Please allow me to introduce myself: I am a certified stenographic court reporter, and I can type faster than you can.
Bragging? Nope.
If I was going to brag about something I would pick a topic more scintillating than typing, trust me. It’s just the facts, and since we can’t graduate from court reporting training until we accurately hit the speed of 225 words per minute, I don’t consider it boasting or bragging because it’s a requirement.
Think of it this way, does a brain surgeon boast “Guess what, I can do brain surgery!” No, they don’t, because they are sort of supposed to know how to do brain surgery once they leave medical school.
I think I can even get away without fact-checking this. Brain surgeons do brain surgery, engineers do engineer things, lawyers do lawyer things, and court reporters can type anyone under the table, without question.
Court reporting school is grueling. The attrition rate from day one is startling. On day one in the program, one student left at the morning break and never came back. We were told that this is extremely common. By the end of the first week, a few more have decided this is not for them. Out of 25 hopefuls that started the program in my year, only four of us finished.
Yes, you read that correctly. For a myriad of reasons people drop off gradually, leaving a small group of hopefuls left just trying to keep their eye on the prize of a promising career as a court reporter.
As stenographers/court reporters, we fight stereotypes every day. The image of the “little old lady with her hair in a bun and a pencil tucked behind her ear in some old-timey Perry Mason courtroom” has dogged us for years.
That is not who we are. We are modern. We change with the times. We use technology to our advantage. We grow and evolve as the industry requires. We do this because we want to stay relevant and want to provide you, as lawyers, with the best and most high-quality skills and services we can.
During legal proceedings, a court reporter/stenographer (the titles are interchangeable) are literally writing every word everyone in the room says.
We are watching body language and visual cues as to who is about to say something. We watch mouths and often lipread to help us decipher words.
We interpret context on the fly, to ensure that our brains are instructing our fingers to write the correct their/they’re/there or it’s/its.
Our brains hear thick accents and speech impediments and chronic mumblers and people that speak as fast as those legal disclaimers read at the end of radio ads, and we manage. It’s all in a day’s work. It is a skill that is weird, even for us.
I often look down at my fingers rapidly pressing keys on my stenography machine (we do not use a conventional keyboard, but instead those “funny little typewriters” you might have seen in movies and TV shows) and when I look down at my own fingers writing away and listening and unconsciously discerning context and deciphering words I may have never even heard before, all while my brain is also making a shopping list for dinner ingredients for that night, even I think it’s totally bizarre.
It’s a skill set that not many people in the world have, and most reporters will agree that we don’t even understand how we do it.
It’s extra disheartening when, after all the training and endless hours of practice we have done to achieve our career goals, a new threat gets introduced to try to compete with our skills, and that is the new “trend” of digital reporting.
Digital reporting is when someone shows up to your legal proceeding armed with only a digital recording device to then audio-record the proceedings, to potentially type up later on down the road should a transcript be required.
Digital reporters are NOT court reporters. They are not certified, and therefore any transcripts they provide are not certified and are unusable in court.
The fact that they call themselves “digital court reporters” or even simply “court reporters” really flies in the face of logic, and is insulting when you realize a true, certified court reporter has trained rigorously for two years to earn their title, and a digital reporter has visited their local electronics store to buy a digital recorder for $100 and printed up some business cards.
Calling yourself a court reporter when you are not certified to be one is false advertising, plain and simple, and ultimately hurtful to our profession.
I’d like to think that in an ideal world there is room enough in the legal industry for everyone. However, when an inferior product/transcript is being marketed as being from a “court reporter” when it’s not, that gives us certified reporters a bad name, and that opens the door for us to make sure you, as lawyers and legal assistants and paralegals, know exactly what you are getting if you book with a digital reporter.
Just because they can type on a QWERTY keyboard and press “record” on a digital mini recorder does not mean they are providing the same service as a certified stenographic court reporter. Not even close.
Would you like testimony read back during your discovery?
No problem at all, if you’ve hired a certified court reporter.
If you’ve hired a digital “reporter”, it’s not possible, unless you want to sit there for countless wasted minutes while they fast-forward and rewind until they find the spot you’re wanting played back.
From what I understand, most digital “reporters” refuse to read back, period. With a real court reporter, reading back is part of our job and done immediately, because we are literally creating your transcript as we go. Whether you want your last question read back, or want to know what the witness’s answer was two hours ago, we have you covered.
Would you like accurate verbatim transcripts delivered to you in a timely manner? I certainly hope so. This is a court reporter’s job. It is what we trained for. Our certified signatures on the last page of every transcript are our promise to you of a quality product, usable in court.
If you hire a digital reporter, your transcript is in the hands of someone who hopefully can navigate a QWERTY keyboard with at least some proficiency, and someone who remembered to press “record” during your proceedings.
This digital reporter may not have clear audio to work with, and they won’t realize this until the proceedings are over, so your transcript may be littered with [unintelligible] or [inaudible] notations, or words that are hard to understand due to bad audio or a witness with a difficult accent may just be deleted and you will never know.
If two people talked at once during your discovery, that audio will be hard to decipher after the fact, but after the fact is too late and at that point what’s done is done, and with no clarification being possible at that point your transcript will very likely not be accurate, and definitely not verbatim.
If you are in doubt as to whether you’ve hired a certified court reporter versus someone who is merely a digital recorder, please ask to see your court reporter’s stenography machine.
Any legitimate and certified reporter will happily hold up their steno machine, whether it’s sitting under the table in an in-person examination, or on their Zoom screen in a remote examination.
Certified court reporters WANT you to do this. We WANT you to see that we are who we say we are, and that you’ve hired someone qualified to hold the title of “official court reporter”.
Also, when in doubt, contact the firm your court reporter works for and ask if your reporter is certified. My firm regularly assures our clients that our reporters are certified, and we are happy to do this for anyone, any time.
In short, accept no substitutes. Let a certified reporter help you retain the accuracy of your record. Let a certified reporter read testimony back for you when required. Let a certified reporter provide you with transcripts in a timely manner, not weeks and weeks afterwards. Get your money’s worth and get what you are paying for.
We, as official reporters, hold ourselves to a very high standard because our names and professional reputations are on the line every time we work with you.
Let our years of training and experience ensure that your transcripts are certified and accurate. Don’t be fooled by imitators.
Hire the best and trust you are in excellent hands with an official, certified court reporter for all your litigation needs.
