I believe this can be part of a larger series with help from readers like you. Any money sent to Stenonymous during the lifetime of this ad campaign (until September 11, 2023), will be designated toward developing and running more advertising to reduce the shortage. Stenonymous has put out tons of information with regard to advertising metrics and the fact that solvable localized shortages were painted as an unsolvable national problem. Up until now, a lot of my advertising was aimed at attorneys to educate them on the issues we’re facing in the field. But the objective of solving the localized shortages still remains. For an example of how this plays out in the real world, I know for a fact that right now the Bronx is hurting for court reporters more than any other borough in New York City. Meanwhile, at least one freelancer in the private sector reported they were told there were too many reporters and not enough work. So even in individual cities, we’re seeing uneven shortage impacts.
Please consider donating to Stenonymous today to end localized shortages. Based on this ad’s current stats, I expect it will cost $150 per 1,000 engagements, $30 per 1,000 impressions. With the help and support of people like you, I believe we can bring those numbers down to half of what they are today. To put these numbers into perspective, about $30,000 would get the ad in front of a million people, and about $150,000 would get a million people to like or share it if progress is linear. $30,000 is more or less the equivalent of every court reporter throwing down a dollar. We don’t need that kind of money to make an impact, but raising more money will make a bigger impact than the one I will make by myself. If you donate, please email in or comment below what geographical area(s) you feel need the most advertising, as it will help us improve audience targeting on future ads.
Stenonymous can be sent money through PayPal or Zelle (ChristopherDay227@gmail.com), Venmo @Stenonymous, the donation box at the front page of Stenonymous.com, or the special donation box I’m setting up below. Even if you cannot contribute any amount of money, please share this on social media so that it can get in front of the people that can.
Due to an oversight on my end about how Facebook presents information, I mistakenly believed the Cost Per Mille was lower than it currently is. I will have more accurate data and an explanation by the end of the campaign. The overall principle still stands that community support will make or break this campaign.
Cassandra Caldarella reached out to me a while ago with some information about California. Given my relative lack of familiarity with California’s court reporting laws and statistics, the interaction was very welcome. I’ve said it many times, but I would be nowhere without information sent in by readers.
The first thing I was told was that in 2013 there were 7,100 active CSRs in California and that there are now 6,580 CSRs in 2023, a loss of 520, or about 8%. A loss of about 50 per year, or 0.7% of that 7,100 total. The Ducker Report told us something like 70% of reporters would be retiring between 2013 and 2023, so about 2.3% a year. 4.67% per year if you count from 2018, when the shortage was supposed to start getting bad. What does all this mean? The California shortage may be half as bad as it was forecasted to be.
An explanation of CSR license numbers from Cassandra Caldarella.
We can pull straight from Ducker to confirm something is off.
Ducker Report, Forecasted Supply for CA in 2018, 6,110.
There was a 6,110 supply of stenographers forecasted in 2018, and it was supposed to get worse and worse every year until 2018. If it is accurate that there are now 6,580, then we are doing much better than the forecast.
Cassandra went on to explain that these were not straight losses and that there were a lot of new CSRs coming in.
I was then given a yearly breakdown of out-of-state CA CSR licensees. The average before COVID was about 10 per year. 2020 to 2023, that jumps to about 16.
Out-of-state California CSR licenares per year according to Cassandra Caldarella.
I did go snooping for these numbers, because I don’t like to publish without some fact checking, and I did find at least one piece of information from SB662 that seems to contradict or call into question these numbers.
2022, 5,605 CSRs according to SB662 bill text. 4.,829 listed an address in California. 8,004 in 2000. 7,503 in 2010. 6,085 in 2020.
That’s a much more grim outlook. But perhaps it’s just market forces at work? Unless 30% of the workforce has been replaced by digital, it means that the demand for court reporters is simply lower than it once was or that there was not enough demand in the market for those 8,004 CSRs. A lot of people believe in the self-correction of markets. Why is our labor market any different? We could blame it on government regulation. Then again, we could also blame it on the larger corporations that stood by and did basically nothing for half a decade. If there was a retirement cliff, they sure weren’t worried about it, and I think that says a lot.
Let’s work with the most relevant numbers presented here. 7,503 in 2010. 1,418 drop from 2010 to 2020. A loss of about 19%, 1.7% a year. Still below the 2.3% to 4.7% it was supposed to be, but not quite as rosy as the 0.7% figure I was hoping for.
I’d really like to get the discussion going here. Are there more accurate direct sources I’ve missed? Has anybody run these numbers and come up with similar results? Have I gotten something completely wrong?
