Keep Enemies Closer

I get a lot of anonymous emails. While I am grateful for every opinion and comment, it’s very difficult to write about each one. It would unfairly spam my subscribers, and that’s a no-go zone for me. That’s why we banned ads! That acknowledged, I received an e-mail from a reader with regard to when attorneys, our clients, use friendship as a tactic. This is a rare phenomenon that I’ve had more than one veteran reporter warn me about, but never had the misfortune of experiencing it myself. The warning goes something like this: Be a little tight lipped about what you’re making, doing, and your interactions with other reporters, because that same person who’s smiling at you and pretending to be your friend can take what you say and blow it out of proportion or cause you trouble. This can happen in any setting with any mix of people, so be mindful of the general principle of cautiousness.

Remember that part of being a professional is knowing where the boundaries lie. Lawyers deal with these kinds of difficult questions all the time; what is okay to share, what is off limits. If you’re not too sure whether something is “safe to share,” it’s best to not share in that moment and seek out a friend, advisory opinion, or mentor to get some perspective on the issue.

As a quick example, I saw this done to an interpreter years ago. He was ordered to do some kind of Sicilian dialect. Turns out that the witness was some other Sicilian dialect. Off the record, he tried his best to professionally explain the issue. And the more he did, the more the attorney prepared to go on the record and explain that the interpreter was “translating incorrectly.” This guy was doing everything right, and he was still about to get thrown under the bus because he was giving the information to someone who had made up their mind against him. Perhaps by divine intervention, the witness became ill, and we adjourned.

But we can’t count on divine intervention. What can we learn? We cannot go through our professional lives afraid that someone will twist the truth to hurt us. That’s no way to live. But the hard truth is that if you have any reservations about sharing a comment, it can only protect you to trust your gut and say nothing.

A brilliant attorney told me years ago: No one can complain if you’re silent. I have great reservations about demanding reporters, people already relegated to the silent role, be quiet. Most of the time we need to be out there educating our clients and being active in marketing ourselves and our profession. But new people need to know the pitfalls so that they can avoid them and have bigger, better, brighter careers. So do us all a favor. If you see a newbie oversharing, politely caution them so that they have a chance to take your advice. Regardless of whether they take the advice, it’s meant well, and it might just save them from having a bad day.

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.

Pattern Writing

In a recent discussion with a new reporter, I was asked what I did with medications. I thought about it, and I brought up a recent example where I had to write Haldol. Sure enough, I wrote it out the first time. Before long, I was doing what I call halves. I just split the word in half, HAL, and J-defined it.

While not necessarily the best way to deal with writing, it’s certainly a resourceful way, and something that I find fairly common among reporters. During my internship almost a decade ago, the reporter explained he uses final Z for anything that ends in that Z-ish sound, even words I might have used final S for, like “says.” I find myself coming up with all sorts of rules for my writing. I tag Z at the end for “self suffix” words, PHAOEUZ becomes myself. HERZ, HEUPLZ, THEPLZ, OURZ. There’s a pattern. There’s a rule. It’s a made-up rule, but it stops hesitation, and I get the words every time.

Why is this useful? Why am I sharing it? Many students and new people get caught up in the quest to brief it all. Briefs have their place and there’s no denying that briefs are useful. But pattern writing can carry the day because it can reduce your hesitation on things you’ve never briefed or even heard before. For example, if you tuck an asterisk into certain groupings of words, or tuck your G in to get that -ing ending (WAEUGT), or tuck the AE in to note apostrophes sometimes (TAES, it’s), the words themselves need not be remembered, specific briefs need not be thought of, because you’re handling groups of words similarly.

The stenotype is all about muscle memory and repetition. So if you haven’t started creating patterns and ways to handle specific word groups, give it a shot, get things you do in two strokes down to one and three strokes down to two, it just might pass your next test.

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.

Do You Log Your Practice?

Steno students, do you keep track of how much you’re really practicing? Some of the most successful stenographers out there practiced at least 2 to 4 hours in addition to school to reach their goals. It is a whopping time commitment, and there are simple things you can do to increase your monitoring of practice and progress.

One easy, old-fashioned way to do it is a practice log. The one I have here will take all the hours you input into column B and add them together to give your entire month total of practice. A really solid month of practice and good goal to have for speed students is 100 hours a month. So take this log, or design your own, and take the next step in holding yourself accountable and living up to your potential. (DROPBOX)

Shortage Solutions 9: Independent Listings

It occurred to me not long ago that one of our biggest issues with the shortage is that we are allowing many other groups to dictate what is true. Big companies or companies that sell audio equipment profit from spreading the belief that the stenographer is on its way out and that their product is the future. Because of this, we can no longer trust companies and organizations that are not by steno and for steno to represent us.

Perhaps this serves as a time for associations to shine. Many stenographic associations across the country maintain member rolls and directories. The most prominent of these directories is our NCRA Sourcebook. It is a powerful tool that, used correctly and advertised frequently, can serve as a gateway for the outsider into finding a qualified stenographer. We are so familiar with it — how often have we told lawyers and bar associations it exists? I admit that I personally have not told a single lawyer about the Sourcebook. Perhaps after today, I will get the opportunity.

Indeed, there are many associations that maintain public directories. My own state of New York has a public listing of stenographers on the NYSCRA website. It needs a little work. Some stenographers, like myself, have disappeared from the listings on occasion. But this is understandable, and I am sure that as members look to independent listing to assist with the shortage, associations will answer the call. Perhaps there will even be individuals and companies that take up the task of creating their own listings or listing companies in order to deliver stenographic services. A lot of direct market apps like Expedite or NexDep function on this very principle, and it’s exciting any time another player brings a new idea to the game.

Now it comes down to you, reader. Does your state have a listing? Are you and your colleagues in the Sourcebook? Are we advertising independent listings so that consumers can find qualified stenographers? NCRA and so many state associations are working hard to maintain these tools for us, and I find this to be just one more way that we can give back by keeping the legal profession aware that we’re not going anywhere and are easy to find. Will you take the jump and bring up Sourcebook at your next dep?

Addendum 9/11/21:
In preparation for my 9/13/21 post, I stumbled across this one again, and realize the link for Sourcebook is now dead. NCRA decided to rebrand Sourcebook as PRO Link. It’s not dead, it’s just moved.

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.