To Our Litigators

RE: Stenographic Reporters

If you’re reading, I’m going to hope you’re the kind of lawyer that we all look up to. You’re responsive to clients, you’re honest with potential clients about what you can do for them, and you’re ready when it comes to filings, motions, discovery, or trial. Maybe you’re the one at your firm tailoring your service to your client’s budget, or maybe you oversee someone doing that for you. But the end is the same, giving the consumer the best value for the budget.

That’s what urges me to write today. There has been a lot said about “AI” transcription and digital recording versus stenographic reporting. There has been a lot said in my field about the Ducker Report and a forecasted shortage of court reporters. Some brave companies are turning to remote reporting, where legal, to allow a stenographer to appear remotely. Other courageous reporters are doubling their workload to meet your demand.

There is one solution that’s come out known as digital reporting. The main idea is that someone will record the proceedings, run it through a computer program, and then someone will fix up what the computer does. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is what we stenographers actually do. The major difference is we are stenographically recording (typing!) every word, and the computer is accepting that stenographic word and turning it into your English transcript.

The bottom line is: It simply ends up being more efficient to do it our way. One person, perhaps two, can stenographically record and transcribe an entire proceeding and have it to you that night or the next morning. For your dollar, there’s just not better value. Stenographers type four to five times faster than your average typist, so to finish the same proceeding, we are talking about four or five times the usual turnaround time for transcribers, or four or five times the staffing. Take the number of stenographers you have today, and multiply that number by 3, 4, or 5. If you think there’s a shortage and/or workflow issues now, imagine a world where you need five court reporters to put together your one proceeding. Imagine a world where the transcript is questioned and you need to bring those people in to testify instead of one stenographer.

Trust me when I say the firms switching to digital reporting or demanding you change your deposition notices to allow digital reporters are not saving you or your clients any money. Ever notice how there are almost never prices posted online for services? That’s because most of these companies act as middlemen. They make an agreement with you or the insurer, and then they make an agreement with us, the stenographers or transcribers, and they keep what’s in the middle. It’s really that simple. I would not be surprised, as a stenographer, to learn that I only made $3.25 a page on some of my old depositions with 25 cents per copy while the agency I worked with charged whatever they charged. 5? 6? 7? I don’t know. I only know that when I consulted a lawyer, the lawyer wanted almost 15 dollars a page if my case went to depositions.

I’ve been a stenographer for a long time, and I see two roads that you, the litigators, may take. You can let the sellers decide the market, and eventually stenographers won’t be an option, or you can make a sustained demand for a stenographic reporter at every dep. When lawyers start turning to direct market apps like Appear Me, Expedite Legal, and NexDep to get stenographers, those agencies pushing the digital and AI will jump on board and do whatever it takes to increase your supply of stenographers and get your business back.

Stenographers have been serving the legal community for decades. There’s been a push in recent years to do away with us because of a public perception that our methods are antiquated. Ironically, the people leading this charge are the companies we trusted with selling our services. So to our litigators: You now know all I know, and the customer is always right. Which will you choose?

Value Gradients for the Stenographer in Training (180+ WPM)

In this article we’ll get down to the different kinds of services offered by freelancers and some officials. This’ll be for the benefit of the relatively new and uninitiated. If you’ve already obtained some mastery over the basics of steno industry or if you’re brand new, this really won’t be for you because you already know about it or are just too new to be worrying about it. I say if you’ve completed 80 percent of a 225 words-per-minute program, 180 WPM, this is probably a worthwhile read.

So there are different things in this field that add value to your work as a stenographer. While we can’t necessarily get behind the subjectivity theory, value is, to a great degree, subjective. This means that simple things like writing a professional cover letter, resume, or contract pitch can make you, at 180 WPM, more valuable than a person who can get 225 WPM but can’t really nail the grammar on anything. Consider the first gradient in your whole career to be learning to write professionally, and always look to improve that writing.

Then we get to the simple things offered by stenographers that pull in more money, typically called upcharges. Often markets are different, and “employers” may even tell you that “they don’t pay for that.” This is a tactic to get you more comfortable with doing the work for less. If there are more stenographers willing to do the work for less, the “employer” has leverage over the stenographers that know about these upcharges, and can bypass them and have you do it for less money. Work smarter, not harder, and consider asking several reporters in your market about the types of upcharges they get. Here are some common ones: Medical testimony, expert testimony, video testimony. Some charge up to 5 percent more for late night work. Some even add an interpreted testimony fee to make up for the time lost to interpreted depositions, which are often fewer pages per hour.

