Sharing: Won’t AI Make Digital Court Reporting Obsolete?

Came across Reddit user elzpwetd’s post a couple of days ago. Wanted to get it some attention. More or less, the post talks about how AI already has a capacity to summarize documents very well. The idea is that the need for log notes and deposition digests done by humans would, in a perfect-AI world, disappear.

In a world where AI has been perfected, you don’t need anyone in the seat. It’s simply assistive technology to the professional lawyer. You could argue that you still need someone to set up the recording equipment, but in courts that’s often a one-and-done situation and in depositions we’re doing Zoom depos, so…

…I think [she] hits the nail on the head.

Of course, this opens up the stage to what I have said all along. AI sellers will claim the technology is perfect or ready for prime time well before it is. Case in point, in 2016, Microsoft said its AI was better than human transcribers. In 2020, AI scored as low as 25% in the racial disparities in automated speech recognition study. We’re now in 2024, and AI’s imperfections are obvious to anyone that spends enough time playing with it. On good-quality audio with standard English speakers, 100% is possible. I’ve seen it myself. It does well. Guess what? We do well under such conditions too. The conditions where humans struggle? AI becomes an unreliable nightmare that needs to be manually fixed by a human — a human that may not be able to decipher whatever garbled audio there is, which is just one good reason to have a human being taking simultaneous verbatim notes.

Still, not a problem in many cases, as our spitballers will point out. But there’s nobody tracking how many appeals bad audio has sabotaged in the United States. Ignorance is bliss and it allows court administrators to take action without knowing or caring about the potential pitfalls. Even if it’s as low as 1% of the appeals that get screwed, just looking at the federal level, I’m pretty sure we’re looking at 500 a year, which is a lot for a system where many believe it is better for 100 guilty people to go free than one innocent be convicted. And even when the stakes aren’t freedom, who wants their multimillion dollar pharmaceutical case to be blown up by an inadequate record?

Our spitballers are also habitually wrong. I’ve seen it said that our jobs only exist because we have a strong lobby. Nothing could be further from the truth. As I revealed two days ago, our “strong lobby” sabotages us whenever it thinks it can get away with it. We need look no further than the steady decline of officialships for recordings despite every indication that stenotype is a better solution for access to justice.

In a way, it would be a joy to see AI be perfected. The very people who have fought so hard for our replacement would watch their companies become relatively worthless. How long would Veritext’s court reporting revenue last with other companies selling subscriptions to unlimited transcription for less than the cost of a single deposition? Maybe that’s why all the big boxes are gouging the lawyers now while they can? Scared of the future?

I guess I was too, for a time. Maybe we’re not so different?

Bulletin: r/court_reporting Joins Reddit & Unionization Plan Posted to Industry Times of New York!

This app ate the draft I made about r/court_reporting! Technology is crazy.

r/court_reporting now joins r/courtreporting and r/stenography as places where machine shorthand writers can ~~be chronically online~~ talk to each other anonymously through Reddit. Made by a not-me court reporter, for court reporters, it’s worth joining the discussion today!

In other news, we already have a couple of pledges and a couple hundred eyes on the post about New York City unionization from yesterday. Word about the idea has been posted to the Industry Times of New York.

I gotta say though, alternative publications like mine thrive off word-of-mouth spread from readers like you. If anyone out there would like to share the Industry Times press release or my post from yesterday, I’d be eternally grateful, even if you share it under the guise of an insult about me so that the agencies don’t catch on. I had the privilege of very briefly speaking with two figureheads from the then-defunct Federation of Shorthand over the years. I got the sense that one of the reasons it didn’t work out was it was hard to reach people. It’s still hard to reach people. But now the internet is so ubiquitous that word can travel faster and farther than was imaginable in the whole history of mankind. Surely, if we can get some shares, we can reach more people than those reporters of the past were able to.

And, you know, like I said yesterday, once this gets rolling it becomes a model that is theoretically reproducible in other states. I’ve already had a reporter reach out about the terrible treatment they’ve received in another state, the pain of doing the “freelance” thing with disabilities, and the hope that the unionization model will take off and protect new reporters.

