By Cassandra Caldarella
The negotiating process is about how you can create and increase value. Ideally, it involves a conclusion that involves everyone walking away satisfied.
In order to do this, there are three things we need to do:
- Know what you want and be prepared.
- Visualize and assume the best case.
- Tell yourself what you’re going to do.
Knowing what you want is imperative, and it’s different for everyone. You have to know in your mind exactly what you want, and you have to link pleasure, not pain, to doing the things that are hard. When you collaborate with your brain, anything is possible.
The brain responds to only two things: the images you create in your head and the words you say to yourself. That’s it.
WHAT DO WE ALL WANT?
Setting ourselves apart as the gold standard, providing premium services, and commanding top-shelf pricing, will ensure our survival for the foreseeable future.
I’ll tell you why this should be our vision and how we can achieve it through collaborating together using these negotiation strategies.
We stand at a crossroads today, with three paths before us. One path leads to integration, another to bifurcation, and the third to annihilation.
The path of integration keeps court reporters in charge of making the record with highly advanced technology. Our CAT software can use existing technology that combines speech-to-text processing with artificial intelligence, enabling ALL human stenographers to offer realtime streaming services. We can provide the highest translation rate, producing immediate roughs, and with the assistance of live realtime scoping and proofreading teams that will enable us to produce an immediate final within 30 minutes of ending a session.
It won’t take us years to develop the skills to attain this level of service anymore. And we’ll be able to charge premium rates for these services. It will level the court reporter playing field, but elevate all of us, leaving no one behind. We no longer have to fear that we’ll lose any court reporter to these increased service demands.
The new boost to our bottom line, advanced technology, and reduction in the time it takes for entry into our workforce, would lead to a sense of renewed job security that would increase the attractiveness of our profession and could bolster our ranks.
The other path is already being built by agencies and venture capitalists who are trying to profit from digital technology that would replace us. They say that’s not the case, but we know better. They believe they can send digitals and then find certified shorthand reporters to do the transcription. But that’s already proving problematic because they can’t find enough court reporters to make this model work. Even more troubling, they’re charging the same whether they’re sending a stenographer or a digital. In addition, there are outliers who are trying to cut into our industry with inefficient artificial speech-to-text technologies and create a new market for themselves.
We need to establish our position as gold-standard court reporters, at the top of the market where we will command top tier pricing. ER, Digital, AI, and lesser options may command the bottom market rates and services for the lower dollar-value cases and will probably make up the majority in the future. We need to ensure our place at the top of a hierarchical structure, or else they will succeed in attempting to create what’s called a holacracy where digital and ER are on the same par with highly skilled court reporters. We cannot let that happen.
There’s a saying called “Wag the Dog,” and it was the name of a great movie with Dustin Hoffman. Does the dog wag its tail? Or does the tail wag the dog? We can’t keep letting non-stenographers drive our industry and determine our value. Entities such as attorneys, insurance companies, large agencies backed by venture capital, foreign-based outliers, and other non-licensed, non-certified reporters who are profit-driven should NOT be driving our court reporting industry.
So now that we know what we want, and we’ve visualized what we’re going to achieve, and we’ve told ourselves that’s what we’re going to do, now we can move on to the next step.
Learn to negotiate using your “Unique Value Proposition.”
Before I was a court reporter, I worked for a company called Ingram Micro, where I learned some valuable lessons that apply to our industry today.
Ingram Micro is the largest electronics and information technology distributor in the world. When I worked there in the mid-nineties, I experienced the go-go growth days.
Ingram Micro increased annual revenue from $8.6 billion dollars to $22 billion in only 3 years. We rose to number 16 on the Fortune 500 list. I worked for one of the best CEO’s in the history of corporate America, Chip Lacy.
At that time, Ingram Micro’s competitors, Tech Data and Merisel, engaged us in an all-out price war. In some cases, they dropped their pricing down to cost, or even below cost. But our CEO gave a directive to our company: no more price drops. Instead, Chip Lacy told us to focus on value. And to do that, we had to learn to negotiate better than our competitors. And so we did.
