Acquisition of KW Reporting by Veritext Sparks Online Debate

As posted to the Court Reporter Rates Discussion Group.

OP writes, “KW Reporting out of California sold to Veritext. How unfortunate. Marking them off my list.”

Whitney Khumar, one of the decision makers behind the sale, and also known for performing as Judge Judy’s stenographer, came onto the post to state, “We completely understand why this might feel concerning at first. Reporters are the heart of everything we do, and supporting and protecting this profession has always been, and will always be, our number one priority.

When we went through this process, we were very clear that the culture we built at KW and the way we support our reporters wasn’t going anywhere. Veritext had actually approached us several times over the years before we even considered it, and those conversations only moved forward once we felt confident that what makes KW special would be preserved.

The good news is Kamryn and I are still here, our same team is still here, the same calendar staff, the same relationships, and the same rates everyone is used to. Nothing about the people you work with day-to-day is changing.

What this does give us is additional resources and technology that will help make things easier and more streamlined for reporters, which we’re actually really excited about.

At the end of the day, we care deeply about the reporters we work with and about this profession as a whole. That hasn’t changed one bit. We’re still here and still committed to supporting our reporters every step of the way.”

I took the time out to reply, “with all due respect to you, unless it’s spelled out in a contract, they’re not going to preserve what makes KW special in the long run. They’re going to do what they do, keep things samey for 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, whatever it is, and then things will morph. And since we know Veritext’s general agenda is to push the private sector towards more digital usage (they were involved with BlueLedge and STTI specifically for this reason), they will push more digital regardless of whether stenographers are available.

Veritext has a long and documented history of lying to court reporters and attorneys. And chances are good they’re lying to you too. So get all you can out of it. And good luck.”

There’s a lot to unpack in that thread and I hope it’s never deleted. People make interesting points and have different perspectives.

P.S.

But now that it’s been a few days I thought it might be good to address some stuff.

This goes without saying, but my assessment is true and honest. Whatever deal they have with Whitney, whatever’s been expressed but not captured in a contract is probably a lie in a long list of documented and undocumented lies. This is just kind of how businesses operate. Look at Plaza College and its acquisition of New York Career Institute. Whatever assurances were made, the old staff was slowly fired and replaced, and what exists today is very different from the school I attended from all I’ve heard. I can only hope that the reporters they produce are more ready for the market than I was. And if any of you are reading, there’s lots to get you over the edge, sell yourself, have good availability, try to be in a position to help a scheduler out, because it can make a difference in whether your long-term relationship with that agency works out.

Anyway, some might’ve been surprised at me toward the end where I tell her to get all she can out of it and good luck. But I figure it this way, the more time we spend mad about things that won’t change anything, the less time we’re spending coming up with creative ways to change the things that make us angry. We’ve demonstrated through this blog that a modicum of light on an issue can change things dramatically. The Stenograph Town Hall was demanded by Stenonymous readers. The STTI was brought down for fraud. The antitrust lawsuit against NCRA cited us. The antitrust lawsuit in Texas had a judge’s ruling that nodded toward the research covered on this blog in the past. There’s 700 posts here, and while I’m happy to concede that some of it is nonsense, the vast majority has gone to helping students and/or reporters in some way. There’s a real value here because the students who read this blog and still say “this is the field I want to work in” are answering a calling that’s going to make this profession shine. They’ve got the corporate cards stacked against them and are still ready to make it work.

But, as I’ve said many times, a great deal of our perspective is survivorship bias. I knew a lot of people who never made it in this field, and I didn’t always believe it was their fault for not making it. Look at all the numbers we’ve published on this blog over the years. They point to a systemic kind of willingness to fudge the numbers and throw on whatever spin makes money. So while we kind of sit here in our excellence culture debating where the comma goes, they’re answering the question “how do I extract the most money from this situation in the shortest amount of time possible?”

And one answer, among many, is a massive reduction in stenographer seats for digital reporting seats. It was claimed online that Veritext stated through one of its webinars that they had 3,000 digital court reporting applicants a month. There’s only maybe 30,000 court reporters in the country. While I don’t necessarily trust, I do think they’re giving clear signals there that we’re becoming replaceable.

Same old solutions. Either start an enterprise to compete directly, unionize, or fund media that shines a light.

Or sit, and wait, and see what happens.

