As posted to social media, it appears that Utah Senator John Johnson, working with Libertas, is moving to remove licensing for four professions, among them, court reporting.
Our sources say this is on the radar in Utah and that it’s been tabled for the next legislative session.
P.S.
As I admitted on social media, I’ve been on both sides of the licensing argument. As a young New York reporter I thought licensure was necessary because the rates were awful. As a still-young New York reporter, I just think, well, what’s the harm? They want to transform how we do things, cool. Stick me in a senior role and let someone else worry about the transcript. But then I feel guilty because I’ve just joined the “pull the ladder up behind me” crowd.
Of course the end goal would be perfection enough to do away with human oversight.
But we’re a long way off. We’ve learned that in the best of conditions with the best recording equipment money can buy it can be hard to accurately capture a moment in time. But “good enough” is also a threat to stenographer seats. I think we’re kidding ourselves to think otherwise. And make no mistake that it’s good enough. It’s outperformed me. I’ve outperformed it. Does it get better every day? Some seem to think so. But for those tense moments where something cannot be captured correctly, do you trust its judgment?
That’s what the market’s answering every day and a big part of why we’re still here in 2026.
I was directed to the Department of Consumer Affairs in California regarding the Court Reporter Board licensing fiasco. I wrote them a fun little comment. Because why not? It’s already public knowledge that the licensing board violates the law and fails to protect consumers. I also submitted something to the Auditor. But I’m not holding my breath. New York, California, and Texas all have government agencies that have ignored various complaints for various lawbreaking behaviors. In Texas, a writ had to be filed to get the government to follow the law. In California, the Board just denied they had any responsibility to protect the consumer under the law. It’s like the government’s version of being a sovereign citizen. Make shit up until you’re forced to follow the law. That should give the public confidence in its public institutions.
If you have more knowledge about that member of the licensing board rumored to have sold their business to one of the lawbreaking companies, you should probably write the Auditor. I just don’t have my notes on that anymore, so I’m not very much help to the Auditor.
This really isn’t my domain. I’m over 2,000 miles away. But if you’re in California, it might be beneficial to stop trying to work with the Board and start looking at how to completely restructure it and sweep whoever’s on it out. They deserve as much for their systemic failure.
Maybe go to your legislature and just be like “yeah, the lawbreaking companies got together under a fraud nonprofit to push misinformation, then this idiot with a blog outed them for fraud and the nonprofit deleted itself from the internet, then licensing boards in several states miraculously stopped doing their job, then our licensing board decided it wants to legalize the illegal behavior and is probably going to use you all to do it. Is this copacetic?”
Text from the complaint of a person kind enough to share theirs, since it was more professional than mine:
Please briefly describe your complaint:
I am a longtime California Certified Shorthand Reporter and would like to remain anonymous due to overall lack of trust of the current Court Reporters Board.
In short, I strongly believe the California Court Reporters Board is in need of an audit.
We currently have unlicensed individuals all over the state calling themselves court reporters and practicing without a license. When these people get reported to the CRB, the Board’s standard response is that the CRB has no oversight of non-licensees.
So, there is only oversight and/or consequences for licensees while it’s a free-for-all with the CRB for anyone else who wants to pretend they’re a court reporter. This in no way protects the consumer.
The other Boards who serve under the Department of Consumer Affairs do not make similar claims. They don’t protect unlicensed individuals working in their professions. For example: “Acting as a contractor without a license is a crime (Business and Professions Code 7028). Those convicted risk up to six months in jail, a fine of up to $5,000 and administrative fines of up to $15,000.”
If it is true that the CRB can do nothing about unlicensed individuals practicing in the field (creating legal transcripts used in civil and criminal cases), then why have steps not been taken to rectify this? Allowing unlicensed digital court reporters to produce transcripts is clearly not protecting the public.
I read an article by an attorney who indicated that she didn’t realize her reporter was an unlicensed digital reporter and not a CSR until she got the transcript back with a 60-page chunk missing. This was a domestic violence restraining order case, and the missing testimony directly caused a ruling by the judge that was not in favor of the alleged victim; yet this digital reporter continues to practice without consequence while a licensed CSR in the same position would surely have been disciplined if not lost their license.
