Forgiving Your Impostor Syndrome

There can be a culture shock for students who get out of reporting school and jump directly into the freelance world. One minute you’re in a t-shirt and jeans tapping away in a class of people with about the same skill level as you, and the next minute you find yourself at the head of the table, more or less alone, and in charge of making the legal record of deposition proceedings. Even worse, the people you’re working with don’t always cooperate. Even worse, you may not have ever seen a legal proceeding before.

There may be a feeling building that you are inadequate, or that you handled a particular situation poorly, or even that you made a mistake! Everyone makes mistakes. The reporter who tells you, “I never make mistakes,” makes mistakes. The reporter who tells you they’ve never had a complaint makes mistakes. The reporter who tells you mistakes were made, usually on your part, most definitely makes mistakes! That multimillion dollar corporation you work for? They make mistakes too.

The mistakes are not the problem. Being unwilling to learn is where many struggle. Be trainable. Be willing to question yourself and sometimes even your “superiors” to find the right answer. Be willing to reach out and ask a mentor how you could’ve handled something better. Be willing to talk to several mentors if a topic seems controversial. In a regular office or court environment, we have coworkers, union reps, and generally people to talk to about how to handle things that come up. As independent contractors we’re our own business, and navigating these things on the fly can be challenging.

Those feelings of inadequacy? Treat them like a bad dream. Forget them, go about your day, and forgive yourself. Learn what you can and move on. A lot of times I try to offer numbers and science to back up what I’m telling people. Today’s a lesson straight from the “been there, done that” camp of court reporting. Years of observation. You know what you’ll see very rarely? People wearing their mistakes. Nobody is sitting there saying, “yeah, I totally botched a job at the start of my career 10, 20, 30 years ago.” The truth isn’t that nobody has ever botched a job in the history of reporting, but that professionals learn from what happened and move forward into long and illustrious careers.

Your career can be long and illustrious. But if you suffer from feelings of inadequacy or frustration from difficult challenges, one of the first steps is going to be learning to let them go and do what you’ve trained to do. The next step? Training yourself to do better. Before long, you’ve got yourself a staircase, and hopefully that day you’ll turn around and help others build theirs.

Shortage Solutions 10: Contract or Employment

Can you believe this blog has covered 10 ideas for addressing the shortage? Time flies. Having given the whole court reporting shortage issue some more brainstorming, it’s worth bringing up for discussion the solutions that will follow. As always, happy to have comment on this issue. First, contractual agreements. In the field today, many reporters work under a verbal agreement, or a very informal email or rate sheet agreement. Even in places where independent contractors are required to have contracts, much of the business is contracted verbally or less formally.

Anecdotally, there’s something respectable about putting things in writing. People are more likely to live up to their word when there are clear terms of engagement. Need a freelancer to be on call to cover? Get it in writing. Throw them a little consideration (money) for their availability. Create easy-to-understand terms and expectations on availability. Create fair and realistic penalties for breach of contract on either side, or remedial terms that both sides can live with.

That lets me move on to another thought process. There is nothing in US law, to my knowledge, that prohibits a company from hiring employees and paying them a per-page commission or per diem rate. Pretty much no reporter makes less than minimum wage, so compliance with minimum wage laws is trivial. What is stopping a company from shifting its workforce from 1099 reporters to employees? Nothing. Nothing but a different set of paperwork and some accounting changes. Compliance with workers compensation laws may need a little creative insuring to allow reporters to transcribe from home if they choose to give employees that option. But this does not seem like an impossibility, merely a challenge for the entrepreneurial to overcome.

Why these solutions? Frankly, one of the issues with shortage boils down to the inconsistency of freelance reporting. If reporting firms nail down some availability, via employment contract or independently-contracted agreement, they can have a more realistic idea of how many reporters they have versus how many they need. Businesses survive and thrive off of mastering their staffing needs. Reporting businesses will be no different, and in the end will rise and fall based on their ability to meet demand. In this case, the demand being the service that so many stenographic reporters are ready, willing, and able to provide.