Related to what we just went into is confidence. There is a level of unease that comes with being new. You will probably be pressured to take jobs for less than they are worth. Immediately out of training, it’s agreeable to take all you can get. That said, after a couple of months, after you’re used to getting the transcripts out and doing the work, have the confidence to talk to some other reporters in your market and learn more about what’s expected locally. Don’t talk to one or two — talk to as many as you can. One reporter may say don’t get out of bed for less than a thousand. Another reporter may say hey, if you can rack up 6 busts in a day, it’s okay money for zero work. Have the confidence to take all the different types of jobs just mentioned. In my “class” of reporters there was a very strong fear about taking medical testimony. It had been hyped up as this impossible thing. To be clear, medical words can be unique or difficult, but having the confidence to go out there and do it makes you a better writer with the marketable trait of being able to take any kind of job. There is value in a person that can be sent to any type of job.

Let’s touch on some more common upcharges. Expedite. What is an expedite? That depends. When I started, a “regular” was 2 weeks. Anything quicker was some kind of expedite. Of course the rule follows: The faster they want it, the more they should pay. Nowadays, agencies are pushing people to make 7 or 5 days the regular. In my mind, this is much too short, and it devalues the worth of an expedite. It’s what people who play strategy games would call “a stupid move.” That said, if you can get your work out faster than “regular”, that adds value.

Daily. What’s a daily? You take the job, go home, transcribe, and the job is done by the next day. If you can do a daily, again, there’s value there. Not every single stenographer or transcriber can fulfill a daily. Indeed, to fulfill a daily, multiple transcriptionists have to be put on the same job sometimes. If you can do a daily, you can probably make a thousand or more dollars in a day without being realtime because daily jobs can be worth double a regular in freelance.

Immediate. Immediate is basically you finish the deposition and within 30 minutes to an hour it is ready to go out. The bottom line is the client is getting the transcript pretty quick after the deposition ends. Only the best reporters with 99.9 percent accuracy or a phenomenal scopist behind them can achieve these kinds of levels.

Rough. Rough is basically you go through the untranslates and fix up the transcript before sending it out with the understanding the finished transcript comes later. A rough can be a dollar or more per page in upcharges because it’s basically like an easier immediate. Proceed with caution: Many reporters go out there and produce roughs that are basically unusable. Some of my own roughs have been pretty bad. Always seek to improve and get out the best roughs so that lawyers are encouraged to use this service.

Realtime. Maybe you’ve heard of realtime reporting. It’s among the largest upcharges because these reporters have their words coming out on a laptop or tablet screen for the client. I haven’t personally done realtime, but I know that these reporters can command a dollar or more per realtime hookup on top of their daily, medical, or other upcharges. Why are these upcharges important? More money per page equals fewer pages to make the annual income you want to make. We’ve got over 900 mathematical calculations to show this off.

Now that we’ve been through these different levels of skill, let’s look at how it’ll apply in the real world. Certifications exist, and they are important. That said, in many states and municipalities you can offer these services without the certification. What does this mean? It means that the limiting factor is you. It’s your skill and comfort level. It’s your willingness to go out there and say yes, I will take a medical. It’s the desire to get your skill level to a place where you can realistically offer these things. Your value, to a great degree, is dictated by you.

You will go out there and have bad jobs. There will be hard days. There will be times you feel shaky about the service you’re providing. There will be “employers” who make you feel replaceable. Just keep improving. Know where you are at. Be open to feedback, but don’t live by it. Learn from every mistake. If you are in training and know you are able to produce a daily transcript already — great! Don’t let anybody take that away from you. Don’t accept, as fact, that anybody can do it or that nobody charges for that. The freelance world — the business world — is a tough one. There are buyers and sellers, and the buyers will always be looking for a way to knock you down on the price. Remember these gradients in value, and remember that the more of them you achieve, the more you have something to sell.

Persuasive Writing Tips For The Stenographic Legion

I’ve received some phenomenal drafts and works from stenographers around the country. This burst of activity and people creating stuff to get each other talking and educate attorneys is great. Let’s all keep it up — and for those who haven’t yet jumped in, definitely do, there is a spot for you.