Note that a “digital reporter” is not licensed and is someone who records proceedings with a recorder and then sends the recording out to be typed. In the case of the 60-page chunk of transcript missing, the recording was sent to several different people to type portions of, with office staff then inadequately attempting to assemble the pieces of transcript.
Again, the CRB as it stands is not protecting the public.
Thank you for your consideration of an audit of the California Court Reporters Board.
Date
Date is ongoing.
What do you want the person or company to do to resolve your complaint?
As requested above, a full audit of the CRB and its practices, particularly with reference to the lack of oversight of unlicensed individuals and there being no consequence for practicing without a license.
———————
The text of my comment to the Department of Consumer Affairs:
The Court Reporter board regulates court reporting / stenographers. When companies began illegally using what’s known as digital court reporters, the board claimed that it couldn’t do anything about digital because it didn’t have jurisdiction over them. This is very much like if someone was unlicensed to be a doctor and was practicing medicine, but they called themselves a digital doctor, so the licensing board was just like “we don’t have jurisdiction” and continued to allow the illegal activity. Now the board wants to bring digital reporters under its licensing. So this is like if we made a special exception to make the digital doctors legal. Maybe you guys should look into whether past or present board members sold their business to the companies illegally using digital. Might be a little something to do with why they’re shirking their responsibilities. Not to be too forthright, but the companies illegally using digital used a fraud nonprofit to pump the market with misinformation called the Speech-to-Text Institute. That nonprofit was later sued for its anticompetitive conduct and shut down its website. The point I’m trying to convey here is that the median bribe in this country is $60,000 and these companies have millions of dollars, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there’s been a little money exchange to make sure people look the other way.
Interestingly enough, this happened in Texas too. A writ had to be filed against the licensing authority out there to get them to investigate StoryCloud’s illegal activity. Coincidence that the two states with the strongest court reporter licensing in the nation tie a blindfold around their eyes and stick their head up their ass to avoid doing their job? Nope.
My great big suggestion is put some systems in place to avoid the appearance of your licensing boards being dirty and bribed.
(I even linked them to my article. How kind of me.)
To their credit, I was responded to, which is more than I get from a number of governmental authorities in New York when I write to them about people abusing parking placards to park in front of schools for disabled children.
Of course, to me, it’s all nonsense, but I’ll keep an open mind.
Came to my attention that under 2422 California test takers were allowed to review their dictation licensing test. At least one source has stated that since 2020, CSR candidates have not been entitled to review their test.
Since the CA CSR Board has been violating the law for at least four years, they’ve decided to correct that by changing the rules so that they simply won’t allow people to review their test. Ana Fatima Costa is spearheading some activism related to this. Allowing our students to review errors can only improve pass rates. If you want to help, go take a look now. This is really something that you want all your state legislators and the people on Ana’s list to be looking at, because it’s a good example of how government should not be doing its business. It’s shady. I’ll demonstrate how:
Word on the street is that this is about preventing cheating. Oh, I’m glad that we’re worried about cheating suddenly after all these decades and not the alleged shortage of doom that allegedly requires the wholesale replacement of stenographic court reporters with digital court reporters. It’s not our fault you only have 20 tests in the vault and can’t be bothered to periodically write more. Sounds like you manufactured a problem to get a desired result, at least to anyone that thinks about it for more than five seconds.
The CA CSR Board is the poster child for my corruption arguments. Let’s put it this way: If the Board is 100% uncorrupted, they’ve done everything in their power to look as dirty as possible. The CA CSR Board is known for failing to protect consumers and crushing working people. If you’re using all of your regulatory power, authority, and trust to make it harder for us to license actual court reporters, laying down the law on solo practitioners, and hurriedly looking away when the multiverse of corporate America breaks the law by using digital, then you are effectively handicapping our side of the market and the motivations for that become fair game for discussion. Yeah, I get it, it’s pretty lucrative for the government to ignore these things, let these businesses spend some money trying their luck at taking that work off the plates of California CSRs using the companies’ illegal business models, and take a slice every time a dollar gets spent in that competitionwhile simultaneously milking the CSRs for their dues. Does that make it right? Does that mean that we should treat corporations better than people wherever it’s economically convenient?