State Associations With Mentoring

Quick news blast. I contacted pretty much every court reporting association in the world this week and got together a list of associations with mentoring. Some have not gotten back to me yet, so this is a work in progress.

This’ll be made available at the student webinar hosted by Joshua Edwards and NYSCRA Sunday. If you are a student that has not yet RSVP’d, do so now! Connecting with working reporters is invaluable and every effort we make for students is an investment in the future of court reporting.

Achieve Your Dream Salary Using Retrograde Extrapolation

Sorry in advance to anyone wanting to learn about the science and math behind actual retrograde extrapolation. Just to skim over it, it’s when a person is accused of drunk driving and they only have the alcohol level the person was caught and tested with, often under the legal limit. Using common absorption rates and facts, they work backwards from the number they have in order to surmise and prove the amount of alcohol the person had in their system while driving. Pro tip, if you begin court reporting in criminal matters, you will probably hear this term someday and can get it in your dictionary.

That aside, we should all be cognizant of the fact that we, as freelancers, can extrapolate what we need to do to get where we want to be. I’ll be keeping a spreadsheet that people can put their dream salary into, and it will go on to calculate their ostensible hourly rate, approximate hours of transcription, approximate hours of on-record time, and a suggestible page rate based on the mathematical formula I’m about to give. If you hate math, skip all that and go to the spreadsheet linked above. Remember that this kind of thinking doesn’t have to be all about money. Envision any goal in your mind and work backwards to see the steps you might take to get there. (DROPBOX)

Just keep in mind that if you’re using this tool in the future, there is a concept called inflation where the buying power of money decreases over time. Inflation is more or less inevitable unless the government begins a massive money-destruction program, so the dream salary you put in today will probably be different 5, 10, 20 years down the road. The numbers will all be the same, but the value of every dollar will be less.

The math:

As a freelancer, you’re a business person. Running a successful business does not require great math skills, but they cannot hurt you. Here is some helpful math.

There are certain givens about time and the world. There are 365 days in a year, but only 260 workdays (52 weeks a year * 5 days a week). So let’s say your target is 100,000 a year. That’s about 1,924 a week. That’s about 385 a workday. That’s about 55 per hour for a 7-hour workday. Believe it or not, at a fair pace of about 40 pages an hour, that’s about $1.40 a page. KEEP READING.

Now let’s evaluate some more truths. It takes an average of 2 to 3 hours of transcription for every hour of testimony, in my experience. That mean that to have some semblance of a normal life without an awesome scopist, you would work something more like three days and leave two for transcription. 156 on-record workdays a year. Let’s go back. 1,924 a week divided by three days is 642 a workday. About 92 an hour for a 7-hour workday on the record, but remember that you’re actually working 14 to 21 hours, so it’s actually more like 46 an hour. That’s only $2.30 per page! KEEP READING.

All of this math assumes you have an absolute guarantee of three 7-hour workdays every week for a year. It doesn’t factor in sick days, scheduling issues, or any of the risk that comes with being a self-employed person. Capturing that risk is a difficult task to put into numbers. Let’s try. A quick glance at some Googled numbers for sick days a year says 7 sick days a year is not a horrible number. Let’s take it. You’re your own boss and you’re going to give yourself sick days, right? Further, let’s assume that some percentage of jobs ARE NOT 7-hour writing days. In an informal poll, respondents averaged about 70 percent of their jobs weren’t 7-hour writing days.

Guess what? I just screwed up our whole calculation. So now we have 149 on-record workdays a year. Remember, you still want 100,000, so that’s 672 a workday, 96 an hour on record, $2.40 a page, plus a 70 percent “I am a smart business owner by anticipating risk” upcharge of $1.68. That’s $4.08 a page. You know what kills me? At least one respondent said only five percent of their jobs were 7-hour workdays, which means if we take my very simple assertion that that’s a good way to calculate risk as true, that’s a suggestible rate of 95 percent upcharge, That’s 2.4 + 2.38. That’s almost $4.70 a page. Do you think that’s too high? Consider that retailers often use a rule of 50% markup to set their prices. If we do that in this calculation? $4.80 per page.