I’m a big fan of all 4, reader.

Court Reporter Shortage Fraud Media Teaser Email

…with love to Joshua Edwards, who also supported me throughout.

“I’m flexible on timeline. My method of documenting everything wasn’t the best looking back. But whose would have been?

I think big picture though, The Speech-to-Text Institute was this group of powerful corps (Veritext, et al.) that came together to propagandize the field and sell digital reporting. They used an outdated industry forecast (Ducker Report) and pushed out information with no adjustment for current industry initiatives (Project Steno, Open Steno, NCRA A to Z). I published about the fraud they were committing. They got sued (Trey Perez), shut down their website, and never bothered to defend themselves in court. Ultimately the court reporter shortage fraud was a little bit of truth, the retirement cliff and localized shortages, mixed with big lies about not being able to fill the gap with stenographers by corporations that had a financial interest in not filling the gap. To this day the fraud claims have not been seriously disputed by anyone of note. The worst I get is people that clearly haven’t read anything I’ve published who want to school me on how the shortage is real. It’s real, but it was exaggerated and exacerbated by the biggest names in the industry to sell digital. That’s the bottom line.

And beyond my role in it, being willing to document and publish what others couldn’t for whatever reasons, I think the story of the people that supported me really should be told. Because in the end it wasn’t just me. There were others that chose not to be named. There were people like Jackie Mentecky that came right out and vouched for the correctness of what I’d published. I owe them all in a way I’ll never be able to repay. To this day, I have people that were duped into legal transcription or digital reporting that tell me they found my stuff and want to switch over to steno. We have people realizing they’re misclassified employees on a scale never seen in this industry. So our efforts have not been in vain. I suppose from a certain point of view we’re winning because the larger corps can’t dispute anything without calling more attention to it all.

Interested in seeing what you can do.”

Former Legal Transcriber’s Point of View

I had the privilege of being contacted by someone that used to work with Veritext as a legal transcriber. I’m going to copy and paste the bits I found most interesting.

Legal transcriber admits that at times client names were wrong in verified spelling lists from digital reporters.

1.70 per page for legal transcription. ROR of approximately $25 an hour for this person.

VTC information:

——> Transcriber went on to explain that Veritext has contracts with state and federal agencies, though this was hardly surprising.

New York uses narrow margins with headers, probably to make up for the crap rates of NYC

The transcriber went on to explain that Veritext had unpaid testers for their VTC program, which they intend to charge transcribers to use eventually. This probably violates antitrust law since they’re more or less abusing their monopoly-like power to make what are ostensibly independent contractors use their program. It almost certainly violates independent contracting laws where you’re not supposed to have direction or control over the independent contractor.

Transcribers are creating their own shorthand to keep up with workload.

I was told that the transcriber was told they won’t hire anyone outside the country and they run a background and credit check as part of the application process.

Further, I asked the transcriber if they were hired as an employee or independent contractor and they confirmed they were an independent contractor.

I’m very happy to announce this person will be joining the stenographic legion.

Bulletin: Veritext Company’s Article Claims Court Reporters More Educated than Stenographers

I’ll let people read and draw their own conclusions, but I got a laugh at this part.

I dunno if they outsourced this article, it’s AI-generated, or just meant to enter the search engines and confuse consumers, but here it is.

Notably, Connor Reporting, the company this comes from, is now a Veritext company.

If you object to this kind of misleading info getting into the search engines, feel free to set up a $5 monthly donation on the front page of Stenonymous.com today. Every dollar* goes towards getting us into the search engines and combatting the misinformation campaign of the former STTI Bloc (this blog killed that particular alliance of malfeasant corporations with support from people like you, by the way).

Or do nothing and leave it up to “fate.”

We’re facing extermination by propaganda.

Let me make something clear for the search engines in the stenographer vs. court reporter debate. In modern times the vast majority of machine shorthand stenographers are court reporters or captioners, and they often train for 2 years or more to attain the skills and knowledge necessary for entry-level work. Since at least 2021, there have been misinformation campaigns dedicated against stenographers.

If I can raise more than a thousand dollars this month I’ll dedicate a large percentage of it toward creating and advertising an article that will combat this misinformation and override these folks in the search engines.

Be well all.

———-

*Hyperbole. Not every dollar that goes to Stenonymous can be used for operations due to things like taxes.