For anyone that’s doing great in this field, I know you don’t want to let negativity into your bubble. I was the same way. But the purpose of acknowledging these negative situations is to progress toward positive solutions.

Let me remind everybody that the paragons of silence and ignorance that instinctively cling to their failing traditions are the ones that brought us to a place where we have very little institutional support, a falling median wage, and the public perception that this profession cannot meet the demands of a modern world. Yet we persist, insistent on assisting each other through a time of rapid change and artificial upheaval of our previously unchallenged prevalence. We must listen to the stories of struggle, lest we see a cascading failure and consequent erasure of our principles and paradigm.

Now say that 5x fast.

Deaf Redditor: Why Are We Treated like a Nuisance?

On Reddit, I spotted a thread that talked about the H3 podcast and how upon requesting captions other members of the audience insisted auto captions were adequate. The podcast itself apparently stated it was too difficult to do the captioning for hours of content.

My audience is mostly stenographers that support good captions on all content. I’ll be preaching to the choir here. The only thing between us and that dream are the greedy corps and individuals that have no problem being rewarded for their success — they’ll take every dime you’ll give — but they have a lot of problems making simple provisions for the disabled.

Redditor discusses the failure of the H3 podcast to provide adequate captions for the deaf.

It’s my position that we need to be firm about this and keep pushing for the expansion of stenographic writers in captioning. No method is perfect, but auto captions and crowdsourcing are failing some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Do we accept that or do we speak out about it?

We need a significant increase in our numbers to be able to cover all the content out there. Hopefully investors see things like this and realize there’s a genuine need for a lot more stenographers. Pump students up with stenographic and business education and set them loose on the market. It’d give this field the tools it needs to fight for the disabled. I believe so strongly in this that I myself might look into school funding.

If anybody from H3 Podcast stumbles across this, your rep is going to take a hit if you keep letting this situation go unresolved. Don’t let it get to that point and just spend the piddly $100 or $200 it would take you to caption your content per hour. If stenographer prices are really a problem for whatever level of revenue you have, you could at the very least turn to transcribers, who are often taken advantage of and underpaid.

How can we spread this message beyond our social circles?

The Positive Reporting Challenge

Have you been on the stenography or court reporting subreddits? You may be surprised to see that those communities are not heavily populated by stenographers, but awash with electronic recording heralds.

It’s no secret what they’re doing. They’re poaching people who have an interest in stenography or court reporting and siphoning them to recording. It’s out there in the open, it’s legal and allowed. Transcribers can be taken from a pool of people that know nothing about what we do or how much we make, and then put to work for far less than what they deserve for the job — our job.

They rely on us being complacent and putting on a vitriolic, belligerent public face. They rely on us not taking notice or doing nothing about it. They rely on us not stepping in and saying: Yeah, you can go record, but you can also do what I do, and wow, what I do has given me a lot of success. They need people to become transcribers. The companies that want transcribers are on a recruitment drive, and they go directly to the root to get recruits, us.

I say we take it back. One person described how their girlfriend just got a job recording for US Legal. You know what I did? I said wow, congratulations. But if she likes it, why doesn’t she try steno? She can get paid more for the same job! Encourage people. Empower people to step up the game and join the stenographic legion. And boy, did it enflame another user. He was all LOL tape recorders are taking your job.

And now I realize — this strikes a nerve. It absolutely breaks their game when we come in and say: Hey, this is a great career, and you make more. I mean just by politely suggesting steno, I made someone explode.

So what do I propose? I propose anyone who has five minutes this month sit down, make a Reddit account, head over there to the stenography or court reporting subreddit, and post something positive about steno, or post a resource for steno. Whether you had a great run for 30 years, or you mentored a student, or you have a wonderful resource for sten learners, or you have a great career right now, just go write about it. Let’s be honest, there are thousands of us. If just ten say something nice about steno, it drowns out the ads for ER and puts us in the best possible light.

What’s business about? Presence. Location, location, location. And right now you’ve got ER sitting right under a sign labeled court reporting. Set up shop and put it out there for the public: This field’s here to stay.