The comments are open.
Addendum:
Some edits were done to the images and text in this post after it went live. Subsequently, I was sent a spreadsheet that purports to show about 6,849 California CSRs active as of May 10, 2023. So, after seeing that, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that we are in much better shape than was forecasted.
How court reporting companies are getting away with charging top-shelf prices for undervalued work…
The overpriced court reporter page is something that comes up occasionally in legal circles. All through my early career, law firm owners I worked with mentioned how their firms were stuck with expensive court reporter bills. As a young stenographic court reporter, I was paid very little, and later learned that court reporters in my city were about 30 years behind inflation. This set me down a path of skepticism when it came to what court reporters are told about themselves, their industry, and the public’s perception of them. How could lawyers be paying so much when I was making so little and such a large part of the transcript creation was on me?
Years later, as it turned out, some of the largest court reporting companies would get together using a nonprofit called the Speech-to-Text Institute (STTI). That nonprofit would go on to mislead consumers about the stenographer shortage to artificially increase demand for digital court reporting. Tellingly, while a U.S. Legal Support representative had no problem using the word “libel” on one of the female members of my profession, USL and the other multimillion dollar corporations never dared utter a word about my eventual fraud allegations. The companies wanted to trick consumers into believing stenographers were unavailable due to shortage and force digital court reporting on them, where matters are recorded and transcribed.
This set off alarm bells in the world of court reporting. Stenotype manufacturing giant, Stenograph, also represented in STTI’s leadership, shifted from supporting realtime stenographic reporters to shoddy service, and began to call its MAXScribe technology realtime. Realtime, as many attorneys know, is a highly trained subset of court reporting that often comes with a premium. These bait-and-switch tactics on the digital court reporter side of the industry caused a nonprofit called Protect Your Record Project to spring up and begin educating attorneys on what was happening in our field. But as of today, the nonprofit has not reached a level of funding that would allow it to advertise these issues on a national scale — this blog’s in the same boat.
So as more of the workforce is switched to digital reporters / recorders and transcribers, we’re seeing companies use influencers and other media to lure transcribers in for low pay. In short, digital court reporting is now synonymous with side hustle. These companies are going to take the field of skilled reporters that law firms and courts know and love, replace them with transcribers, and go on charging the same money. For the stenographer shortage, these folks were dead silent for the better part of a decade. Now that they need transcribers to replace us, they’re going all out to recruit.
Shopify talks about transcribing as a side hustle.Shopify talks about transcribing as a side hustle.
“What do I care?” That’s what a lot of lawyers and paralegals might be asking at this point. Well, I may not write as well as Alex Su, but I’ll do my best here. First, there are egalitarian concerns. In the Testifying While Black study, stenographers only scored 80% accuracy on the African American Vernacular English dialect. This was widely reported in the media, but what was lost by the media was the reveal of pilot study 1, which showed everyday people only transcribe with an accuracy of about 40% (e226). When we’re talking about replacing court reporters with “side hustle technology,” we’re talking about a potential 50% drop in accuracy and a reduction in court record quality for minority speakers, something courts are largely unaware of. According to the Racial Disparities in Automatic Speech Recognition study, automation isn’t coming to save us either. Voice writing is the best bet for the futurists, and it’s being completely ignored by these big companies.
There are also security concerns. When we’re talking about utilizing transcribers, we’re talking about people that have an economic incentive to sell any private data they might gain from the audio or transcript. If transcription is outsourced, a bribe as low as $600 might be enough to get people acting unethically. Digital court reporting companies have already shown they’re not protective of people’s data — in fact, companies represented in the Speech-to-Text Institute. This also leads to questions about remedies for suspected omissions or tampering. Would you rather subpoena one local stenographer or teams of transcribers, some possibly outside of the jurisdiction?
Finally, there’s an efficiency issue with digital court reporting. Turnaround times can be much slower. Self-reported, it can take up to 6 hours to transcribe 1 hour of audio. By comparison, 1 hour of proceedings can take a qualified stenographer 1 to 2 hours to transcribe. That’s 3 to 6 times faster. Everyone here knows stenographers aren’t perfect and that backlogs happen. Now imagine a world where the backlog is 3 to 6 times what it is today. In one case, a transcript took about two months to deliver. If we’re going to hire teams of transcribers to do the work of one stenographic court reporter, aren’t we going backwards?