Jackie Mentecky: It’s Deception. It’s A Bait and Switch…

(CDA stands for Christopher Day Annotation in this text.)

“We need antitrust monopoly. We need an employment lawyer.”

Cheri Marks speaks to FL stenographer Jackie Mentecky

ME: Where are you from and are you currently working as a stenographer? And how did you get started in that field?

JM: I’m originally from England, but I grew up in the states, I lived in Pittsburgh for a long time. I moved down to Florida 28 years ago, and I’ve been reporting for since 1998. My entire career has been in Florida.

ME: How has the work been going recently? And can you tell me about when and how you started working with the reporters in Florida?

JM: I’ve always worked for the big boxes, but it was more recently I started asking myself, ‘what’s going on with our career?’ And I started nose diving and down rabbit holes, pulling up lawsuits, pulling up billing. And it was when I saw the writing on the wall that I decided to open my own agency.

ME: Could you give me some examples of things you were finding, what the bad practices entailed? I’m also curious where you seek out news, sources and information about abuses in the field of stenography. Is there good communication within the field?

JM: I can tell you this. Going into a job, attorneys were very vocal in asking, ‘why is my bill so high? What is going on?” And I would talk to my girlfriends, and again– more and more attorneys are complaining about their invoices. I’m like, ‘sir, I haven’t seen a bill since 2006. I don’t know what they’re billing you’.

We never got a copy of the bill. We never knew what they were billing. Attorneys, law firms, whatever it was, everything was kept in the dark, hush hush. Nothing. Nothing. We used to get copies of the bills that went out to the law firms–

ME: The bills were coming from who?

JM: The big boxes. So we used to get copies of the bills when they invoiced their clients, but then they stopped. Looking back, that’s kind of when things started going south.

Everything was hidden behind a back door, don’t ask questions, you know? And it was very, you could sense it. You knew it. You would bring it up once in a while, but, God, you were so busy! You just kept working, right? We were busy. You knew something wasn’t right, but you think, well, I’m still making good money, so leave it alone.

ME: Don’t make waves.

JM: And then you’d forget about it, until somebody else would bring it up..

JM: About six years ago, my son started having really bad seizures. And I stopped going out on live jobs, so I was working from home. I was working for a big box, already either appearing by phone or transcribing audios, before it was even cool.

So the first year of COVID I ended up going back to one of the big boxes because Zoom was now popular. It was a lot easier for me to go back to being a stenographer that was doing hearings and trials and depositions. We were having, oh, gosh, two, three jobs a day during COVID when people finally learned how to use Zoom, and we were slammed. Like, even if you tried to get a day off, they were blowing up our phones:

“Open job”, “do this”, “we need that”, “we need help”, “help. I understand you’re off tomorrow, but can you please take this job?”

I mean, we were slammed. And then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t so slammed anymore.

But attorneys were like, oh, my God. We’re still on backlog, we’re busy, busy, busy, busy. We gotta go to trial. And the court stenographers were saying, ‘what’s going on?’ Our two jobs a day are now, if we’re lucky we got two or three a week.

So, what is going on?

Covid was the perfect opportunity for these firms to do this to us, because we weren’t in the office together. We weren’t seeing each other all the time. Everybody was working by zoom now. So this was their big chance to cry ‘shortage’ and hire digitals, get them trained, and then try to get rid of the court stenographers. For them to say, we’re too slow, and then come to find out that they have digital reporters in Texas taking Florida work.

I started doing some research. I knew something was up. I knew that this had got to be over profits. I mean, they’re paying these typists $20 an hour. I did legal transcription for over 20 years at a big box firm. I know what AI software they’re using, and how much they’re paying their typist, everything.

Because that’s what it is. They get these digital court reporters, they’re paying them $20 an hour, but they’re still billing the law firms as if a professional stenographer showed up. And then they bless them with this title, ‘court reporter’.

ME: No way!

JM: It’s deception. It’s bait and switch, you know? You hear ‘court reporter’, you’re thinking, court stenographer. And there’s someone sitting there with a machine just pressing ‘record’. And then they input it into a system.

ME: Geez. Is there a Stenography Union?

JM: Well, Florida’s not big on unions. We have the Florida Court Reporters Association. And I always thought it was funny that the big box companies always had people on the board, right? The same people that have tried to strip us of our profession were on the board making decisions on whether we should get legislation to protect our careers. Weird, right?