Notably, this is all assuming my data is 100% accurate. Surprise, it isn’t. Surprise, business leaders need to make decisions on incomplete data all the time. Working reporters should take note how familiar some of these numbers are starting to sound. I hope you will all take the time to contribute new formulas and ways that people can calculate the cost of doing business. Newbies who have never done this before, take note of how you can use your end goal to work backwards and know exactly what you need to succeed. You want the copy jobs. You want the jobs with good rates. You want expedite, daily, technical, realtime. You want these things because it’s going to bounce your rate up and close the distance between you and your annual salary desires.

The Resurgence

It was looking pretty bad for steno for a while. Schools were closing. Courts were pushing stenographers out. Easy example, a few decades ago, stenographers started getting pushed out of New Jersey courts. The wheels of progress and the winds of change are slow, but I was fortunate enough to see this spot for a stenographic reporter pop up in Elizabeth, New Jersey. This is evidence to me that we can recover lost ground.

And there is certainly ground to recover. The Workers Compensation Board of New York moved to recording and having their stenographers transcribe. Our NYSCRA and others pushed to have the legislature mandate use of stenographic reporting, and the bill to do so was passed by the assembly and senate, but vetoed by Governor Cuomo. Needless to say, whenever New York decides to elect a new governor, it will be time for us to try again.

But seeing such a push by stenographers everywhere to educate the public and continue training each other to provide the best quality records possible, there’s no doubt in my mind that we can continue to take back any areas of the market that were lost.

I’ve gone over the math many times. There are more of us and so many ways to spread the message that stenography is still relevant and superior in this modern world. Old keyboard, new tricks. The best part of it is that as the push continues, people and companies are rising up to start new education programs. Just this year, by my own count, we’ve had something like a half a dozen programs open up and enrolling future stenographers.

The sweeter irony is that digital reporting very well may face the same shortage it tried to use against us. As word about stenography spreads, many transcribers are realizing that stenography can save them time and money in their transcription work, or that they can use stenography as a springboard into a career that is, on average, about double the pay. I’ve seen at least two social media posts in the last seven days about transcribers and digitals switching to steno. Let’s face it, anyone saying stenography is equal is running on intel that’s six years old. At that rate, they’ll catch on and get back on the wagon sometime in the next sixty. We can’t wait for them.

The truth is that from independent people like myself or Mirabai Knight, to major stenographic organizations like ASSCR or NCRA, to all the many consumers, judges, lawyers, stenographic court reporting has a lot of allies. It’s not going away. The New York State Court System said as much. We know the truth. All that’s left is to get out there, tell it, train our students to be the best they can be, and see the resurgence of stenography spread across the country.

Recording Grand Jury (NY)

So I’ve been following the facts on a series of cases picked up by the Batavian and Daily News. The very short story, with some extrapolation, is that a grand jury stenographer contracted by the district attorney was apparently using the AudioSync feature in our modern stenotypes. This caused the defense attorneys to seek dismissals of the indictments. As best I can tell, and after writing Batavian author Howard Owens and one of the attorneys, who had stated it was a Judiciary Law misdemeanor, I pieced together the following with regard to grand jury recording law in New York:

Criminal Procedure Law 190.25(4) makes it very clear that grand jury proceedings are secret. Judiciary Law 325 gets into how it shall be lawful for a stenographer to take grand jury proceedings, and doesn’t explicitly allow audio recording. Penal Law 215.70 talks about unlawful disclosure and lists the crime as a class E felony. Finally, Penal Law 110 tells us an attempted E felony becomes an A misdemeanor.