Consumers are the ones with the power here. They can demand stenographers, utilize companies that aren’t economically incentivized to lie to them, and spread awareness to other consumers. Consumers, lawyers and court administrators, decide the future. Knowing what you do now, do you want a court reporter or a side hustler at your next deposition or criminal case?
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Written by Christopher Day, a stenographic court reporter in New York City that has been serving the legal community since 2010. He is also a former board member of the New York State Court Reporters Association and a former volunteer for the National Court Reporters Association STRONG Committee. Day also authors the Stenonymous blog, the industry’s leading independent publication on court reporting media, information, data, analyses, satire, and archiving of current events. He also appeared on VICE with regard to the Testifying While Black study and fiercely advocated for more linguistics training for court reporters in and around New York State.
Donations for the blog will help run advertising for this article and others like it, as well as pay for more journalists and investigators. If you would like to donate, you may use the donation box on the front page of Stenonymous.com, PayPal or Zelle ChristopherDay227@gmail.com, or Venmo @Stenonymous. Growing honest media to combat misconceptions in and about our marketplace is the premier path to a stronger profession and ultimately better service to the legal community.
A posse ad esse.
Addendum:
By sheer coincidence, an article on the side hustle was released the same day as my post. NCRA STRONG’s Lisa Migliore Black and Kim Falgiani really hit it out of the park with this one. Apparently FTR and Rev say they have security in place to prevent sensitive data from being shared. But FTR is known for selling “deficit products,” and Rev is known for its massive security breach. So check out the article by Chelsea Simeon linked above and enjoy!
In a May 5, 2023 article by Tracey Read, issues with recording were addressed. Interestingly to me, there was a blurb in there about our shortage.
In a 2023 article, it is stated that according to NCRA there is -currently- a shortage of 5,500 court reporters.
You might look at that and say, “so what?”
Remember those Speech-to-Text Institute folks that I call frauds? Well, let’s just take a look at this screenshot from what I just linked.
In a projection released by the Speech-to-Text Institute years before 2023, it was stated that there would be a gap (shortage) of 11,345 court reporters in 2023. A number that is potentially double the actual shortage.
On May 6, 2023, I reached out to NCRA to find out if this article was accurate, and I will publish the response, if any, in an addendum at the bottom of this post. If there’s no addendum, assume no response yet. I’d say check back in a week. As of now, all I’ve been told is “let us check and see where this might have come from, if anywhere, Christopher. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.”
Hopefully this makes it pretty clear why I’ve been so stuck on this issue. A shortage of 11,345 is a lot different than a shortage of 5,500, and now we have in print two very different numbers for 2023.
It seems pretty clear to me that our shortage is less severe than was forecasted, which means that it is more manageable than we have been told for about 5 years, which means that the big boxes in the Speech-to-Text Institute Bloc, having as much market share and working with as many reporters as they do, knew for a fact that the shortage was not as bad as forecasted, and perpetuated the lie anyway.
It’s bittersweet for me. I have been writing about the possibility of false claims being used to demoralize stenographers for almost half a decade, maybe longer. Many who have examined my writing and documentation over the years agree that there is something suspicious going on in stenography land. But many don’t have the time to investigate years worth of chronological discoveries and analyses. And quite frankly, after my medical issues in late 2021, it was easier for some to dismiss me entirely than to believe that such misconduct was occurring in our field.
But this should give stenographers a lot of hope. The shortage is less severe than forecasted. The NCRA is indisputably the strongest court reporting association and in the best position to address the court reporter shortage to the extent that it does exist. And as word spreads that the situation is not hopeless, as so many shills would have had my colleagues believe, we have a chance at drawing in investors to create new and better schools, and expand and improve existing programs in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Should it turn out that this is not NCRA’s position, my past analyses about the shortage being less severe than forecasted stand. But then this shifts to a really good point: News media can make game-changing statements and be completely wrong. If we’re not funding our own media arm, we may very well be drowned by lies and incompetence. That’s the state of modern journalism. As industries grow bigger, more complex, and require more coverage, journalism is seeing an economic contraction and nearly a 10% reduction in jobs between now and 2031. Fewer journalists covering more news means we’d better start hiring some journalists if we want a fair shake. Oh, and the other side has probably been doing that for years, let’s not forget that part.
I leave my core audience with a poem.
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Addendum:
NCRA President Jason Meadors responded to my initial May 6 inquiry on May 12, 2023.
“Chris, mystery solved. That was lifted from the Ducker Report, which was before my time and has been pretty well debunked now.”
A big thanks to NCRA for the transparency and honesty.