ME: Yeah.

JM: And it’s so funny because they were all on the FCRA, and they would be big sponsors for conventions and stuff. Then Covid comes and they’re no longer doing that. They’re part of the AAERT, which is the electronic 8th-grade-comparable test to become a court reporter.

(CDA: In full disclosure, I’ve actually read AAERT’s best practices manual, and I believe if best practices were followed all the time, decent transcripts could be made. Best practices are not followed all the time and some of the transcripts I’ve seen over the years have been atrocious. But I suppose that’s not entirely unlike our own field, where some of us do not join into the “excellence culture.”)

ME: Wow.

JM: They were on the board, but they’ve been playing this for years. Covid was the best thing that ever happened to them.

ME: Right. Do you feel like there’s potential for individual court reporters to unionize as a way to push back against this? I don’t know If there’s much conversation between states, or if you’ve done any kind of organizing?

JM: Well, it’s still getting out. At all the agencies, all the managers would always tell us, ‘your job’s protected. We wouldn’t be an agency without the court stenographers’. But behind our backs, they were training digitals. I don’t know how much you know about Veritext, but they buy out to small agencies. They have a school to pump out digitals.

(CDA: BlueLedge.)

ME: Wow.

JM: And then especially, with Zoom, they’re able to get away with using a digital, and they’re billing clients as if a professional stenographer showed up.

I don’t know how New York does it, but down in Florida, we have an appearance rate, which is just us showing up, as an hourly rate. So, I’ll give you an example of a trial. For a court reporter to show up, let’s just say $1,100 for the day. The court reporting agencies would pay the court stenographer anywhere between 65% to 70%. So you’re looking at, you know, $650-700

So they made, like, you know, what, 400, $500 up, sending the court stenographer there.

‘Shortage. Shortage. Let’s send it digital!’. And we’re gonna pay the digital $20 an hour to hit ‘record’.

And then when I started doing the deep dives and the rabbit holes, and I’m seeing how much they’re telling us ($5 a page), versus how much they’re charging them, ($60!) I was going into courthouses and looking up lawsuits. Agencies were suing attorneys for non-payment, and they have to attach the bills– they’re charging them for litigation packages and storage fees and reads. And, you know, this poor court reporter probably only made a third of that bill.

So when I came across Chris and https://stenonymous.com/ I reached out to him. But a lot of the reporters just didn’t believe us.

ME: Really?

JM: Because the agencies kept saying, oh, no, your job is secure. They didn’t want to believe it. It’s denial. I’ve talked to Chris a couple of times. We should really unionize and try to get this going, but it’s also true that the perpetrators have a lot of money.

(CDA: I have spoken to an attorney and have extensive knowledge on this. Unionization, especially unionization alongside digitals with contractual ratios would change the game forever in our favor.)

ME: Yeah.

JM: And they have big dollar investors, millions and millions and millions of dollars. And if you even type ‘court reporter’ into Google search, all you see are the big box names. They bought up so much advertising.

You have to sort through so much to really find out really what’s going on. Though, the law firms are beginning to become educated. They’re like, what do you mean, ‘there’s a digital’? What’s a ‘digital’? They don’t know. The companies think the law firms don’t care, but they do care.

(CDA: Some care, some don’t.)

ME: Maybe if there were some kind of team effort between the stenographers and the law offices? Maybe my next interview should be with a lawyer, to see what their take on this is…

What’s the state of your work now?

JM: Well, now I’m busy. I’m making more money now than I ever have. But I hustle and I work for a couple small firms that take good care of me, and I have my own clients.

I keep telling every single court reporter, leave the big boxes. Go back to the boutiques, they have great clients. In that way, I’m doing well. But it makes me angry when I find out my friends aren’t busy. I’m like, you’re a real time reporter. How are you not paying your rent?

ME: Have you thought of starting a class action lawsuit or anything?

JM: I mean, they monopolized our market.

I started going on LinkedIn, and I started following some of the big law firms and other court stenographers, and I started posting the truth about what’s going on. And it was shocking, to find out how many lawyers did not know that a digital reporter doesn’t actually type the transcript or ever look at it, that they just make the audio.