What can we further infer from all that? Well, as best I can tell, the indictments are only dismissed if it’s shown that the recording altered the testimony or proceedings in some way, and the defense is given the burden of proving that. As of writing, no indictment has been dismissed because of recording. That said, this opens up a serious concern for grand jury stenographers across New York. Recording the grand jury proceedings may be construed as attempted unlawful disclosure, and thanks to Judiciary Law 325, it may be difficult or impossible to argue that such recording is in the course of your lawful duties. Like Frank Housh in the video linked above, I was shocked that we could work in this industry for years and not ever be told the law surrounding that. Admittedly, I was a grand jury stenographer in New York City for months, and while I understood that not recording was a condition of my employment, I did not know that recording could theoretically give rise to a criminal prosecution. It is up to us to keep ourselves and each other informed, and now we know. This is not a joke, and you could go to jail for up to one year and have a criminal record for up to ten years on an A misdemeanor.

That caution stated, as of writing, there has been no prosecution of any grand jury stenographer for that specific reason, so it seems that the district attorneys or assistant district attorneys involved in these cases disagree with defense’s contention that this rises to the level of a misdemeanor. It also appears that recording of the proceedings does not automatically invalidate indictments.

The court rules Part 29 and Part 131 did not come up in my correspondence with anyone involved in this matter, but they are tangentially related and may be worth a review. And remember, nothing written here pertains to federal grand jury proceedings. We are talking strictly the New York State courts.

Any future updates to this matter will be posted right here.

The vTestify Lie

I’ve often worried we too often buy into hype from voice recognition sellers. Dragon represents itself as being 99 percent accurate, but only has about a 3-star rating. Opened up to scrutiny, VR and digital recording companies don’t make the cut.

So we had a company mentioned on Facebook called vTestify. They brag about all the money they can save people on depositions. Just knowing what I’ve reported in the past, other voice recognition companies have raised a lot of money. Verbit raised $20 million. Trint raised something like $160 million. As far as I can tell, vTestify raised $3 million. Either they’re 50 times more efficient than everybody else or they’re woefully underfunded and their investors are set to lose while the company lurches along burning capital. Let that sink in for the next time somebody is trying to sell you the future, investors!

I would’ve left it there, but then another reporter brought up that they have a calculator. The claims there are laughable. They claim that they can save attorneys $3,198 per deposition. I don’t know what reporters in North Carolina are charging, but I know here in New York I could get somewhere around $4.00 a page, and maybe on a great day a $100 appearance fee. A pretty thick day is about 200 pages, only ever getting to that 300 or 400 page count occasionally. So take 200 pages multiplied by 4. 800. Add on that sweet appearance fee, and maybe it comes to 900 bucks. Even real-time reporters only charge a buck or two a hookup, so even with 6 hookups, we’re still only talking maybe a $2,000 day. We can all acknowledge that these glamorous multi-thousand dollar days exist, but the bottom line is that’s not the norm and vTestify isn’t actually saving anybody a dime. Their calculator doesn’t even make any sense. When I added the numbers they gave, I got $3,646. Somehow their calculator comes up with $4,329.

It gets better — or worse — you decide! Then we have this snippet about the court reporter shortage. Using their numbers and assuming it’s totally true, they say there are 23,000 reporters to cover 3 million depositions. What a crisis! Except when you take three million and divide that by 23,000, you get 130 and change. If every reporter took 131 depositions a year, using vTestify’s own numbers, we’d be just fine. There are about 260 weekdays in a year. Succinctly, if every reporter worked half the weekdays in a year, by vTestify’s own argument, there’d be no shortage. Let’s not forget all of the steno-centric initiatives like Open Steno, A to Z, Stenotrain, and Project Steno, that have taken place since the Ducker Report to bring people into this field. Are we really expected to believe there was zero impact and things went exactly as predicted? I don’t, and you shouldn’t either. Let’s put this another way. If the median salary of a reporter is about 57,000, reporters are only taking home, on average, 5,000 a month gross. So how can vTestify be saving anyone 3k or 4k per deposition when the average reporter is only grossing 5k per month? They can’t. But that doesn’t stop them from saying they can.