First Amendment was made for issues like ours.
P.S.
Excerpt from a letter detailing the experience of a California CSR candidate submitted by a Stenonymous source.
I know digital court reporters can’t be court reporters in California. I use the verbiage I do for the standardization of language and so that when people find out digital court reporting is a scam, they don’t get confused! It also picks up better in search engines. It’s like the typing/writing thing. We can’t force the whole world to use the language we want them to use. We can, however, stand up and speak out against state-sanctioned lawbreaking. We can share why we prefer the language we prefer.
I’ve been told a participant in a public hearing was muted because they asked when survey results from a survey done by the board would be published. I sure wish I could use my government-granted powers to silence people that ask questions I don’t like. That’s the American dream, baby.
If any of you have lawyer friends, maybe it’s time for us to crowdfund some writs, or lobbying, or whatever makes us enough of a headache that the games and obvious deflections end. I guarantee you that your success is directly related to how many people you can get to take action.
Attention California consumers: In the court reporting profession today there are three modalities for recordation, stenotype stenography, voice writing, and digital recording. In California, the stenographers are among the most heavily-regulated court reporters in the country. To give an example of this, in California, it is mandatory to have a Certified Shorthand Reporter (CSR) license to practice shorthand reporting. Now let’s juxtapose that against New York, where the CSR license is a voluntary thing that simply allows one to hold themselves out as a CSR and is not required to practice court reporting.
Recently there has been a debate about whether the licensing board has the ability to regulate digital court reporting, someone going in and recording testimony instead of stenotyping it. The licensing board of California decided not to protect consumers and stated it could not regulate digital. Its failure to regulate anything but stenographers means that consumers that are not using stenographers are facing a Wild West, caveat emptor-type reality.
The reason for this, though unstated, is pretty clear. My field is facing massive corporate consolidation and the big business end of things wants to start replacing stenographers with digital reporters. Licensing boards in California and Texas have been happy to let them do it. In Texas, a writ actually had to be filed to get the government to enforce the law.
There have even been rumors that at least one member of the California licensing board sold their business to a larger company around the time the decision was made not to regulate digital court reporters. When alerted to this fact, the Attorney General of California claimed it could not investigate because they’re responsible for defending the board. So basically the regulatory authority there to protect consumers isn’t protecting consumers, and the regulatory authority meant to enforce the law isn’t willing to take a glance at it. A nation of laws that don’t mean anything.
Letter from the California Attorney General after I raised concerns that something questionable might be happening in the California Licensing Board.
A new law has been passed, non-CSR firms can register with California and the California CSRs that work with non-CSR firms can face enforcement action if that firm isn’t registered with California. Basically the working people, the stenographers, are required to know if a firm is a CSR-owned firm or not, and everybody else is off the hook. You can read more about the situation from Protect Your Record Project’s announcement below.
There are a few ways to look at the situation. Many of us do not believe digital is the equivalent of stenography, but let’s accept the equivalency argument for a second. This would be like California regulating personal injury attorneys and not commercial claims, then turning around and telling personal injury attorneys that they could face enforcement action if they work with a firm owned by someone that is not a personal injury attorney. It’s basically splitting hairs in the direction of allowing the unregulated practice of court reporting while limiting court reporters’ economic opportunities to only certain firms.
At this point, California consumers would do well to ask the board what there is even a court reporting board for. Stenographer misses a word? You have the full backing of the government to come down on that person. Digital recorder botches a transcript? Tough luck, you’re on your own. Does this happen in other licensed fields? Can I just claim I’m a “digital doctor” and bypass California’s medical licensing laws?
I look on with a mix of mirth and despair as the government regulations meant to protect consumers are weaponized against my fellow court reporters. This continues for as long as California attorneys and consumers allow. The government has made one thing clear: It does not intend to meaningfully protect consumers.
Addendum:
A reader pointed out that I misread the information. My article previously stated that non-CSR firms were not required to register. I am now informed that they are required to register. That is an important distinction and so I have updated this post.
