has been admitted to, to replace stenographers with recorders, will threaten access to justice. It is also almost certainly consumer fraud. What else do you call a concerted effort to make it seem as though stenographers are not available when there has been such an abject failure to attempt to recruit any of them in addition to the incredible mistreatment of the workforce? They rely on our consumers being too busy to pay attention to the situation. Asked for comment by me via email on August 12th, Peter didn’t respond, and US Legal asked me to take them off their mailing list. They’re confident you’re not reading my work or that you will throw your hands up and say “not my problem.” They are counting on you being complicit in the suffering and struggle of our young reporters.

How did we get here? Our field is one of mostly independent contractors. Many of us meet the definition of common law employees, but there’s basically no government enforcement there and so any misclassification claims are handled on a case-by-case basis if they’re raised by the court reporter. The only one I ever read about was settled. As independent contractors, we can be considered competitors with these large firms, and therefore the institutions meant to advocate for us have their hands tied. Our court reporter associations cannot call any one company a liar, lest they be accused of group boycott. They do not allow discussion of rates, lest they be accused of anticompetitive behavior. Thrust into a field where large corporations may assert any false claim without being checked, federally-protected discussions of pay are categorically banned, and almost none of us have the legal knowledge to navigate the nuances of employment law, the stenographic reporter has a whole lot stacked against her. We are a field that largely has none of the employee protections written into law. And we have seen as a society just what corporate culture does to women who have those protections. The stenographic reporter? She prevails despite that.

I may not be a woman, but for a decade I have watched my colleagues recount mistreatment and abuse. I will not stand for it longer. If society is seeking a gender pay gap, it need not look further than this situation we find ourselves in. When our field was male dominated, it rose to such prominence and importance that it has a nonprofit in almost every state dedicated to it. As the field transitioned to majority women, rates were frozen. Adjusted for inflation, the average American worker’s pay rose about 58 cents over the last decade. Adjusted for inflation, the stenographic reporter’s pay fell over the last 30 years, in some cases, by nearly 50%. Corporations have court reporters and captioners working much harder today for far less value than 30 or 40 years ago, have made no genuine effort to fix the shortage situation, and then they have the nerve to tell courts and attorneys we aren’t available. It’s like lighting somebody’s house on fire while they’re sleeping, throwing a few droplets of water on it, and telling the firemen you did your best and there’s nobody in the house to rescue.

We need your help. We need you to take a brief but intense interest in our little field of about 30,000 so that we can continue to serve you and the public. Talk to each other about the court reporting service you’re using, talk to your court reporter, start comparing prices. There is a kind of gambling or cost shifting built into our pricing structure that makes it confusing, but ultimately consumers have the power here. You are some of the most educated people on the planet. Whether by legislation or choice, you can make a profound difference in our future. Pass this up to your bosses. Ask them to read it. Ask them whether these are the kinds of businesses we want to entrust the creation of the legal record to. If you’ve been told a stenographic reporter is not available, consider asking some more questions, because there’s a big chance you’re being lied to. Considering investing in stenographic schools or companies. Consider using PRO Link to find a reporter yourself. And of course consider introducing the recruitment resources at the top of this post to someone in your life. We need stenographic court reporters, and all indications are that we will for a long, long time. For my part in it, I will answer any questions I can at ChristopherDay227@gmail.com.

As in the Columbus Bar Lawyers Quarterly, Spring 2020, Caveat Emptor!

To My Usual Readers:

Court reporters, I stand on the backs of all of you at this point. Without your hard work I wouldn’t have been in a position to publish this story. But if we don’t get it in front of people, this is for nothing. I have made about $400 in donations these past two weeks and I will sacrifice every dime of it to boost this post. If you can afford a donation, please send $20. If you cannot, please consider sending this to lawyers and/or tagging a local bar association on the Facebook and Twitter campaign. They cannot be expected to be experts in our industry. We must guide them. Every state is important, but California, Texas, Illinois, and New York are where the majority of our business is, and where the shortage lies can hurt us most. This is not new. This is something we felt in 2019 and now have much more concrete evidence of.

It’s now clear our institutions are not equipped to handle liars, and it is therefore vital for us to seek out allies among the legal community who will see this for what it is, an attack on their choice as consumers; an attack on their clients’ access to justice; and an attack on a field of women and introverts where it was assumed nobody would have the guts to say anything because nobody has bothered to say anything for at least three decades.

I understand why freelancers are hesitant to speak up against companies. They sign your paychecks. The often unsung threat of them withholding work from you leaves you feeling powerless. But if we want a field that has integrity, then we must act now and sound the alarm so that these levels of dishonesty are never seen again. Court reporting firms need to be at least as terrified of dishonesty as we are of speaking against it. I resigned from my board position and asked you to trust me. Trust that action will spare future generations of reporters from sitting silent as their quality of life is eroded year after year. We have to break the silence on the silent problem facing our nation’s courtrooms and spend just a little energy on writing our own collective story.