We have one decision to make in this field. Are we going to get out there and educate the consumer, or are we going to lay down and let these irresponsible companies fake it until they make it? There’s zero compunction with lying to make a buck, and customers need to know. Smart purchasers have already seen through this BS and stuck with stenographers through thick and thin, and they’ve done better for it. Tried, tested, efficient; stenographic reporters are the way to go. Maybe vTestify will figure that out and make the switch themselves!

Remember all this next time you see somebody peddling a similar product. And next time you’re making a sales pitch, ask your buyer what their monthly budget for depositions looks like. If it’s more than $5,000 a month, I have a few numbers above that say they can save a whole lot by switching to stenography.

Can’t Outspend? Outsell.

When many of us were in school we were given a line, steno sells itself. Many of us can probably relate to that. Most steno companies, upon hearing you’re a professional stenographer, will give you a shot. Many of us in New York came out during a big slump (2010) where steno wasn’t selling itself, but even then, it was trivial to get work. All we had to do was say we’d been working three months, and “they’d” go from sorry no work for you to “oh, here are the keys to the kingdom.” Not all of us knew it, but that’s how it was. Agency owners are good at reading confidence, and what we’re offered is often linked directly to our confidence level.

Of course, the following may be an incorrect assumption on my part, but bear with me: We have entered an era where steno is not selling itself. Company owners are being pulled into the mindset that the voice recognition is “good enough,” and some of the major players, like Veritext, have been pushing recording.

I should note, in full disclosure, that I have not been able to corroborate what I’m about to say with documents or pictures as I usually do. It’s pulled from the social media sphere, so consider it anecdotal for now, and do not be surprised if agencies start railing against social media. Even as some claim that Veritext sent an email stating they were not using recording in states like New Jersey, others have come forward across social media to say yes, this is being done behind our backs. Many of us are reportedly asking lawyers what they’re seeing, and they are seeing digital getting peddled to them relentlessly.

So what do we do when we have major players putting their resources into our replacement? Who here thinks they have more money that Veritext or their owners? Hopeless, some would say. But there is something that many reporters are realizing: This alleged shortage is a great time get private clients and begin new businesses. If Veritext or some entity swears they can’t get a stenographer, some lawyers have allegedly called their insurers and gotten authorization to use a local stenographer or stenographic firm. All their marketing moves and salespeople count for nothing if a stenographer finds themselves in the right place at the right time.

We’re the boots on the ground. We have more contact with law office staff and employees. We have the keys to the kingdom. But the people at the top have made it very clear that they’ll do whatever is convenient for them. It’s time we do the same for the survival of our industry. We don’t work for them? Try it. It might just give us access to their clients. We work for them? Guess who already has access.

Even if we don’t want to handle private clients, we could always network with an existing firm owner out there and get them clients in exchange for the work or a share. If we’re even moderately successful, big companies will be offering to buy back their business from us in a few years, and the field will be a lot healthier once the market share is spread out. Our actions determine the future. The conversation today is steno or digital. Tomorrow it just might be stay steno or slam sand.

Cert Shaming

In line with the Pitchfork Culture, since beginning this career and embarking on this journey, I have run into a social phenomenon I’ll call cert shaming. I’ll even go so far as to say it goes both ways. And we’re going to examine this, and then I’ll chime in with why it may not be good to engage in the practice.

First thing we’ll talk about is less common in my view. Shaming or viewing certified reporters as inferior. There’s been a valid and true push for years for people to get certified. It’s come from NCRA in the form of things like the TRAIN initiative to other ideas like realtime for all. Overall, this is good. We all want each other to be at the top of our game. Any interview or correspondence I’ve had with any professional in the field has led to one conclusion, the field needs great reporters. As Doris Wong put it, the field need lions. But a counterculture grew from this. There are a great many reporters in states that do not require any licensure or certification, and from that culture grew people who asked: What does it do for me? More than that, that group can fall into cert shaming, seeing the certified as snobby or entitled without ever getting to know them. If you’re reading along and feel that way, I get it. But if you have no idea what I’m talking about, this counterculture holds one motto: You write better than I do, that doesn’t mean you are better than me.