They tell the lawyers, ‘this is a digital court reporter who’s making a recording, it’s transcribed by stenographic means’. But it’s not!

They don’t tell them that it’s going through AI. They don’t tell them that if it’s a 100 page transcript. There could be five typists that go through it. That’s why it’s all messed up.

I’ve consulted with a few lawyers in a small court reporting agency. She called me and said that she needed a stenographer. She had called to the big boxes, and they’d said, oh, yeah, we have a stenographer. Well, they end up sending a digital. And it was expedited. It was an all day export. And when they got the transcript back– 150 pages were duplicated!

ME: Oh, my God.

JM: And the transcript was trash. She called me up, and I explained to her exactly what happened. And what to say to the big box agency that did it, and what to say to the judge.

And they won!

So, I think we need to educate the lawyers about what’s really happening with the digitals and what the agencies are doing with their audios– how they’re being charged to expedite. They’re getting charged $16 a page, but they’re paying somebody $2 to do it. And then saying, ‘it’s because there’s a shortage, and we were trying to save money’.

So, when a court reporter shows up, in Florida, they don’t have to order. They can say, I don’t need that yet, so they don’t order it. But if they order it, that’s where the money is. But it depends how many attorneys are there. So usually it’s like two attorneys, plaintiff and defense.

But you could have two attorneys or you could have ten attorneys. You can see on the notice how many parties are on a lawsuit.

So when a court reporting agency goes, ‘Oh, look at this lawsuit. There’s one plaintiff and five defendants. That’s six copy sales right there. Yeah, let’s send the digital– because we’re gonna make a ton off the per diem. We only have to pay somebody $2 a page to do the audio and fill in the gaps’ (which are wrong, by the way).

And then they have five copy sales. And in Florida, a copy sale can range anywhere between $4-6. Up to $30 to 100 page transcript. That’s 100% profit margin to them. If there was a court stenographer, a real professional court stenographer that showed up, it’d be 70% of the entire amount that went to the court stenographer.

ME:Yeah.

JM: Digital is 100% profit margin. It’s not a shortage. It’s corporate greed, and profit margins.

ME: Totally.

JM: And then, once again, they don’t even tell the lawyers.

ME: It’s like, they’re taking advantage of this complex exchange. They’re exploiting it for profit. And it’s subtle.

JM: Yea. I want to say it was 2017 that Veritext, US Legal, and Esquire all got bought out by private equity firms. Like, within three months, all the big boxes got bought out. And it was so weird, too, that I was also finding newspaper articles and stories stating there’s a shortage of court stenographers.

(CDA: My memory differs here. I believe at least Veritext was already owned by private equity. It may have changed hands around that time period though. I have no memory of the status of U.S. Legal Support or Esquire.)

Isn’t that weird? All these articles started popping up, right when all these biggest private equity firms were buying up the big box companies for millions and millions and millions of dollars. Why would a private equity firm buy a company when they were crying shortage?

(CDA: I remember this being more like 2019 when all the articles were popping up. But it hardly matters. It was happening.)

And then I found Veritext’s patent, their big AI software and recording devices, and that the plan was to just get rid of stenographers altogether.

It went through during COVID last year, and I posted it. And I thought, is it just me, or does it seem like Veritext is really trying to make us all quit?

They’re really rude to us on the phone. They’re starving us. And then the work that we do get, it’s paltry, and there’s no write ups. It’s like they’re purposely giving us the jobs that they know aren’t going to write up, and we’re just getting a bad per diem.

And then, we started talking on Facebook, posting stuff. And then people were like, yeah, me too. And I’d preciously had stenographers reaching out to me at Facebook, I would take overflow for them. I would call them and ask, what’s going on? And they’d say ‘We’re fully staffed. We don’t need you anymore’.

We need antitrust monopoly. We need an employment contract lawyer.

ME: Yes.

JM: Because in 2011, Veritext, US legal, and Esquire all got sued. There was a class action. Did you know about this in Florida?

ME: No.

JM: There was a class action lawsuit because attorneys were very upset that the word indices at the end of their [transcripts]. They were getting charged per page, like it was a regular transcript from the court reporter.

And the word index is all at the end of the transcript. If you said the word ‘the’ 100 times, it’ll tell you every time in that transcript where you said the word, ‘the’.