Within a year, Merisel and Tech Data, were out of business, and Ingram Micro owned the electronics and IT distribution market.
I’m here today to tell you the insider story on our negotiation secrets. And I’m telling you this, because I see a direct correlation to what’s happening in our industry, and I think it can help us court reporters win!
When Chip Lacy directed us to stop dropping prices, we all panicked. We had gotten so used to simply dropping prices to win deals. Now, instead, we had to learn to focus on our value. What we had to offer were a broader product offering, a larger inventory, and more warehouses across the country so we could ship our customer orders faster and more reliably than the competition. We also offered better credit terms. All of that meant less stock outages, faster inventory turns, and higher profits for our customers. We focused on our total overall value to the customer, not just the price of goods.
When I think about the value that court reporters offer to litigants, it goes way beyond producing an accurate verbatim transcript. The most valuable thing a court reporter has to offer is that we are the responsible charge of the transcript. We are the checks and balances in the entire justice system, which is why judges always comment that the court reporter is the most important person in the room. Our transcripts transcend the courtroom and offers a purpose and power that far exceeds that of judges.
Demonstrate your value.
One valuable lesson I learned from Chip Lacy is about demonstrating our value, and he was especially good at that. He did it by strengthening our vendor relationships and creating value-added partnerships to increase our value.
CoverCrow promises to do just that. CoverCrow is not only a customizable job board with advanced filters, it is a value-added partnership tool that enables court reporters of all kinds to strengthen their relationships with their agencies, attorneys, and government entities with better engagement. CoverCrow allows us all to meet the demand for our services more efficiently and to show our value to all involved. It allows for greater communication, transparency, and accountability all around. And it will reduce the stress load on everyone involved – agency calendar schedulers, attorneys and judges waiting for us to arrive, and especially court reporters. This platform increases communication, transparency, and accountability for everyone involved. This is just one way CoverCrow is revolutionizing the court reporting industry that will help fortify our profession.
What value-added partnerships can our industry and state associations enter into that will add value to our profession? What strategic alliances can we form that will strengthen stenographic services?
We need to MOVE FROM CHARGING FOR TIME TO CHARGING FOR VALUE
There’s a famous story about the artist Pablo Picasso. He was sitting in a Paris café when an admirer approached and asked him to do a quick sketch on a paper napkin. Picasso politely agreed, quickly drew something, and handed the napkin to the admirer— and then asked him for $10,000. The admirer was shocked: “How can you ask for so much? It took you only a minute to draw this!” “No,” said Picasso, “It took me more than 40 years.”
Quantify your contribution
What makes court reporters valuable? We Need to Gather the Evidence.
Court Reporters are the gold standard because without certified transcripts, motions are lost, appeals are lost, trials are lost, and millions of dollars are lost.
In the Derek Chauvin trial, for example, the attorneys submitted a transcript as an exhibit to their motion, but it was not prepared or certified by an official court reporter. District Court Judge Cahill’s ruling? “Denied.”
Our Value is in the Collective
Negotiation is about collaboration. Never negotiate alone! We need to think about the larger picture. We have more power than we think we do. And let me tell you: there are more than 23,000 of us. That is power!
We’re all good at negotiation in one way or another – the problem is that some people also learn habits that just don’t work for the collective. For example, they might negotiate for what benefits them alone.
For the average consumers, most major negotiations relate big-ticket purchases, like a house or a car. These types of interactions are called “distributed negotiations” and normally involve a one-off purchase. They are also referred to as “win-lose,” as one party almost invariably gains at the expense of the other.
Let me give you an example of this in our industry from a conversation I had with a fellow court reporter just the other day. I’ll call her Jane. Jane told me that an agency she works for called to say that another reporter had raised her rates because her scopist and proofreaders had raised their rates. The agency asked Jane what she thought of that.
