THE FUTURE OF THE COURT REPORTING PROFESSION

The future of the court reporting profession will be what the associations, the reporters, the agency owners and the schools make it to be.

We have observed a progressive downfall and just watched and waited. For those who refuse to recognize what must be accomplished: Our associations have to work together for the benefit of the industry. Stenotypists and voicewriters must be recognized equally as professional keepers of the record. Court reporting schools must concentrate on providing comprehensive realtime training and reporters must accept their responsibility to go forward to realtime. In today’s economic environment, it may be time to tighten our belts and sharpen our pencils in order that our reporters may return to their rightful places in the courtrooms. To accomplish this, it is imperative that we bring competent court reporters into the marketplace quickly.

REALTIME IS THE ANSWER, ESPECIALLY WITH THE ADVENT OF CART & CAPTIONING

The court reporting profession can and will thrive, but only through realtime. It is time that court reporting enters the 21st century. It is time to take advantage of the lucrative opportunities offered through realtime reporting. Today, there is a continually growing demand for realtime reporters at depositions, hearings and meetings. There are not enough realtime reporters to meet the needs of the CART/captioning community. There are fields where electronic recording simply cannot compete. There is and will be work for realtime court reporters. Comprehensive training, diligent practice, thorough knowledge of the equipment and problem solving is mandatory to achieve this goal.

SUGGESTIONS FOR REALTIME:

For CART/captioning, knowledge of current events is necessary. Reporters and students should watch captioning and TV broadcast and practice with news from the Internet. There should be familiarity with the disabled community and how to interact therewith; for example, referring to “a person who is deaf,” rather than “a deaf person.”

The American Academy of Voice Writing has the following suggestions for voicewriting students:

In CART/captioning, since there is no transcript and the final product is created while the job is written, the reporter must edit while writing. Keep in mind there are things to be done before and during the job, as there is no going back and editing later. The writer should have voice macros or commands that will enable him/her to add prefixes and suffixes and be able to write acronyms and “finger spell.” Create macros for capital letters, such as A-cappa, B-cappa. For numbers 1 through 9, you can say one-sie, two-sie, etc. For decimals, say point-mac and then the number. Keep a small pad with you to write down terms, acronyms, etc. that might not be in your dictionary and then spend time training those words so you are ready if they are encountered in the future.

Voicewriters who have been sitting on the fence waiting for realtime voicewriting technology to mature need wait no longer. Today’s CAT systems employ the latest in artificial intelligence. They are user friendly and affordable. In fact, most users will find that they are saving money as they no longer will need to employ typists. Additionally, freelance realtime voicewriters may see a bump in income if they are able to charge for their realtime services. Vendors of CAT systems provide excellent customer service and training to their users. There is really no good excuse for continuing to use 20th century technology when the next generation of court reporting technology has arrived.