Court reporting makes comeback as more legal proceedings demand human touch
Posted on 12/14/2018 9:24:25 AM PST by SeekAndFind
I was a court reporter for ten years. The job satisfaction wasn’t all that great for me, but some other facets sort of made up for that. I quit five years ago.
Love my new job.
Sounds like the pay should go up a little bit.
Maybe a percentage of the lawsuit win or lose would get some applicants.
With ubiquitous cameras and recording devices, why are they even necessary nowadays?
They seem to be an anachronism..................
Pay more, be willing to train more, and/or automate.
Sounds like the pay should go up a little bit.
Young people with finger dexterity are entering the tech fields where they have more likelihood of improved income over the course of their careers.
It is a sad fact and skilled court reporters are not so easily replaced as store clerks when the prices are gouged by the big guys.
I have a friend who does this. She tells me that she basically has to detach part of herself in order to do her job, since she works in family court.
I think she enjoys the work but I wouldn’t say that it’s a terribly high-paying job. I don’t think it’s something I would enjoy, myself.
Court reporters are not an anachronism. Compared to reading a transcript, watching a video or, even worse, listening to a recording, is very time consuming. Once there’s a transcript, it can be visually searched for particular passages and, even more important, it can be digitally searched for key words and phrases. Then it’s possible to prepare a list of vital excerpts. In a complex case involving many parties or events, a transcript can be searched to show connections and interactions, then indexed. If there’s a dispute about the accuracy of a transcript, it’s also possible to go back to a recording.
My aunt worked as a court reporter until she was 85. She would sometimes hire college students to help her type up the court records (years before computers) but she did most of the work herself. Working for decades in court under several different judges, she knew the law better than the judges. She would signal or whisper to the judge when he was about to make an erroneous ruling. ;o)
She served in trials with some rather notorious defendants and a few well known attorneys. Thurgood Marshall once complimented her and the judge for presiding over a very fair trial.
Exactly why there is now a “shortage” today. Back in the late 80’s, I believe, emerging technology threatened to make the court reporter obsolete. As a result, court reporters banded together through unions, legislation, and licensing requirements to prevent their jobs from technologically obsolete. Now, there is a human shortage, however, as you suggest there is technology that can record and transcribe courtroom interactions.
We have computer programs that can provide all that...................
As a result I spent some to sitting with only a few court officials and/or lawyers present...setting things up.
during one of those periods I asked the court reporter how she learned to do her job.She was non-specific but basically said it take a lot of training and a lot of experience.
Also,on a side note...the lawyer heading up the prosecution team in that case was Fred Wyshak,the man who successfully prosecuted Whitey Bulger and several FBI agents regarding the decades of murder,drug dealing and corruption in Boston that was just recently ended.I asked him about the film "Black Mass" in which he was briefly portrayed.He,a guy with a full head of hair,laughed and said "I wish they had found somebody with hair to play me". The guy who played him in the film was pretty much bald
Locally, the court “recorder” is there to make sure the sound recording system is working rather than using a steno machine to type as it happens. I don’t know when or how a paper transcript is made or what happens if the judge wants something repeated in the courtroom like court dramas would show the stenographer reading what she had just typed.
Thank you! I wondered about that as well. You just cleared it up for me.
Close, but no cigar. Most speakwrite programs only work when they are trained to understand the speaking peculiarities of the individual user. Witnesses, OTOH, all speak differently, often with slurred voices, foreign accents, and mumbles. In addition, there are often very many persons whose testimony is being transcribed in any given month, meaning a program can't be trained to catch the unique characteristics of each. Thus, the only machine that can really work is a human being with fully functioning eyes and ears. A court reporter often needs to watch a witness’s lips to understand the witness. Finally, if the court reporter can't understand a witness, the reporter can always ask the witness to repeat his or her testimony.
Because transcripts are still a necessity
It’s like medical records (medical transcription). It’s now done on voice recognition, but there are so many doctors from all over the world with many different accents and inflections that it still takes a person to edit the medical record. It’s scary what the program “thinks” it hears, especially when it comes to drugs and dosages.
I tried to make it as a court reporter; but, I simply couldn't get to the 225wpm. I was fast on a typewriter; and, I was fast taking Gregg Steno; but, the machine was different and I could only get to a certain level and I couldn't go higher.
I believe that when I was taking classes, I read an article that said that 85% of people who try to conquer machine shorthand drop out. So, the reason for a shortage is that it is a rare combination of dexterity and quickly translating what you are hearing to the "code" that is the word in the machine language. Very few people have that combination.
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