Jane, told the agency that with her own particular skillset (which probably rank her in the 99th percentile in our profession) she didn’t need a scopist or proofreader to produce daily transcripts, and therefore, she wouldn’t be asking for a rate increase. So as a result, the agency moved Jane up on their list, at the expense of the other reporter whose rates were increasing, who went to the bottom of the list.
Here’s the problem with that scenario. It was great for Jane, but it wasn’t great for our profession. When we don’t have an industry norm, and we’re out there setting individual standards, we can inadvertently hurt the entire industry. And that’s because we’re not working as a team. Using separate, individual strategies puts us behind the eight-ball from the start.
At Ingram Micro, I learned that the collective is powerful. If we all negotiated together, we could win! Just like Ingram Micro did. If all 23,000+ court reporters in the United States started working together, we could survive! So set your goals, align your team’s interests, and keep your side on the same page, not at cross purposes.
EXERCISE: Now I’d like for you to try something with me. Lift your right foot a few inches from the floor, then move it in a circle in a clockwise direction. While you’re doing this, use a finger, your right index finger, to draw a number 6 in the air. What happens? Can anybody do this? No, you can’t do it! Your foot will automatically turn in counterclockwise, the same way your finger is drawing the number six. There’s nothing you can do about it!
Why does this happen?
The left side of your brain, which controls the right side of your body, is responsible for rhythm and timing. The left side of your brain cannot deal with operating two opposite movements at the same time, so it combines them into a single motion.
But try this with your right foot make a circle, and your LEFT hand draw a 6, and you should have no problem!
My point is, you can’t go rogue and do your own thing because what you do affects other people. You have to ask yourself: How will my actions affect others in my business? Am I advancing my industry as a whole? Or will what feels good for me today actually hurt my industry in the long run and thus, hurt me in the future as well? Short-term vision hurts our long-term goals. In the long run, short-sighted actions don’t benefit you. You’re shooting yourself in the foot.
When I was in my MBA program, the first thing the professor said to us was if you’re not increasing your revenues 10% to 20% per year, you’re in the wrong business.” We’d all love to get the job with the 0&30, but if we’re at the top of our game, doing dailies, producing roughs and expedites and working every day, then the only way to increase our revenues another 10-20% is to look at the rates we accept. Many times, we worry that agencies won’t work with us anymore if we don’t accept their lowball rates.
Be Prepared. Look ahead for objections and overcome them.
When I was in technology, I negotiated to sell our products into a big national retail chain. I did my homework and found articles and quotes from the retailer’s own CEO about how, strategically, they needed to add more technology products.
When they buyer objected to our offering, I countered with his own CEO’s quotes about their strategic direction, and how our product offerings would help them meet their goals. After a long pause on the phone, I waited. Then he said, “You know, I have bull dogs beating on my door all day, and now this little puppy jumps up and turns the knob.” From that point forward, I was known in my company as “Cassandra The Puppy Dog [Caldarella].”
GET COMFORTABLE WITH “NO”
That brings me to my next topic. We have to understand some of the things that holds us back from negotiating in the first place: our fears and our misconceptions. In this next section, I’ll teach you to conquer your fear of saying “no.”
40 percent of what we worry about will never happen. It will never happen. That, my friends, is like putting a 40 percent down payment on a house you’ll never own. How ridiculous would that be; right? Putting a 40 percent down payment on a house you’ll never see, smell, experience or own.
When we think of negotiation, we tend to have this image of a bull dog, where the negotiators have to be tough and demanding. We think of conflict and power struggles and deception. In reality, we don’t have to employ contentious power strategies to get what we want in business. In fact, heavy-handed tactics often result in win-lose scenarios. What I’m going to teach you today is how to use a win-win strategy.
You have to be ready to walk away from the relationship. When you have nothing to lose, you are in a powerful negotiating position.
We can learn a key lesson from our children. Many experts have shown that kids are highly-skilled negotiators. A study out of Sweden found that children as young as two years old negotiated with a clear purpose in their play, used problem-solving strategies, and made genuine efforts to understand their friends’ perspectives.
