There is a proposed rule change for Indiana courts that seems to point to keeping stenographers out of the courtroom. Big thanks to Steno Strong and the stenographers that brought it to my attention. It’s pretty straightforward.
The Indiana government apparently seeks to purge stenography from court.
Much like Arizona, Indiana is asking for public comment. I’m feeling less dramatic than usual, so I gave it a shot.
Christopher Day (Stenonymous) responds to Indiana’s proposed purging of stenography from courts.
As I understand it, our institutions and many members of our community are already organizing a response. I would say get involved. Brainstorm on the best ways to phrase things or the right angle to go at this from. See if any attorney allies or anyone related to the legal field will pitch in a public comment. In my mind, it’s unquestionable that we have to give it to them straight. They’re handing an economic win to audio recording vendors. Once stenographic vendors are eliminated, price goes up. This is a concept so well understood that it’s part of the antitrust theory of predatory pricing. But there are probably dozens of arguments that I didn’t address that other stenographers can bring to the table more articulately.
This comes on the heels of the November 1, 2022 dissolution of the Indiana Court Reporters Association.
This is a convenient real-life example of how government impacts the demand for court reporters. They’re considering a rule change that would delete us from the courtrooms. They’re telegraphing a huge drop in court reporter demand. Is it any surprise that the market responds by training fewer court reporters? This is the deathblow I wrote about in 2018. How are we going to attract investors for stenographic education if a large purchaser of court reporting services, like the government, is saying “yeah, thanks for the memories?”
There were other comments far better than mine. Hopefully some of you will copy and paste yours below too.
From the Protect Your Record TikTok I was alerted to the existence of a December 1986 Caligrams publication from the CCRA. California, at least, was experiencing shortage. We can see that their President at the time seemed to feel that speaking negatively of the profession and failing to promote it were big problems.
Perhaps we can survive and thrive in the same way our predecessors did.Cooperation and attorney scheduling preferences. The discussion never ended, did it?
Interestingly enough, the shortage of 1986 wasn’t the only one. There was something going on in 1970, as revealed to me by another reader.
1970. NSRA was NCRA, by the way.Committees promoting the profession. They knew they had to and they did it.They did this. We can do this.Our great profession.
Perhaps what has changed is not the viability of our field or the importance of our work, but how we think about it. When we thought of the shortage as a thing to be solved, this profession survived. What happens when we think of our work as something to be improved? What happens when my East Coast friends are not making less than 1991 rates adjusted for inflation? What happens when my West Coast friends are not carrying gigantic accounts receivable and being kept on the work treadmill of survival and collection? This field’s problems would solve themselves in short order because everyone would be talking about it. Become a court reporter! Field would probably double its numbers inside five years. This field gave me so much and I want to make it better for the people entering it today. When you see me write about that stuff, it’s about making sure we’re not training students to be chewed out by companies that don’t have an interest in their professional growth or development.
The only thing that changed in me over time was my willingness to do what needed to be done and say what needed to be said. Some might look at this and say I’m acting against the advice of history here. “You’re not being very cooperative when you use your blog to attack XYZ firm.” No, but it was a different time with different challenges. We did not have a small league of corporations using every ounce of their effort to push the narrative towards “there just aren’t enough stenographers, honest.” Even if we solved the shortage tomorrow, I very much doubt they would stop promoting their alternative version of reality. They haven’t stopped promoting digital despite clear evidence it’s a losing horse.
To expound some, US Legal has made a LinkedIn recruitment blast for digital reporters each day since my last article about the company. They can’t do one for stenographers? They can’t acknowledge that digital is a harmful modality for consumers and workers? Of course they can, they just aren’t. How privileged I am to be the person that gets to raise the alarm. I’ve shown you all how weak the big companies actually are. I come out swinging with words like “fraud” and “attack on minority speakers,” and US Legal can’t be bothered to do anything. Not a cease and desist email, not a phone call, nothing. Maybe they’re afraid I’ll draw on it and blog about that too.
Maybe they should be afraid. It’s not every day someone says to a group of 27,000 “hey, you know this recognizable name in our industry? There’s a good chance they’re lying about your future.” Until I did it, it wasn’t something that was done. Now that that’s done it’s not going to be long before court reporters realize the weakness and silence on the side of digital reporting proponents and everybody starts taking shots. That’s 27,000 people that can say damn near anything supported by the evidence I published over the last month. I become a magnifier and shield for those 27,000. “Chris Day published evidence of fraud.” Why not? US Legal’s already shown its cards. It’s not touching me. When it was your job on the line, “nothing else we can do.” When all the things they can do were dragged in front of them and their hypocrisy was exposed, things got real quiet and they just kept on pushing to recruit digital. That’s called an agenda, a mission, or a deception, and all evidence points to the fact that the agenda has no intention of bowing to reality.
Ducker told us that over the next 12 years a large percentage of this field will likely retire. The next few years, we get to repeat the history of 1970 and 1986. We decide whether to survive or die as a profession. Things are looking good since we come from a long history of “survive.” The corporate line of “simply not enough stenographers” turned out to be an exaggeration or lie. I’ll be doing what I can to recruit and educate. I hope you’ll all join me. We don’t need to wait for the big companies to promote us. We will promote us and watch this field grow over the next decade in opposition to the forecasted decline.