Dozens of stenographers are creating blog posts and informational flyers for attorneys, and now is the time to help each other with that.

Some common writing tips that I’ve used in my most popular posts, and what I hope will make everything you all write popular:

Narrow the scope. Too many topics at once gives the reader mental overload.
KISS your work. Keep it simple, silly. Big or sophisticated words are great, but if your piece reads like a technical textbook or manual, it will only attract readers who like that.
Organize. By far my own weakest point. Try to make information easy to access and process. The order you do things can make your piece look professional or chaotic.
Think of the audience. A lot of us are writing informational pieces for lawyers or law firms. These are highly intelligent people and we can expect them to understand what we have to say. But they’re also very busy people, meaning we can expect them to crumple up and throw away anything that doesn’t get to the point pretty fast.
The less you write in one piece, the more people remember and/or misremember! We don’t really get to talk much on the job so when we sit down to write we can get verbose. Verbosity isn’t inherently bad but can turn audiences off.
With the above in mind, writing different pieces targeted at different audiences can increase your impressions and impact the spread of your message.
Sales and Persuasion. A lot of what we put out is trying to convince people stenography is better. It boils down to a sales pitch with some facts and/or law thrown in. Just bear in mind that anything you state as fact ought to be fact, and anything you state as opinion ought to be opinion, or you may find your enemies discrediting you with your own words.
What you write can be as important as what you don’t.
Opinions shape markets. The best thing you can sell is an experience. If you make reviewing your writing a pleasant experience, people will come back. Same for steno. Sell it as a positive experience to use a stenographer — because it is!
The cheap v. good argument. We are throwing ourselves under the bus if we reinforce the notion that audio recording is cheaper than stenography. Stenographers in certain places around the country have worked for 3.65 a page or less. That boils down to close to 140 an hour. Even the most boastful transcription companies like Rev have said a dollar a minute, sometimes with upcharges for multiple speakers or terminology easily doubling the price. That 120 v 140 doesn’t impress me, and probably doesn’t impress you either. Let’s face facts, we’re better quality, same price, and any alleged savings are not going to the lawyers that purchase our time and talent. Succinctly, take note of people like Milestone, who talk about how inexpensive they are, but as of writing, don’t bother to put their price up. They’re not cheaper. They’re playing the same middleman game of hiding the price to cut the most profit from the middle.

Now we run through a few quick examples. If you are designing a class for lawyers or stenographers to take, then that is a time when you want to expound and get in depth. You’ll have, more or less, a captive audience, and it’s okay to get to the details in. If you are designing a flyer or brochure, you want it to be pretty short and sweet, relevant law and how it impacts a business or individual.

A last and final note: What you write is going to get out there. You will likely have fans and haters. What you have to remember is that if your work is receiving this attention, it is making an impact. Even if it is not yet receiving this attention, content creation takes time and energy. If you feel yourself burning out, it’s good to take a break. Feel free to jot some notes about what you’d like to write on or improve during your break, but don’t feel forced to continue a strenuous campaign of information dispersal while your energy is low.

All that’s left is to say get out there and show the world what you’ve got. Whatever your project, good writing can give it the boost it needs.

The Empty City Strategy

Everywhere you look there’s an article about digital reporting. It’s the future! It’s coming! Abandon all hope ye who use steno! We’ve even had articles claim AI is 95 percent accurate or more.

You know what’s missing? Evidence of these claims. Everything is behind a pay wall, a service, a guarantee, a private company. We need to acknowledge that in this country, companies are generally allowed to lie. Anything short of serious fraud is probably not getting investigated. Anything short of serious damage is probably not being sued for.

Anyone can make a claim. Over 400 people read this blog in the last eight days. You have no evidence what we’re telling you is true. You either believe us or leave it. There’s no penalty for us if we’re lying. Decide for yourself while we get into the Empty City Strategy.

The idea is simple enough. When facing an overwhelming force, throw open the gates of the city, sit up in a tower like Zhuge Liang, and start playing your lute. Your enemies, so convinced that there’s a trap waiting for them, flee or fall back. The concept is one of deception and demoralization, and it’s something you see in business and politics.