People start to learn basic negotiating skills as toddlers. Even though they’re totally dependent on their parents, toddlers still manage to wrap us parents around their fingers, don’t they? They know their value to us, and get more and more from us, they’re honest, and they discover the incredible power of saying “no.”
We court reporters have to get comfortable with the word “No.”
At Ingram Micro, this was one of the secrets of our $13 billion dollar growth in only 3 years. We learned to say “No.” We got so comfortable with it, in fact, it was comical.
I sat in the cubicle next to a guy named Ken. He was like the Ken doll, Barbie’s boyfriend. Tall, blonde, probably had been the captain of his high school football team. He had a slow Texas drawl, like Matthew McConaughey. Everyone loved Ken, especially his customers. One day, I could hear Ken say to a customer, “I’m gonna FedEx you a Q-Tip, so you can clean out your ears, because I said ‘No!’”
We’re so afraid of saying no because we’re afraid we’ll lose customers. But, in fact, the data says that while raising prices may cost you a few customers, you’ll end up making more money in the long run. And once you realize that we can still make sales after saying “no,” you can start to have fun with creative and bold ways to say it.
In this example, you can see that if you increase prices by 10%, and lose 16% of your customers, you end up earning more money and doing less work!
Another real-world example of saying “no” that you’re probably familiar with is the “Stop the SoCal Stip” campaign. The movement got started back in 2014 when our CRB published an opinion that warned if we don’t say “no” to the stip, our licenses could be in jeopardy.
For those of you who don’t know, the SoCal Stip is where, at the end of a depo, they say “I stipulate to relieve the court reporter of her duties…,” blah, blah, blah.” When I left my officialship and started freelancing again, I raised the issue to my boss… otherwise known as The Court Reporter Facebook groups. The topic of the SoCal Stip was heating up. An agency owner named Jason Buktenika then created a new FB group called “Stop The SoCal Stip.” Our issue now had a catchy name with alliteration of s’es.
By sharing research, collaboration on strategies, educating ourselves, encouraging each other, and venting our frustrations, we practically abolished an unfair practice that had plagued our industry for decades. And we did it in less than 2 years!
The Stop The SoCal Stip Campaign did a great job of building a strong narrative around saying “No.” We employed such strategies as “The Gray Rock” strategy, where we imagined we were a big immovable gray rock. And when attorneys tried to use intimidation tactics on us to try to force us to accept their stipulation, we would do what you do if you encounter a bear in the woods. You play dead.
- Avoid escalating interactions
- Keep unavoidable interactions brief
- Give short, one-word responses
- Communicate in a factual, unemotional way
- Simply say “No”
Now the court reporting industry needs a new narrative.
The point is simply this: Court Reporting is facing an existential crisis on several fronts.
The truth is that stenographers will become extinct if we don’t start valuing them appropriately and if we don’t learn to impart our value to the legal community better. Court reporters are not commodities. We are the highly-skilled gold standard that the legal industry cannot live without! We are the responsible charge. If court reporters are going to exist in the legal industry in the future, then court reporters had better learn to say “No,” we’d better learn our value, we’d better start to tell the truth about having court reporters available in the future, and we’d better start doing this before it’s too late.
We are the official guardians of the record, in one of the few places in the world that lives by the rule of law. What is it in us that seeks to protect the record? Our minds? Our hands? or is it our hearts?
We need to negotiate and collaborate, say “no” to everything that goes against our survival, and we need to be brutally honest. If you’re sitting there feeling fine with your situation, or nearing retirement, then don’t do this for yourself. Do it for your peers who have a career ahead of them. Do it for the students. Do it for the future of the profession that supported you for your entire career and helped put your kids through college. Do it for the litigants who deserve to have an accurate and unbiased record. Do it for the justice system who needs us as their checks and balances against absolute corruption.
We stenographers have been recording the spoken word since the time of Socrates. We can be around for another thousand years. But we have to fight for it and negotiate now like our very profession depends on it.