Then, of course, we have the other end of the spectrum. We have folks out there in our community that get these certifications and then decide that the uncertified are the unfit. There’s no gray area or middle ground, there’s certified or not. It doesn’t matter if you take continuing education courses, write realtime, or are out there making the field shine in your own little way. No certs, no credit, full shame.

Here is the great thing about what I am about to say: You don’t have to believe me. You can go about your business and live with a long and shining career. But here’s where I’m coming from strategically. The next time you feel like someone is inferior as a professional or reporter, examine why. If all it comes down to is whether they passed a test, then I challenge you to re-examine that view. Why? Unity. Teamwork. Commitment to one another. Commitment to this field.

We have all been stuck in a substandard position at one time or another because of somebody. We all have our own idea of what constitutes a good reporter and a bad reporter. If we take that pain and disappointment and use it to tear down the next person, we lose our ability to work together on the issues that matter. On the flip side, if you take that pain and encourage the next person to do better, to reach up and be the best reporter they can be, you’re breaking the cycle and making things a little bit better. In time, I hope we can tackle big questions together. What makes us good beyond the certs? What makes us attractive to lawyers, judges, and clients? Would the NCRA benefit from allowing uncertified people in its membership? How do we balance things so that neither the certified nor uncertified feel disenfranchised? Can we? Have we already?

Whatever your answers, know that there are other professionals out there looking to you for guidance and example, and perhaps the greatest thing you can do for them is lend your perspective firmly but politely. For a quick example, I am among the uncertified, but with every single student I have ever mentored, I have set out the truth I felt most beneficial: You can succeed regardless, and if you go for those certs you give it your all and get them. Shame your fellow reporter, and to our collective shame they may leave our field one weaker. Encourage them to do well, and they will do well.

New Speed Students, Learn To Let Go

I spend a good deal of time interacting with self-learners and some new students. One thing that new people often struggle with is the switch from QWERTY-style typing to our stenotype keyboard. What do I mean?

Picture this. How many times on a regular keyboard have you typed something quickly, only to realize it is wrong? Backspace, backspace, backspace, fix! This habit is ingrained in pretty much anyone that has been raised typing on a computer. That’s what we do. It doesn’t make sense to do it another way because you’d have to go back and fix it later anyway.

Well, all that changes when it’s time to do steno. In the early days, we must learn to let go and just get the take. Perhaps captioners will disagree, but I feel it strongly hampers a person’s natural progression, early on, to be using the asterisk to correct every little messed up keystroke. In the beginning, put an emphasis on reading through your mistakes. But correcting them on your tests or in your practice takes will likely take time away from creating the muscle memory you need to succeed.

All of this is said with one caution: If you notice a serious problem with a group of words, you need to practice out that problem. Create a finger drill. Reach out to a mentor. Talk to your teachers. Heck, reach out to me. You don’t want to end up a professional reporter who drags their S into every stroke or something semi-critical like that.

Another thing: Do not be surprised if someone disagrees with what I have to say. In the stenographic learning process there tends to be two schools of thought. There is speed, and there is accuracy. There are, in fact, people who believe that accuracy is paramount and you cannot advance in speed without accuracy. My own experience is that with speed comes accuracy. If you can stroke out a sloppy 240, you can probably jam out a neat 180 or 200, and a passing 225. I have had failing tests turn to a pass because I sat down with my notes and really looked at what I had.

A mentor outside the stenographic field once told me, “your hesitation is what kills you.” When it came to steno school, I took that to heart, I stopped hesitating. I urge every student to do the same so that you can get out of school, make some money, and change some lives in this wonderful field.

If you enjoyed this article, check out my old assorted tips for students.