New York Court Reporters Blog

Our court reporting agency is located in the heart of New York City. We often get requests from other court reporting agencies to use our conference room with their own reporter. We always let them do it, bring in their own videographer and reporter. The agencies we work with on a regular basis give us the same courtesy.

However, we have on occasion asked agencies we do not work with regularly to help us when our client wants the reporter who has been on the case with him. Sometimes we are refused. The point being, why can’t more of us look past the dollar and help each other out. We have also had jobs “mistakeningly” gone out under another agency’s name or the reporter and videographer conveniently forget who they are working for. My agency is extremely careful to make sure this never happens.

It is more important now more than ever that we work together as a profession and really try and help each other out.

I get numerous calls weekly from other owners of companies in the court reporting industry. Everybody is talking about the same thing, lack of work, plummeting prices and fierce competition. Freelance court reporters are concerned with the lack of work.

As an owner of a court reporting business for more than 25 years, I have never seen or heard the type of proposals and negotiations that have become part and parcel of our everyday business. I hope that just one person reading this will try and hold to decent and fair rates and not be bullied into accepting absurd terms that are being dictated by some insurance companies and law firms. We have said no several times now and each time our clients came back with counterproposals because they did value our service and weren’t willing to sacrifice quality. That is reassuring to some degree.

We have a highly-tuned skill, and we deserve fair compensation for the time, effort and money we have invested in our profession.

I have had several emails from court reporting students looking for a fair appraisal of what the job market will be when they get out of school. They are taking student loans and obviously schools need students and probably are painting an unrealistic picture of our industry. For years, the court reporting industry’s biggest problem was not enough reporters. Now, like most segments of our world, there are not enough jobs.
What is a student to do? Be realistic about your skills. My feeling, only the top students will finish, which is usually the case. They will land the limited amount of jobs being offered to new students coming out of school.
There are many new fields opening up that do not demand the time and money, ie, investment, that becoming a court reporter does. Be honest with yourself about your prospects. Call the agencies in your area to find out if they are hiring new reporters and what you can expect to earn. Do some research. If you are reading this blog, you are a step ahead of most in your class.

Good luck. It is a wonderful profession but like everything requires hard work and dedication.

Rates are falling in the court reporting world due to the same economic factors affecting our country. There is a shortage of money due to tightening of the credit markets and a huge loss of jobs. Corporations and individuals have less money to spend on litigation. Less litigation obviously means less deposition work. There is necessarily more competition for the available work. More competition among firms to get the work and more competition among reporters to do the work. Plus there are lots of unemployed people looking for new careers and there will be a new flock of court reporters hitting the street in a couple of years.

So, guys, what to do. For me, we are trying to hold as firm as possible on our rates. The price-cutting that is going on is outrageous. There is a market for price-cutting and there is always a market for quality and good service. Those of us around for the longest of times have survived not on cutting throats and pricing but offering consistent high quality and excellent service. The reporters who will survive are those who also bring to the table these same old-fashion work ethics.

I have been writing this court reporting blog for court reporters for several months now. I find it fascinating the number of court reporters versus other readers who have responded to my court reporting blog. I would think that somebody out there in the court reporting world is reading court reporting blogs but you would never know it from my blog experience. After all my blogging, I would say I get about 1 percent of responses from court reporters reading blogs. It appears that there are a vast number of spam emails that go out to blogs. If anybody knows what purpose the spam serve, I would certainly be interested. I can’t imagine anybody who is writing a blog on court reporting for court reporters would be interested in this spam stuff. If somebody out there has some kind of explanation for all this spam clogging my blog mail, please tell me.

Thanks to all the court reporters and people associated with court reporting for reading my court reporting blog.

Court reporting and court reporters will be facing the same economic challanges that exist in many other sectors of the economy. There are becoming fewer jobs in every aspect of court reporting and that’s because the volume of court reporting has fallen in the courts as well as in the legal industry. Law firms are firing because of a lack of business and courts and other agencies are using other type of recording devices. So what then is the future of court reporters?

I think court reporters have to keep at the top of their game, always improving and increasing their skills. They must constantly show how incredible their range of skills must be to perform their job efficiently.

TFor many court reporters, there has been a tremendous change in the court reporting community, both from the perspective of a court reporting agency owner court reporters in both the official and freelance communities. These changes will be around for a while until the next big change.

It wouldn’t be normal not to be concerned about the future. It does not resemble the past as we have known it for so long. There are several trends in the court reporting world, especially in consolidations and becoming very corporate. Extremes in anything doesn’t work, and I truly hope as we enter a new decade that some of the old simple court reporting values are not lost in the new corporate environment.