I was sent this by a contact over social media. It’s labeled as an advertorial. And that alone gives us enough to pick it apart and figure out what it’s selling. It’s written by Christy Pratt, VP of Veritext Canada.
Veritext releases advertorial about the court reporting shortage, strengthening Stenonymous arguments that the court reporter shortage is being exaggerated and exacerbated to artificially increase demand for digital court reporting.
It goes a little into the history of reporting to give the rest of the piece some credibility. I have no problem with that. But then it gets to its main sell: The shortage is real and times are changing! Hey everybody! Did you know times change? You can trust the rest of the advertorial because the author is making perfect sense up to this point.
Veritext advertorial showcasing that the shortage is being used as a selling point for digital court reporting.
Remember, this is posted to Trial Lawyers of BC. It’s clear who the audience is. They don’t want lawyers to complain about the transition from steno to digital, where the author admits steno is still in heavy use. They want to paint digital as the solution. It’s much easier to tell someone what they want is not available instead of telling them you don’t want to give it to them. It’s a lie to limit consumer choice.
It’s worth noting that the shortage isn’t as bad as it was forecasted to be in America and that the Speech-to-Text Institute’s Jim Cudahy left the field when I accused him of fraud for spreading court reporter shortage disinformation. It’s also worth noting that Veritext is represented in the Speech-to-Text Institute’s leadership by Adam Friend, VP of business development, and has not made any attempt to correct the misleading information put out onto the market by STTI. Misleading information that threatens the futures of ourselves and our students, by the way. Does anyone believe that Veritext, a multimillion dollar corporation that benefits financially from the expansion of digital, would not spread the same lies in Canada?
I’ve had people lie to me over $5. When the future direction of an industry is at stake, does anyone believe this isn’t fabricated? And I’m sure I have a detractor or two who would point at me and say the same, but let’s be real, in my wildest dreams Stenonymous makes me maybe a million dollars someday because some rich person realizes how much fun it would be to set me loose on the world or Veritext realizes my creative genius can be bought (in reality, I lose money on my media activities, even with the support of my wonderful audience.) This industry is close to $3 billion annually by estimates I’ve seen. Who has a greater incentive to lie? And it’s not like they can claim they don’t know about my research now. They’re basically using my arguments on AI to make the case for why court reporters won’t be replaced. I’ve basically never had better proof that Veritext execs read the blog and understand at least part of my work.
To make matters worse, a source inside a big box is saying the nickel and diming of stenographers is getting worse despite the alleged demand. If they’re chipping away at the incomes of high-end realtime reporters, the average reporter isn’t going to stand a chance.
Reporters, organize and resist or be ruled by people that don’t care if you have a good life. That’s all there is to it. I know my methods come off as extreme, but it’s an extraordinary case where an entire profession is threatened with extinction based on a lie. It’s a classic what-would-you-do scenario, and I’d like to think that if every reporter had the same statistics and information that I have seen and published, they’d be just as outraged. They’d fight just as hard, and maybe harder.
It seems almost a waste to make this its own post, but the thought occurred to me that if the shortage was really a pressing concern and something the agencies wanted to help alleviate, they might just take work a little later.
It varies from case to case and isn’t something that can be done everywhere, but in general, at least in New York, the deadlines have remained the same over the years. If anything, they’ve tried to demand transcripts even sooner than the two-week turnaround that existed when I started out.
It would not only enable individual court reporters to take more work, but also help draw the existing pool of reporters to an agency that’s easier to work for rather than trying to squeeze them for every ounce of productivity they can.
Had the pleasure of viewing this interview between Stenograph and TransAtlantic about their new partnership. TransAtlantic’s David Ross, Secretary/Treasurer of the Speech-to-Text Institute, mentions during the interview that a machine will “never, ever, ever” replace the reporter. I found the interview to be seeded with more generalities about the shortage. It came across to me as trying to sell the idea of shortage.
Mr. Ross did have a lot of positives to say about stenographers, “And we’re very proud of them and honored to have them and I just wish there were more.” But the direction of the company seems clear, it’s going to be about digital court reporter integration. He even mentions the possibility of stenographers switching over to “try something new.” Towards the close of the interview he notes we should never be threatened by technology and keep an open mind. But those of us that dispute the severity of shortage are open minded. Most of us had to be convinced by math and science that there was a problem with the numbers and narrative being distributed to the public. Why has there been a push to get stenographers to go digital if digital is so easy to recruit and train for?