If a potential opponent is demoralized, they will not fight you. How many people do not start a business because there’s already a huge company in that field that they feel they cannot compete with? If we say to you right now that we have a great idea — let’s begin a business selling burgers and fries — you’d laugh. Right? No! We cannot do that! There are too many big players in the field! McDonald’s would crush us, they’ve been around since 1955. Look at Shake Shack. Born 49 years later, and yet still managed to carve out some of the market for itself.

Nobody knows what the future holds. Giant companies go bankrupt all the time. Bear Stearns, survivor of the Great Depression, a company that had some $9 billion in revenue and 13,000+ employees worldwide, died thanks to the Great Recession. The case we are trying to make here is simple: Don’t be scared of the empty city. If someone is shouting out about how something is the next big thing and how everybody should jump aboard or be left behind, consider their motives, fears, and evidence.

We can go on and on about how ATMs replaced bank tellers, self-service kiosks replaced cashiers, cars replaced horses — or we can realize that this industry is just a little different. Many of us are reliant on these companies to bring us work, but we are not their employees. We are not disposable.

We have the option and opportunity to compete with them directly. It’s as simple as telling the law office secretary you take depos independently. The major startup costs for producing work, steno machine, CAT software, laptop, and printer are largely borne by us anyway. It’s not like your CVS where the employee has no hope of buying a storefront, or your teller that can’t afford to open a bank, or your horse that — well, you get the idea. We pay out the cost of doing business at the very start of our careers. Isn’t that worth thinking about?

So if you’re a stenographer and you’re on the fence about this field because people around you are telling you the future is bleak or uncertain, you can be certain that’s only one perspective. That’s one side of the story. For a field that’s been “dying” for the last fifty years, there’s a whole lot of businesses out there trying to get a bigger slice of the pie and have you forfeit your own. And if you want the unbridled truth, you’ll have to stop taking people’s word for it.

Shortage Solutions 4: Direct Market Apps

So by now everybody knows the Uber story. Basically replaced or pushed on the conventional taxi company and made it so that you no longer had to call a company or hail a cab, but could just click in on your phone and get door-to-door service.

Expedite is kind of like that for legal service professionals, AKA stenographers. Court Buddy is kind of like that for lawyers. With more industries trying the direct market app approach, from food delivery to barbers, we are seeing people really give the direct market apps a try and it might be worth looking into as a potential shortage solution. Like other direct market apps, there’s bound to be competition and a growing number of apps to fill that void.

A word of caution: These direct market apps are only good for us if the players know their own market. Be a part of that. If you don’t know your market, join a mentoring program. If you know your market, be a mentor, guide the others in your market so that they can take advantage of these new ideas. Look at Uber. There have literally been articles about how Uber tries to use “psychological carrots” to get drivers to drive cheap. We don’t need to drive cheap to get work. If you start to notice these apps playing the carrot game with you, don’t be afraid to beat them with a stick!

Second word of caution: Agencies are reportedly telling their reporters not to use Expedite and even allegedly withholding work from those that do. Know why? Their entire business model relies on being the middleman, and apps like Expedite can subsume the middleman position and can threaten their livelihood.

Apps like Expedite also can dispel the illusion of a shortage in areas where the ongoing reporter shortage may be less severe than companies would like clients and reporters to believe. As reporters, we need to identify that the shortage may be exaggerated in part so that companies can say “there’s nothing we can do but go digital” and recreate the glut of reporters that they used as an excuse to depress our rates nine years ago in New York.

The 2013 Ducker Report forecasted a shortage, and we’re all coming up with ideas and solutions every day. Coincidentally none of them do away with the stenographic reporter. Remember: The future is malleable. You do not need to throw away a vibrant and wonderful career on the say-so of somebody who’d profit from you getting out of the business.

Shortage Solutions 3: Private Labeling

One shortage concern is a stenographic (stenographers’) aversion to the colloquial big-box companies. Some reporters have reported that even when the company acquiesces and pays proper rates, they don’t want to take it for whatever perceived reasons. The other day I was lucky enough to catch a profound and interesting idea put out there by MA Payonk on her current blog space, Steno Jewels.

To put it in simple terms it’s the age-old idea of private labeling. Example: Imagine all the resellers out there that take Coke, slap their label on it, and sell it away. Perfectly legal, functional, conceptual example of private labeling. You see this all day, every day in probably every store you walk into.