What we need to do is show the true value of our services. And we need to remember that our value withstands – and will continue to withstand the test of time.
I’m optimistic because I know that by looking at our work with fresh eyes, with perspective, acting collectively as individuals, and collaborating with agencies, attorneys, and each other, we can turn around our profession’s burn-out culture and negotiate a brighter future where we’re happier, healthier, and more productive people. So I challenge every one of us to get bossed up to say “no” to burn-out culture and build a happy, healthy, sustainable career.
Together, we shine brighter!
Cassandra Caldarella, CSR, can be reached at info@covercrow.com.
(This is a partial excerpt from her speech entitled “Negotiation Strategies For Court Reporters” that was presented at the 2021 NCRA Convention in Las Vegas, Nevada.)
BIO: Cassandra Caldarella is the founder and CEO of CoverCrow, Inc., a company that’s devoted to helping fortify the stenography profession by helping to meet the demand for stenographic services more efficiently.
An accomplished freelance realtime civil trial reporter with 20 years’ shorthand reporter experience in California, Caldarella takes great pride in promoting the profession, cultivating students, and helping to advance realtime skills within her profession. As a student, she qualified for the California Certified Shorthand Reporter exam in two short years. After freelancing for two years doing Securities and Exchange hearings and Civil Grand Jury hearings in Los Angeles, she was hired as an Official Court Reporter for the largest trial court in the world, Los Angeles Superior Court, where she floated to 30 different courthouse buildings and reported every kind of litigation possible.
When she was laid off in 2012, she started doing high-profile and high stakes civil trials, privately hired by attorneys, and was compelled to offer realtime. She created a 12-week Realtime Bootcamp in 2012 that has two sessions a year at South Coast College. She started the $500 Why I Love Court Reporting scholarship for court reporting students. She created the CA Deposition Reporters Association $2,000 scholarship program. She created the DRA mentor program, and recruits and mentors several court reporting students. She loves writing articles about her beloved profession; one entitled “What I do as a Court Reporter,” published by LifeHacker, was viewed by their over 8 million subscribers and was republished by Monster and other career sites. She’s had several articles published in the Journal of Court Reporting, including “How to Build a Million Dollar Court Reporting Business,” “Why I Love Court Reporting,” and “Court Reporters who Became Judges,” among others. She’s the creator and admin of the Facebook group “Why I Love Court Reporting,” which has over 4,700 members. She’s the co-creator and former co-admin of the Facebook group “Court Reporters, Zoom Learn and Share,” which she helped grow to over 5,000 members in one short year during the pandemic.
Prior to becoming a court stenographer, Cassandra worked for Fortune 500 tech companies where she set channel sales records, won awards, launched hundreds of innovative products, managed an $80 million emerging products sales quota and closed many million-dollar deals. Caldarella knows the challenges of small business owners firsthand. After a decade of working to build other companies, she opened her own technology company where she pioneered keywords and worked with Microsoft and Google to help monetize their search engines. She built a team of 16 sales reps and other support staff that grew market share to 25 percent and overall revenue to $3 million in her first year in business. She also created an innovative SEO strategy that is widely used today. She left a career in technology to pursue something less stressful – court reporting. Oh, the irony. Out of the frying pan, into the fire; am I right?
Her experience in leading sales and marketing of emerging technology projects proved invaluable in developing a highly successful freelance reporting career and in starting up CoverCrow, a SaaS software platform that helps court reporters find court reporting jobs through agencies, using sophisticated filters to find exactly the work they want, check-in with their live availability status, cutting out the noise of a variety of sources for jobs, and bringing reporters together under one universal platform that helps them automate the most stressful part of our job – scheduling.
Cassandra earned her BA in Communication from California State University at Long Beach, studied at Imperial College London and the University of London, and graduated from South Coast College of Court Reporting.
At home, Cassandra is a wife, a mom to a 7-year-old daughter, and enjoys spending time with family.