It’s tough for me. I personally see many companies coming and saying they have a shortage, but I see little in the way of communication. They’re largely not on our Facebook groups, not using PRO Link, not using recruiters on LinkedIn, and not asking our associations for help. This is why I am generally suspicious of the narrative being sold at every turn: “The shortage is insurmountable, you must change, or else.” It’s fear appeal propaganda. I do it too, but for truth.
Certain court reporting companies are exaggerating and exacerbating the stenographer shortage for the purpose of selling digital court reporting to lawyers/courts/consumers.
Veritext, US Legal Support, and Planet Depos have all publicly made statements about the unavailability or shortage of stenographers while putting most of their effort into expanding digital court reporting. Succinctly, utilizing their market share to obfuscate the availability of stenographers and artificially increase digital court reporter demand. It is unknown whether this is concerted or a form of tacit parallelism.
The nonprofit Protect Your Record Project was formed to educate consumers on the bait and switch tactics occurring in the court reporting industry.
In 2021, US Legal Rep Peter Giammanco wrote, “Does it really matter if done legally and ethically and both methods end with the same final transcript?” A consumer awareness campaign was subsequently launched. There are questions about whether digital recording is reliably the same as stenography. In one New York case, the court remarked that past holdings that recording was equivalent to stenography were belied by the record in that appeal.
Companies continue to profess shortage while placing the bulk of their effort into expanding the digital reporting market, effectively limiting consumer choice and ignoring consumer preference for stenography. The 2013-2014 Court Reporting Industry Outlook is used to add credibility to these claims, but that forecast is nearly a decade old and does not account for recruitment initiatives such as National Court Reporters A to Z, Project Steno, and Open Steno.
Attorneys, courts, and support staff can attempt to find stenographers or stenographer-run businesses through their state court reporting association or NCRA Pro Link.
Stenonymous (Christopher Day) is dedicated to informing the court reporting and legal community and has faced legal threat for accurate reporting in the past.
Does this look like they’re looking for stenographers?
Members of the community that wish to support advertising for this bulletin may send money through the donation box at Stenonymous.com.
Readback, the company most known for declaring it’s going to do away with steno and making bogus claims, is on the hunt for a reporter in charge in California.
Active Readback seeks stenographer after bashing steno.
I cannot think of a company that has made it more clear that they hate stenographers, and stenographers would do well to lock them out of the California market’s whole licensing scam by just not working for them. It’s very simple. The data we have today is that stenography is more accurate. They effectively advertised wanting to be less accurate. In a field that’s all about accuracy, consumers and court reporters are going to run the other way. As for this game of “oh, your poor joints…” Maybe we were gullible enough as an industry to believe such a thing half a decade ago, but not now.
One has to wonder if the business types have taken notice that we are allegedly on our way out and have this massive retirement cliff, but we are able to organize, get legislatures to act on our behalf, and just generally be a pain in the ass of anybody that wants to eliminate positions for our students. It’s almost as if the data they were relying on is wrong. I wonder who could have predicted that?
Perhaps this message goes beyond the businesses and meets us directly. We have value for as long as accurate court records have value. A major part of the game is learning and pricing that value. Another part of the game is communicating the value of accuracy in a way that only we really can. A third piece is realizing that organization constitutes part of our value. The more we are able to organize and fund associations or entities that will advertise and advocate for the profession, the more collective benefit we pull.
One thing is clear: Stenographers will not let the shortage be the scapegoat for our replacement. Readback, what’s your next move?
I’m informed that John Jay is now partnered with Veritext.
Of course, I object to this for many reasons. I still believe that stenography will lead to better accuracy outcomes, particularly for minority speakers. In the Testifying While Black study, stenographers were only 80% accurate taking down African American Vernacular English. Laypeople were 40% accurate (pilot study 1). Since emphasis in the above examples is on short-duration training, which accuracy level do we expect from digital reporting?
If Veritext wasn’t threatening the futures of our students with its lies and misinformation, I’d admire the company for its brilliance. It’s set up to earn money from digital, at least according to Twitter.
“They require you to buy their equipment…”
Of course, we still have the fact that we are honest, hard-working people on our side. We still constitute the majority of workers in this field. Our collective voices can still win this. We have a choice to remain silent and resign the future to the agendas of others or resist and lead this field into its next iteration.
Thank you to my readers for informing me of this development. Without you, what am I?
If you have ever doubted that we are under attack as a profession and that the incomes and outcomes of our students are at risk, here is your sign. It is time to be bold. It is time to stand up for the profession that has given us so much. Share this with your fellow colleagues so that they know what’s happening and can begin to talk about solutions.