John Belcher on Winning Depositions

Spreading through social media is a clip from John Belcher. He talks about how he got his dream job as a prosecutor, which allowed him to be in court almost every day and work with court reporters and other court staff. He talks about all the things that court reporters hope attorneys talk about. Some key takeaways?

Don’t do something you wouldn’t do in front of the judge. They read the transcripts.
Don’t step on the witness. Count to four before starting the next question or answer.
Speak a little slower. He suggests 70% speed.
Don’t disrespect opposing counsel, the witness, the court reporter, or other attendees.
Be careful about side discussions that take away or distract from the proceeding.
Adding fillers at the beginning of questions like “okay” or “perfect” may create bad habits for trial questioning.
Preparation is key. Expecting the court reporter to put up your exhibits for you may burn valuable time.

Don’t take it from me, check out his video on LinkedIn today! You can also see his YouTube here.

MGR Interviewed on the Treatment of Reporters

This month I had a chance to sit down with Marc Russo of MGR Reporting. Marc’s a working reporter and business owner. We got to hit a lot of topics in this video, including Marc’s history in the field, how reporter skill relates to reporter treatment, and how scheduling ahead can help reporting firms fill their clients’ needs.

Using Marc’s words, it’s about treating reporters like people instead of numbers.

Don’t take my word for it, check out the interview here!

How We Discuss Errors and Automatic Speech Recognition

As a stenographic court reporter, I have been amazed by the strides in technology. Around 2016, I, like many of you, saw the first claims that speech recognition was as good as human ears. Automation seemed inevitable, and a few of my most beloved colleagues believed there was not a future for our amazing students. In 2019, the Testifying While Black study was published in the Language Journal, and while the study and its pilot studies showed that court reporters were twice as good at understanding the AAVE dialect as your average person, even though we have no training whatsoever in that dialect, the news media focused on the fact that we certify at 95 percent and yet only had 80 percent accuracy in the study. Some of the people involved with that study, namely Taylor Jones and Christopher Hall, introduced Culture Point, just one provider that could help make that 80 percent so much higher. In 2020, a study from Stanford showed that automatic speech recognition had a word error rate of 19 percent for “white” speakers, 35 percent for “black” speakers, and “worse” for speakers with a high dialect density. How much worse?

The .75 on the left means 75 percent. DDM is the dialect density. Even with fairly low dialect density, we’re looking at over 50 percent word error rate.

75 percent word error rate in a study done three or four years after the first claim that automatic speech recognition had 94 percent accuracy. But in all my research and all that has been written on this topic, I have not seen the following point addressed:

What Is An Error?

NCRA, many years ago, set out guidelines for what constituted an error. Word error guidelines take up about a page. Grammatical error guidelines take up about a page. What this means is that when you sit down for a steno test, you’re not being graded on your word error rate (WER), you’re being graded on your total errors. We have decades of failed certification tests where a period or comma meant a reporter wasn’t ready for the working world yet. Even where speech recognition is amazing on that WER, I’ve almost never seen appreciable grammar, punctuation, Q&A, or anything that we do to make the transcript readable. It’s so bad that advocates for the deaf, like Meryl Evans, refer to automatic speech recognition as “autocraptions.”

Unless the bench, bar, and captioning consumers want word soup to be the standard, the difference in how we describe errors needs to be injected into the discussion. Unless we want to go from a world where one reporter, perhaps paired with a scopist, completes the transcript and is accountable for it, to a world where up to eight transcribers are needed to transcribe a daily, we need to continue to push this as a consumer protection issue. Even where regulations are lacking, this is a serious and systemic issue that could shred access to justice. We have to hit every medium possible and let people know the record — in fact, every record in this country — could be in danger. The data coming out is clear. Anyone selling recording and/or automatic transcription says 90-something percent accuracy. Any time it’s actually studied? Maybe 80 percent accuracy, maybe 25; maybe they hire a real expert transcriber, or maybe they outsource all their transcription to Kenya or Manila. Perception matters; court administrators are making industry-changing decisions based on the lies or ignorance of private sector vendors.

The point is recording equipment sellers are taking a field which has been refined by stenographic court reporters to be a fairly painless process where there are clear guidelines for what happens when something goes wrong, adding lots of extra parts to it, and calling it new. We’ve been comparing our 95 percent total accuracy to their “94 percent” word error rate. In 2016, perhaps there were questions that needed answering. This is April 2021, there’s no contest, and proponents of digital recording and automatic transcription have a moral obligation to look at the facts as they are today and not what they’d like them to be.