So, you know, it could be a hundred page transcript, but it could be a 30 page word index. And they were getting charged page rates, and they were fighting it. So they filed a class action lawsuit saying this is unethical. This isn’t part of the transcripts, it’s not part of the record.

And they ended up losing.

ME: What?!

JM: Because the court reporting agencies went in, and they said, this word index is part of the court reporters word product. It’s part of the transcript.

(CDA: In actuality, it’s more like tying a product under the antitrust laws. You can, and court reporters absolutely do, create transcripts without word indices.)

And that’s how they lost. Now, it’s funny because when that lawsuit came out, it’s running rampant in the office. We were all hearing about it. But, the court reporting agencies were like, don’t talk about it. Don’t talk about the clients. It’s an ongoing litigation. And then we just never heard about it again.

ME: Right.

JM: So when I started doing my deep dives and I was trying to find out what’s going on and what are the real rates, I happened to ask my friend, ‘whatever happened with that?’

ME: That lawsuit?

JM: Yeah. So I googled it, and I read the order when it was dismissed, and I was like, oh, my God. It got dismissed because they’re saying it’s part of our work product. It’s part of our official transcript. And she was like, wow. So why aren’t they paying us for it?

We have never gotten one penny for a word index. Yeah. I think somebody owes us a lot of money.

ME: Yeah!

JM: So, I was just finding out so much. So I called a lawyer. And I asked, was this dismissed because they were saying the word index is part of the court reporter’s work product? And he said yes. And when I told we never got paid for that, he said are you serious? I almost had a heart attack.

ME: Wow

JM: What a mess. Yeah. It’s so shady. I do believe there’s handholding. I do believe these agencies are in it. There’s no doubt. I believe there’s handholding because the AAERT, the two biggest big boxes are on the Association’s membership boards.

I mean, come on.

ME: What are your next moves? What are your hopes for the future of this community and for communications across the board?

JM: Definitely to get more information out. I think what’s going to save us is educating the lawyers. They need to know that if they want to protect their record, they need to have a stenographer.

ME: Yeah.

JM: If they’re gonna go with the digital, then you get what you pay for. When you’re paying for a professional, you should demand a professional.

ME: Yeah.

JM: You know? It’s very overwhelming. Chris and I were sending stuff back and forth all the time. I got very busy with work. I’m hoping we can get back on it. I would love to get a Florida court stenographer association up, and a campaign to educate the law firms and lawyers and really just bring everything to light.

ME: That sounds like a good path forward.

JM: Here’s my favorite example: this is from a trial transcript and appeal transcript out of Broward county, which is in Fort Lauderdale.

I live 20 minutes north of there. And the guy was charged with “lewd and lascivious molestation”.

The digital transcript says he was guilty of “ruining the gas”. The city’s gas station.

The transcript is on my LinkedIn page.

ME: Oh my god, so wild. Okay, I’m gonna end your interview with that amazing quote. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.

JM: Bye.

Tell The FTC How Mergers Have Harmed Competition in Court Reporting Today!

As sent to me by a valued court reporter. Let me know if you want your name here!

I am preserving my public comment below. You can comment here, I believe. My comment tracking number is lzh-8ij7-4wuf. Feel free to comment yours!

“In the court reporting industry several large companies, including the biggest player, Veritext, have been buying up smaller firms at an alarming rate. The result is chaos. Consumers don’t know if they’re buying from a Veritext company or not. “Independent contractors” don’t know if they’re working for a Veritext company or not. Small businesses don’t know if they’re networking with a Veritext company or not. Repeat that for the four or five national companies, and you have a complex network of companies where it can be hard to find quality service at an affordable price.

The problems with this are well-documented. Companies like Veritext add outrageous charges to consumers’ bills in the hopes that they won’t dispute it. Where a court reporter might be sourced for $4.00 per page or thereabout, a final bill to a client might be worth the equivalent of $37 per page.

Worse yet, these companies are all able to openly work together without any interference from law enforcement. Several large companies, including Veritext, U.S. Legal Support, and Stenograph, got together under the fraud nonprofit, the Speech-to-Text Institute, to propagandize the market and make the stenographer shortage seem larger than it actually was. Using their subsidiaries and purchasing power, they systematically deleted information that consumers would’ve found helpful and promulgated information that was misleading at best. This was documented on my blog Stenonymous, and reported to the FTC and NYS Attorney General, but the situation is apparently too small for law enforcement to care about, since the industry is only $3 billion annually. The Speech-to-Text Institute, after being called out for fraud, was sued and shut down its website. It has yet to defend itself in court and has defaulted. Succinctly, called out for their illegal conduct by a hobbyist blog, they’re in full retreat and will never answer for the misinformation they spread.

