Digital recording advocates are business people who are selling the method. I have yet to hear a lawyer say he loves it and prefers it over steno. I have yet to hear anyone say they have heard it either. To the contrary. Even digital firm owners acknowledge that steno is superior to digital, but that the cost savings and recordings is what makes them better. Funny thing is, we can do everything they can do. We can use all the equipment they use and even more. They cannot hold a candle to us.
Back to the subject at hand. There is no place for digital in the legal arena. Why? Because it is pointless. Digital recorders use a notetaking software that syncs their notes to the audio by timestamps. The notes they take are speaker identification and if they are bored enough, they might try to type some words. Definitely not what an appellate court wants to read. How about those inaudibles they are allowed to throw in there? Dare a steno ever use an inaudible.
I was reading an article the other day about a digital firm owner touting a certain software that the firm is using for taking these notes and syncing it with the audio. This person was so happy that the firm could buy this software for $5 and do their job. As it turns out, this software he is talking about is marketed towards students who want to take notes in class and record the class for later listening during study time. It is also marketed for businesses who have meetings and want to take notes during the meeting and reference back to the audio. So this firm owner uses this $5 software geared towards scant notetaking to produce a transcript. It is a disgrace to try to pawn that off as a way to create a verbatim appellate transcript for a panel of judges to make a costly decision.
The digital community continually criticizes the stenographic community for defending our profession through lobbying efforts and trying to monopolize the industry. What the digital community fails to understand is the importance of our duty as the guardians of the record. This is why these business people are using this method to make money. Stenographers take pride in their product and understand the importance of the role of a verbatim transcript in the legal world and will fight tooth and nail to guard it. If digital reporting were a worthy opponent, I could handle that kind of competition. I might even switch my method if it were worthy, but digital is not worthy of anything having to do with the law.
The judicial arm of the government has allowed digital recordings in their courthouses as a cost-saving measure. Well, that has happened time and time again. It has been started and stopped, started and stopped and yet again started and stopped in the same courthouses time and time again. The reason this happens is because new management comes in and thinks that the previous management made a poor decision by going back to steno for budgetary reasons. Then the new person comes in and puts in the "new technology" and it fails again. The only credit I will give to recordings happening in a courthouse is that the government is responsible for it from all aspects; from the cost of it, to the efficacy of it, to the storage of it, to the production of the transcript, to the inevitable retrials. Everything. It is on them to make sure that what they are allowing into our states is their full responsibility from start to finish. When this takes place in the private sector, it is purely a free-for-all money-making process.
These digital houses are hiring people who have no idea what they are doing. The people going out and doing this are simply saying, "Hey, I can be a court reporter with just a laptop. Wow. I'm a professional now." The digital firm owner pays these people a small salary, trains them on microphone usage and sends them off running. This hardly trains them for the language they are about to encounter and the ways of carrying themselves in a professional setting and what it takes to create a verbatim transcript; after all, the one recording it does not create the transcript. The truth is, there is no place for digital recording in the legal arena. I believe that digital recording is at its peak and will see its own demise. In the meantime, the digital firm owners are making big dollars at the expense of the general public. After all, it is the party to the litigation paying for the court reporter.
We've got 120 courthouses in Kentucky. One sneeze at just the right moment, one garbled word (i.e. "I did go" / I did not go"), one accidentally covered microphone, problems with sidebar bench conferences, millions of $$ for installation, more millions of $$ for maintenance and repair, jobs lost, ..." Someone's getting rich and benefiting from this fleecing, but it's not the litigants nor the taxpaying public :)
ReplyDeleteZPolish, that is so true. That's all this is about is money-making business people. I mean, hat's off to them for coming up with a model that SELLS, but for Pete's sake, it is ruining the principles that we stand on for creating a verbatim record. These business people do not care about the integrity of the record. All that matters is their bottom line. Quite disturbing.
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