If you are a reporter that wants more information or ideas on how to talk about these issues with clients, check out the NCRA Strong Resource Library, and Protect Your Record Project. Even reporters that have never engaged in any kind of public speaking can pick up valuable tips on how to educate the public about why stenographic reporting is necessary. Lawyers, litigants, and everyday people do not have time to go seeking this information; together, we can bring it to them.

Aggressive Marketing — Growth or Flailing?

During our Court Reporting & Captioning Week 2021 there were a couple of press releases and some press releases dressed up as journalism all about digital recording, automatic speech recognition, and its accuracy and viability. There’s actually a lesson to be learned from businesses that continually promise without any regard for reality, so that’s what I’ll focus on today. I’ll start with this statement. We have a big, vibrant field of students and professionals where everyone that is actually involved in it, from the smallest one-woman reporting armies to the corporate giants, says technology will not replace the stenographic court reporter. Then we have the tech players who continuously talk about how their tech is 99 percent accurate, but can’t be bothered to sell it to us, and whose brilliant plan is to record and transcribe the testimony, something stenographers figured out how to do decades ago.

Steno students are out there getting a million views and worldwide audiences…
And Chris Day? He’s posting memes on the internet.

You know the formula. First we’ll compare this to an exaggerated event outside the industry, and then we’ll tie it right into our world. So let’s breeze briefly over Fyre Festival. To put it in very simple terms, Fyre Festival was an event where the CEO overpromised, underdelivered, and played “hide the ball” until the bitter end. Customers were lied to. Investors were lied to. Staff and construction members were lied to. It was a corporate fiasco propped up by disinformation, investor money, and cash flow games that ended with the CEO in prison and a whole lot of people owed a whole lot of money that they will, in all likelihood, never get paid. It was the story of a relative newcomer to the industry of music festivals saying they’d do it bigger and better. Sound familiar?

As for relative newcomers in the legal transcription or court reporting business, take your pick. Even ones that have been incorporated for a couple of decades really aren’t that impressive when you start holding up the magnifying glass. Take, for example, VIQ Solutions and its many subsidiaries:

I promise to explain if you promise to keep reading.

VIQ apparently trades OTC so it gives us a rare glimpse of financial information that we don’t get with a lot of private companies. Right off the bat, we can see some interesting stuff. $8 million in revenue with a negative net income and a positive cash flow. Positive cash flow means the money they have on hand is going up. Negative income means the company is losing money. How does a company lose money but continue to have cash on hand grow? Creditors and investors. When you see money coming in while the company is taking losses, it generally means that the company is borrowing the money or getting more cash from investors/shareholders. A company can continue on this way for as long as money keeps coming in. Companies can also use tricks similar to price dumping, and charge one client or project an excessive amount in order to fund losses on other projects. The amazing thing is that most companies won’t light up the same way Fyre did, they’ll just declare bankruptcy and move on. There’s not going to be a big “gotcha” parade or reckoning where anyone admits that stenographic court reporting is by far the superior business model.

This is juxtaposed against a situation where, for the individual stenographic reporter, you’re kind of stuck making whatever you make. If things go badly, bankruptcy is an option, but there’s never really an option to borrow money or receive investor money for decades while you figure it out. Seeing all these ostensible giants enter the field can be a bit intimidating or confusing. But any time you see these staggering tech reveals wrapped up in a paid-for press release, I urge you to remember Fyre, remember VIQ, and remember that no matter what that revenue or cash flow looks like, you may not have access to the information that would tell you how the company is really doing.

This also leads to a very bright future for steno entrepreneurs. As we learn the game, we can pass it along to each other. When Stenovate landed its first big investor, I talked about that. Court reporting and its attached services, in the way we know them and love them, are an extremely stable, winning investment. Think about it. Many of us, when we begin down this road, spend up to $2,000 on a student machine and up to $9,000 on a professional machine and software. That $11,000 sinkhole, coupled with student loan debt, grows into stable, positive income. So what’s stopping any stenographic court reporting firm from getting out there and educating investors on our field? The time and drive to do it. Maybe for some people, they just haven’t had that idea yet. But that’s where we’re headed. I have little doubt that if we compete, we will win. But we have to get people in that mindset. So if you know somebody with that entrepreneurial spirit, maybe pass them this post and get them thinking about whether they’d like to seek investors to grow their firm and reach. Business 101 is that a dollar today is more valuable than a dollar tomorrow. That means our field can be extremely attractive to value investors and be a safe haven from the gambling money being supplied to “tech’s” habitual promisors.

Know a great reporting or captioning firm that needs a spotlight? Feel free to write me or comment about them below. I’ll start us off. Steno Captions, LLC launched off recently without doing the investor dance. That’s the kind of promise this field has. I wish them a lot of luck and success in managing clients and training writers.