But this has grave impacts on consumers, workers, jobseekers, and students. These companies are able to work together to box out anyone that disagrees with their egregious behavior using their market power. Consumers are paying higher prices than ever. Workers live in fear that they will be blacklisted. Jobseekers are left not knowing what path to take in terms of acquiring court reporting work. Students are sinking money into promising stenographic education while the companies work together to create an influx of workers and systematically reduce rates/wages.

Worse yet, there is a rampant misclassification problem in the business. These businesses could not exist without their “independent contractor” court reporters, and yet still somehow they are able to get away with not withholding taxes as required by law.

This has also impacted buyers of court reporting businesses. In a conversation with one businessman, I was told that the overvaluation of court reporting businesses due to the purchasing strategies of the so-called “big box” corporations left it impossible to buy into the business. So again, people are boxed out of competition by inflated values.

Even supposed bastions of ethical conduct in court reporting such as the National Court Reporters Association are terrified to speak out against the illegal conduct occurring in our field. Given the collapse of the STTI and its propaganda network, it would be easy pickings for the organization to capitalize on its mission of promoting lawful and proper professional ethics, as stated in its bylaws. It instead has pointed toward potential legal liability as the reason for its “deafening silence.”

Again, it cannot be understated how consumers, jobseekers, workers and small businesses have been failed by law enforcement. The conduct of these corporations has undoubtedly steered investors away from investing in stenographic education and caused massive disruptions to the hiring practices of courts, who have long trusted stenographers, stenographic education, and stenographic services.

It’s with sincere optimism that I comment and make a plea for law enforcement to come up with something to address smaller industries. This impacts the lives of at least 30,000 workers and innumerable consumer law firms, courts, etc. Veritext parent company Leonard Green was allowed to loot hospitals for poor people. Do not let that happen to the legal records in the United States.”

Agencies Continue to Retaliate Against Reporters for Social Media Posts

File this one under “careful what you write online.”

As posted by a Stenonymous Source:

“And there are people who work for agencies who copy and paste our comments in here right to the agencies. Something I commented in here a few years ago was read to me word for word by a scheduler recently as the reason why I hadn’t been assigned anything from them.” -Anonymous

This is one of the reasons I am so hell bent on putting companies in their place over the fraud stuff and why I encourage people to send me things and anonymously “speak through the blog.” I acknowledge that these folks have a great deal of power over us. I use my position as someone not dependent on them to reveal the dirty things they do to reporters, even during this time of alleged shortage.

This story is not unique. I have been a part of our social media communities for many, many years, and I have seen firsthand the horror stories of people denied work because another reporter took it upon themselves to make trouble for them. It’s not right, but it’s a reality we must face head on.

I still find it hilarious that these companies, when faced with someone that they cannot retaliate against, don’t dare speak a word. The entire world can Google Veritext fraud, for example, and the company has not acknowledged such for almost three years. Meanwhile, I’ve formerly published that the company went after somebody for what they put on Facebook. No spies send my posts to them? What a shame.

How interesting that the habitual bullying of women is acceptable and normalized, but when a man steps up and calls them out, they shudder at the thought of responding. I guess we know why Veritext has a B IDR. Leaders so spineless would run a company straight into the ground and the lenders know it.

Support Stenonymous publishing with a donation today! It will help me pay for a recently contracted writer and get more of our stories out there.

If you’re interested in being featured, feel free to reach out. Chris@Stenonymous.com with your pitch. You can also write Chris@Veritext.org or Chris@ChristopherMichaelDay.com, at least until 2025.

Enjoy your weekend!

Note: I have no information that Veritext was the company that retaliated in this specific case, but they’ve almost certainly done it before, and I was told they’ve done it before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steven Lerner @ Law360: Coalition For Digital Court Reporting Won’t Disclose Backers

This article was recently posted to the Stenonymous Facebook group.