How would this work in steno? Well, if an agency is asking you to cover and they’ve agreed to pay what you want paid, but you have an aversion to building their brand for whatever reason, it’s perfectly sensible and allowable for you to make an agreement with them that you will cover production, and/or billing, and/or read & sign or services that are normally under their purview. Imagine a world where it’s your name, transcript cover, brand, on all the materials. That’s what we’re talking about here.

Succinctly whatever their cut is, it is for the marketing side of what they’ve done. In this private label example, the reporter is becoming more of a focal point, face, and name attached to the full service.

There is some merit to this idea. Many steno and reporting companies today follow a strict corporate brand strategy where their name is on every transcript, and this is something you see all over the country from McDonald’s to From You Flowers. That said, money is money, business is business, and if you can sell the idea of the private label strategy or an alternative branding strategy, you can take advantage of this novel shortage solution. As a matter of fact, we have seen this strategy before in reverse. For example, if ABC Company asks CBA Company to cover, CBA often goes “as” ABC. This idea would be the company “going as” Reporter Doe.

The only real question is: Would a company agree? And my money is on yes. I truly believe that companies would agree, especially if there was a dialogue or agreement. Maybe the answer would be middle of the road: We want to handle production but you can put all your contact information on the certification. In this country there is literally no limit to what can be in an agreement except that an agreement may not be illegal, so it is a sincere hope that every freelance reporter would read this and maybe come to their own conclusions or come up with their own ideas about being a self-employed person and the advertisement decisions that need to go along with that. It’s a hell of a lot more corporate friendly than my previous suggestion to poach clients, and you can bet that given the option, these companies will choose to work with us.

Shortage Solutions 2: Coverage Area & Marketability

Read a post from a reporter that listed off all the things she’d read reporters wouldn’t take this week: Med mal, doctor depo, realtime, rough, late job, early job, remote deposition, big-box dep, interpreted dep, video dep. it dawned on me that one obvious albeit unlikely-to-work solution to the shortage is an attitudinal shift in reporting.

Think about it this way: We complain about digital recording making its way into our work, but if the companies can’t cover that work because we won’t take any job below our special standard, then we’re leaving a gap, and markets fill gaps one way or another.

So although this might seem obvious, let’s roll through some things that make people marketable, and understand that doing any of these makes you — and steno — more palatable. No shame in being selective sometimes. Just understand that the more selective we are collectively, the more of an in non stenographers have into what we are all hopefully wanting to be our industry. Again, things that make you and steno marketable.

Taking a wide variety of work. See above.
Being on time to jobs.
Being able to get to jobs without schedulers holding your hand.
Knowing when and how to call an agency. Client forgot an interpreter? How you get on that phone and address the situation is huge.
Organization, ability to manage files, find orders quickly, and do your work. Goes with time management.
Daily, expedite services. Realtime is good, but there are intermediate levels of skill and turnaround that can be just as important and necessary.
Having a wide coverage area and/or a lot of open coverage times.
Sales leaning. Don’t be afraid to ask your agency what other services they offer and mention them on a dep. Not your primary purpose, but communicates to the agency and client that you’re someone with a wider skill set. Don’t be afraid to ask for some compensation for selling the upcharge or service. Don’t be afraid to ask the agency if they give any training or classes in selling upcharges on the job.
Service leaning. Again, controversial, but if the setting is warm, comfortable, and appropriate, it can be okay to bring water to the dep or some little extra snack. Mixed feelings here because we often have to set boundaries and let people know we are not the secretary. We also suffer often from not being considered for lunch breaks and the like in freelance. But consider this: Court officers and interpreters have offered to go get court reporters coffee. They’re not secretaries, it wasn’t their job, but it’s a nice gesture, and sometimes it can be that moment where a lawyer realizes wow, this person is not only a super stenographer, but a really pleasant person to work with. Caution: If a setting is hostile, inappropriate, or uncomfortable for you, you do not have to play the yes woman/man.
Positive attitude. Life isn’t all roses and sunshine, and sometimes there is a time to put your foot down and say no, stop. But anecdotally, we are so used to suppressing our emotions that once we finally speak up on a job, it can actually become a habit. Controlling the room for the sake of the record is good. Controlling the room for the sake of control is damaging to how people view you and what you do. I guarantee that if you are polite to a client, they might just be a little kinder to the next reporter they work with. On the other hand, if you’re rude…

We’ll be talking about some more shortage solutions in the coming days, but take this as the one you have the most innate control over!