We’ve got another snippet of the past. Last time, we looked at historic rate data from the west coast of the United States. Today, the old Federation of Shorthand Reporters contract hit the web. That’s the east coast of the United States. For those who don’t know, there was a union for freelancers in New York City in the 80s and 90s. They had their struggles and legal hurdles, and they do not exist today, but the agreement stands as a gateway to the past that we can use to inform our future.
And inform our future this should. A quick glance at the contract tells us the November 1991 rate for a regular was 2.75. Expedite $3.35. Daily $3.65. As with last time, I shoved this into an inflation calculator. Inflation, remember, affects all currency. It impacts every industry. It impacts every dollar earned in this country every year regardless of who is earning it or what job they do. If you have money, you are pretty much guaranteed to have inflation. Even virtual economies in video games experience inflation. It is a concept inherent to capital.
You know what I learned? That $2.75 rate in 1991 dollars had the buying power of $5.12. That means if you’re making $3.25 today, you’re working 40 percent harder to have the same buying power. If you’re making $3.50, you’re working about 30 percent harder to have the same buying power. Even at a gorgeous rate like $4.50, you are working 10 percent harder than they did in the 90s to make the same buying power. When I say work harder, I mean more pages. When I say more pages, we all know that that translates to lost time with our families, friends, and more time staring into our screens racing deadlines. If you’re a newbie like I was, and you’re started out at $2.80, you basically need to do double the pages that they had to do in 1991 in order to have the same buying power and quality of life. Again, we’re not talking about a raise. We’re talking about keeping the same exact quality of life.
It’s time to train each other. It’s time to share this info so we don’t stay on this ride. For every reporter out there who doesn’t know, there’s a reporter ready to be suckered. It’s that simple. Staying quiet will force people right out of this field because they’re being expected to work much harder to have the same quality of life. Personally, I have no problem accepting that there are market forces pushing down that rate. It’s not $5.12 or bust. But have some respect for ourselves. I have no problem saying we need to rise up and be damn good at what we do. Can you walk into an agency and say “hey, the rates from 1991 were better, I need a raise?” No. But it’s time to end the culture of silence, look at what was, keep each other informed, and stride toward where we want to be.
To share some quick history, stenographer became seen by some as a term akin to secretary. Court reporter is the term that ended up in almost all of our associations even though those associations were almost entirely dedicated to stenography and machine shorthand. Court reporter became the dominant term for us.
To explain what’s happened, digital reporters, people who record the record electronically and ship it off to be transcribed, hijacked the court reporter title and started billing what they do as the same as what we do. I don’t have hostility or contempt for people making a living. I openly invite digital recorders to join the stenographic legion. I encourage stenographers to reach out to these people and tell them there is a better way. I do think stenography has a rich history of providing for the legal community and should continue to grow and thrive. I’m a serious case of steno first!
With the Ducker Report, some agencies began to push digital reporting as a way to close the gap on the shortage. With the average stenographer being able to do the work of a recorder and a transcriber, this is a horrible move for the field, and to see us all relegated to recorder would mean a cut in pay and bargaining power, as well as potential problems with the quality of the legal record. People’s lives and fortunes are at stake, very much including our own!
So what’s next? We are actually seeing people answer the call to keep leading. CalDRA is creating materials and stickers plastered with the term stenographer and stenography, and leading the charge in creating a distinction from the generic court reporter term stolen from us. They’ve even announced a war chest.
Then on the front of the working, regular reporter, we are seeing the spread of these materials. Realtime reporters like Rich Germosen are posting up these stickers on their laptops and equipment. Court reporting companies like the famous Migliore & Associates are taking a stand and putting out their own materials differentiating stenography from alternatives (Archive). In related news, reporters like Abby Guerra and Dana Srebrenik (LinkedIn) also got out there and talked about why it was so offensive to have folks move in and set up shop on our court reporting title. These people are real. Their choice to stand up and start saying no is real. This wave is so powerful that there are entire groups springing up to share steno materials.
A quick note to the agencies that are pushing digital: Here’s your sign. Stenographers are here to stay. If you’re not focusing on us, you’re going to lose clients to stenographers. Companies collapse, careers go on. Pick the winning side. Pick steno. Think about why organizations like STAR cowered in fear and Stenograph immediately distanced itself as a separate entity when a STAR flyer showed a course that would purportedly teach videographers to make the record. Though this is a small field, there are enough of us that your businesses require our tacit consent to thrive. If even a fraction of the 10,000 or so estimated freelance stenographers competed directly against your businesses, you’d be looking at half the profits you have today. You don’t want that. We don’t want that. But we do want you to focus your energy on promoting steno. Push meet pushback. Check meet checkmate.
The bottom line for all readers is getting involved is becoming easier every day. We get it. Companies and individual reporters don’t always have a huge budget for pro-steno materials. If you don’t have the time to create your own bandwagon, hop aboard, and join the wave of people getting out there and educating attorneys on steno. The solution may not come from one movement, but the collective efforts of many movements. From Project Steno to the Open Steno Project, we all have the ability to take control of the future of this industry. I can only hope all associations are taking note and preparing to launch campaigns like CalDRA in every state. But even if not, individual reporters just like you make all the difference. How do I know that? It’s happening today.
