Court reporting makes comeback as more legal proceedings demand human touch
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.
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.
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.
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.