Veritext Update, March 2019

Introduction & History.

First and foremost: This post is going to get into past history and then go into more recent history. In the more recent history, in order to prove that what we’re saying is true, there are screen shots of a person’s LinkedIn social media. We’re free to discuss that and we’re free to say how we feel, but any reader that comes here should be aware that harassment, bullying, menacing, stalking, and defamation are all amoral and illegal. Those things may all open you up to criminal and civil action. If you use our steno news as a gateway for antisocial behavior, do not be surprised if you get police at your door.

Now onto history. Veritext was a leader in working to bolster stenography. A quick Google search will show you that assuming all the media out there to be true or partially true, they are a partner to NCRA and do or did, on some level, and sometimes on an astounding level, support the stenographic methodology for taking the record. It is hard to tell if what follows is a case of Yes, Prime Minister’s advice on backstabbing or a case of the principle of hedging. Veritext proceeded to buy out a lot of stenographic or court reporting companies, including Diamond Reporting here in New York. Next, we caught wind that Veritext was advertising to attorneys that they should change their deposition notices to add language of “stenographic or other means”, presumably so that Veritext could choose to send digital reporters to jobs.

This all ended up culminating in a post where we mirrored SoCalReporter’s ideas and said: We need to stop beating each other up about where we work and start talking solutions. Guess what happened? People started coming up with solutions, and content, and even going so far as to create watchdog groups. We have said this before, but we are seeing a memetic shift. The reporting zeitgeist of silence is over. There are hundreds of voices blogging, talking, and working together to come up with new ideas.

Today & Tomorrow.

So that brings us to the end of February 2019. A woman named Gina Hardin, purportedly a VP of Sales at Veritext, wrote or posted an article about digital reporting being the changing landscape of reporting. There was a great deal of chatter about this, culminating in the post being taken down the night it was posted, and an immediate declaration from Veritext that the post was posted by a former employee and that they had nothing to do with it, honest. This doesn’t pass the colloquial “sniff test” or SMELL test for being true. Why would a former employee try to drum up business for a past employer? In this country, with so few rights for workers, what employee would ever go out on a limb and post something like that without their employer’s explicit permission? Unless you work for the government or have a contract saying otherwise, you can be fired for any reason or no reason, even a made up reason, just not an illegal reason, of which there are very few. The whole thing just doesn’t make sense. And if she’s a former employee, apparently nobody told her, because as of March 2, 2019, she was still listed as working at Veritext, but under the name Gina H. It’s all but undeniable that Veritext is pushing digital, including hiring via their website.

Now, here’s the deal: Some people went online and talked about the typos in the article, or even had personal attacks. It’s not about her. As best we can tell, she’s an employee doing a job, and probably doing it damn well. We make a thousand typos a day unless we’re Super Stenographer. Stenographers, and the entrepreneurs among us, should really be looking at teaming up with salespeople like that who’re dedicated to their job and willing to put themselves out there. Though we have not yet gotten a chance to interview Eve Barrett of Expedite Legal, one of the things she’s alluded to online is there’s an amazing power in human-to-human marketing because of this digital, faceless world. Who is going to be better at human-to-human marketing than someone who is willing to attach their face to the product and pitch? We wouldn’t be surprised if there are stenographic companies looking to poach Gina H. or salespeople like her right now! There’s huge money in this field. Nearly every big agency has a satellite office in every borough of New York City and a cadre of dedicated employees — in other words, there is money to be made in this field, and we shouldn’t be afraid to hire talent when it means a bigger return. Success is often a matter of intelligent delegation. As stenographers, we often let our penchant for perfectionism stand in the way of hiring help and building our brand, perhaps to a fault.