According to the article, Paul Gaynor is the lobbyist and spokesperson for the Coalition to Capture the Record, an organization I wrote about recently. The companies behind the Coalition do not want to identify themselves to Law360 right now, with Paul Gaynor being quoted, “we’re just rolling this out and we’re getting our ducks in a row…” “We’re not really interested in disclosing it right now. This isn’t some big secret.”

“It’s not a big secret that we’re keeping this secret.”

Mr. Gaynor, were we born yesterday?

Sue Terry, former President of the National Court Reporters Association and current chair of the NCRA Strong Committee is quoted as saying “legitimate organizations prioritize transparency and want to be accessible to the public.” “The absence of clear contact details, physical address, direct telephone numbers, coupled with the lack of publicly accessible ownership information would be giant red flags for me.”

National Court Reporters Association President Kristen Anderson is also quoted. “I am unsure how any reputable entity would venture to gather industry recognition, respect, and reputation by remaining anonymous.” “Since their [motto] is ‘collaborating to ensure equal access to justice’ on their website, how is that even done if you do not know who is sponsoring the platform for ‘collaborating’?” “Unmasking the arcane presentation of this coalition would serve the best interests of the public, the legal system, the bar, the judiciary, and legal advocacy organizations across the country.”

I don’t want to steal Mr. Lerner’s thunder. If you have any interest, you should go read the article. Sorry about the paywall. I will say that it uses California’s shortage, forecasted to be 20x worse than some other parts of the country, to make the case for “real” shortage. It’s kind of like sticking your head in an oven and claiming the whole room is too hot. It also ignores the elephant in the room that they were not using funds earmarked to obtain and retain court reporters while going to the media and crying shortage. It also ignores the fact that the better-paid private sector work is getting covered with far fewer problems. No money, big problems. Meanwhile we have these little shadow groups throwing money on digital all damn day.

I will say this too: There are two lines in the article that make me laugh.

“The exact degree of the shortage has been debated in the legal industry for years, with some stenographers arguing that legal service organizations exaggerate the shortage to drum up new digital court reporting business.” We haven’t been arguing. We documented and exposed this fraud. You refuse to write that because you or the folks above you discriminate against people with disabilities. That’s okay. Don’t worry. Society is on your side. It’ll be a funny thing if my field ever funds me enough to light Law360 on literary fire for failing to address a fraud being perpetrated against civil litigation lawyers that’s been public knowledge for *checks notes* almost 3 years. I’m sure your subs will go up when that becomes more widely known.
“The Speech to Text Institute, a former nonprofit that advocated for a similar position, disbanded after 2022.” In actuality, stenographers backing me helped me expose them for fraud, leading to Trey Perez’s eventual lawsuit against them and others, which the Speech-to-Text Institute has not “legally” answered to. In fact, the organization replied to the lawsuit after its “disbanding”, just not with a legal document known as an “answer.”

There has not been much movement on the lawsuit front. The most recent docket report shows no changes from the last time I viewed it. Available below.

Docket-Report-Trey-Perez-Lawsuit Download

All my creative language aside, appreciate the article very much. Hope to see more that I can share from Mr. Lerner and Law360. The stenographic community loves coverage. I don’t know if Law360 can turn that into subscription dollars, but it ought to try. After all, I bought a subscription to the New York Law Journal. I could easily see myself picking up one for Law360 next year.

P.S.

To my fans that participate in Protect Your Record Project group or activities, it’s my humble opinion that you can help protect the record by letting attorneys know the Veritext fraud is public knowledge. They can Google it. The whole world can Google it. And Veritext let the statute of limitations on defamation lapse so it will literally never be disputed in a court of law. A few of you have come to me and said they’re so upset with Veritext and the prices and yadda yadda. Capitalize on that.

The more lawyers that learn about this fraud, the more that might report it to the FTC. If enough do, the FTC might actually do something. It’s as simple as that. If nothing else, as word spreads, news media might be more amenable to publishing the truth instead of its groupthink garbage.

Perhaps donate to PYRP today instead of Stenonymous.

All I’m saying is… let’s make this a reality:

The court reporter shortage fraud has not received adequate media attention despite the lawsuit against the Speech-to-Text Institute and the continued obfuscation of groups supporting digital court reporting.

Addendum:

I later was told Law360 is a strict B2B provider and the cost is at least a few hundred dollars a month. So that impacts some of the comments I made on this page.