But where does that leave us? Well, we need to recognize that Veritext is apparently willing to lie. Freelancers need to recognize that group boycotts by competitors may fall under antitrust violations. Reporters everywhere need to start acknowledging that the best way to beat ’em might be to just start grabbing clients. It’s time for us to get serious about funding our associations and demanding marketing and entrepreneurial courses. These companies all exist because they got clients off of somebody else. Individually, they may seem bigger or stronger than us because they can outspend us one-on-one, but there’s an inherent power in the fact that if thousands of reporters were to compete directly with them and start poaching clients — which is perfectly legal unless you signed a contract saying you wouldn’t do that or stole a trade secret — they’d be SOL.

For the most ambitious, start looking at fundraising. Start considering all the ways companies come into existence. You very well could be the next nationwide conglomerate. As a matter of fact, if you’re in Illinois, New York, California, or Texas, you are in one of the largest court reporting states in the country, and you have a real shot at seizing the market. Companies rise and fall — but your career is in your hands.

We look forward to the day Veritext sees it’s on the losing side and starts throwing its weight behind stenography again. We look forward to dutifully reporting that right here on this blog. But until that day comes, we encourage fierce competition in this market. Don’t be complacent. Maybe someday we’ll get SLAPP’d for standing up for our profession, but we’re happy to take the heat so that you don’t have to. Be involved. Encourage others to get involved and start building their brand. Know that you are making a difference in how the market and our day-to-day jobs develop.

NYSCRA Bagels and Lox February 2019

Some will have seen an article authored after a little prodding and editing (AKA help!) from another reporter, Devora Hackner. Photo archive here. Obviously, I had overall positive impressions from the entire event. Got to meet Steno Joe in person! The food was absolutely amazing. There were literally three or four tables of food and everything from bagels to sushi. NYSCRA spared no expense and its sponsors did an amazing job. If you were a non-steno there to learn about steno, you walked away sated and happy. I do think it was an important showcase of our field, and there were over 100 seats, most full.

Unfortunately the structure of the event prohibited me from seeing the CaseCAT and Eclipse trainings, but I know both trainers are at the top of their game and I have personally attended Anthony Frisolone’s past webinars and a Local 1070 seminar, and it’s always been a wonderful experience. If you need CaseCAT help, Anthony is the man. His training is worth every dime. Quick note, the photography by Shmuel Amit was also amazing and is featured mostly along the bottom of the original article.

There are two major points that don’t get covered in the article because Stenonymous and that article have different audiences. Firstly, when Jane Sackheim got up to speak, it was an honest surprise. Hadn’t been on the agenda. It’s rumored Diamond put 1,500 or more down on the event though, so there’s no real issue with letting a sponsor like that get a few words in. If I had a sponsor that good, we’d be sponsoring stenographers to visit NYC high schools. Jane did say there would always be a need for court reporters. Given the current climate, I hope she meant stenographic court reporters, but given that she was funding a NYSCRA event along with ASSCR, we’ll assume it was stenographic court reporters! Then there was a talk about balance.

Jane said it was always a balance between paying what a reporter would accept and charging what a client would pay. That is an insightful thing to think about and consider. Not every single proceeding is worth $400 per page, and there is a certain point where clients just wouldn’t pay. That said, I have always been under the belief that we are incredibly underpaid in New York. When I was freelancing, many of my contemporaries and I were making in the ballpark of $3.25 per page and 0 to 50 cents on a copy. Back at that time (~2012) I met some freelancers out from Ohio who reported they made a dollar or two a page on copies. Different markets? Yes. Different jobs? How different can they possibly be? We had a hard time negotiating here in New York. We were told there were too many reporters and not enough work because that was a convenient thing to say to get us to accept low rates. Now there’s a reporter shortage but we shouldn’t ask for more because clients won’t pay it? All the respect in the world for a woman that built a business and ran it so well that Veritext decided to buy it out rather than compete with it. There’s power to the personality that runs the ship. But here is something I think every reporter should consider: We don’t know the truth until invoices start leaking. We don’t know if the copies are being charged at a buck a page or 4.85 a page. We have to question it for ourselves and decide how to build our own brands and reputations. We don’t know and therefore we can’t say with certainty today what the truth is, but it’s probably somewhere between clients won’t pay and reporters expect too much. We know there’s a serious profit margin in the business because almost every reporting firm has a main office and a satellite office in every borough of the city, and I would point to that each and every time someone says the agencies are hurting. Do business with these agencies, and do good work, but be open to the idea that sometimes you are told things that are subjective are objectively true. We did over 900 math calculations, and to not be working all the time, you either have to be a fast transcriber or making in the ballpark of $5.50 a page average. That’s a tall order, but I believe that if agencies and reporters continue to put down money and ideas to enhance the field and our professional organizations, we’ll be okay.

Without further delay let’s end this on a high note. Nonmembers who attended get $18 off their membership this year. Also, NYSCRA did something incredible. They asked for the following:

Seminar speakers you’d like to see.

CEU-approvable

Seminars or speeches you yourself would be willing to conduct.

So what’s left to do? Write NYSCRA today at nyscra@bowermanagementservices.com or head over to their site at NYSCRA, tell Tim he’s doing a GREAT job, and share your thoughts and ideas. They’re asking for them! Personally I’d love a few seminars for freelancers on how to be marketable to agencies and how to be marketable to attorneys directly. Hopefully in the coming weeks we’ll have an interview with Eve Barrett of the Expedite app to discuss exactly that. I think these things are perfectly attainable, but it’s time for members and potential members to ask for them.

Steno V Digital (Archive Post)

Consider this a gentle touch on an important topic. There’s been a true memetic shift in the way stenographers are interacting and spreading ideas. Content is honestly popping up faster than we can even really digest it, so let this post serve as a staging point for some of what’s happening this Court Reporting and Captioning Week 2019. This weekend I’ve had the pleasure of reading a flyer from the DRA in California (Photo Archive). Read about Idaho’s need for reporters (Photo Archive). Finally, got to see Cleveland Reporting Partners’ whole take on digital v steno (Photo Archive).

In very brief summary we are seeing many people put into writing what I have opined over Facebook. Yes, technology is amazing. But right now it struggles with certain things. It can transcribe one speaker quite well, but if you throw in some stray sounds or a second speaker, it can have a hard time. This makes the market for captioners and legal reporters a little more promising because we have the skill and training to give them what they need now and train others to do it. Make no mistake, there’s a big market in that, so if a company is having you train a digital, make sure you’re getting at least the next ten years of your annual income upfront.

Technological growth is no longer exponential. Don’t get me wrong, it’s impressive. But until Quantum Computing is cheap and accessible there are probably things we won’t see, like a JARVIS-like AI. We will see imitation AI, that’s for sure, but there is an indeterminate clock on when we will see quantum tech. The running idea and current study that’ll probably lead to true ideas is machine learning. This takes data training sets, like pictures, or recordings, or text — whatever it is programmed to take — and it takes that information and uses it as a basis for its decisions. Sometimes this is entertaining. Sometimes this goes horribly wrong. The bottom line is it is limited by the speed at which it can process its training data and the speed at which it can retrieve that information for later.

I imagine that the training data set for an AI to “do depositions” would look something like recorded depositions paired with their transcripts. There are three big hurdles there, building the training set, processing the training set, and retrieving the right data when it’s time to “do deposition.” In a classic computer we have, in very laypeople terms, little transistors firing on and off to tell the computer what’s going on. Tech is running into a problem where it can’t get these little nanotubes much smaller, and making bigger processors absorbs more electricity. For example, I wrote a Fibonacci-generating program. The basic concept is every number adds itself to the number that would come after it. The computer is happy to make these calculations, but very quickly, the processing power needed to calculate these numbers begins to run dry, and the files we store these numbers in become too large to be opened on a weak laptop. The simplest algorithm in existence busts up a classic computer. This is probably the trouble they have making something that can seamlessly listen to people and transcribe, the computer just doesn’t have the power to process it quickly. Look how long it takes videographers to burn disks or Go To Meeting to process audio. Now imagine adding another layer where the machine is transcribing everything perfectly. In Quantum Computing they’re talking about these very small units being able to calculate everything at once, or large batches of things at once. If they crack that, we’re probably back to exponential technological growth.

In the meantime, fight for your jobs. Fight for market share. It’s not a question of whether we’re outdated. Today the answer to that is no. What matters heavily is perception. Perception can change outcomes. One of the most effective tactics in war has been to get the enemy army to rout, and that’s exactly what digital reporting advocates are trying to get you to do: Give up and go home without a fight. Don’t buy into it, make the technology prove itself. Even the worst stenographer puts in words four or five times faster than the average typist, yet there are still typists.

Keep competing. We are well on our way to winning this thing.