4. July 2008 by admin.

Ever want to make your worksheet work on your laptop instead of having to fill it on the paper with a pen?

Let me throw out a way to do that here very quickly. 

Make your document the way you want it to look as best you can in your word processor.  You can set some of your colums of from there as best you can. 

Then, save the file in a pdf format and take it over to Adobe Professional and finish it off there by putting in your drop-down fields and other things you want in there that Word or Word Perfect weren’t able to allow for.

Then, you can email this file to your Production/Billing department if you’re away from the office, and, you don’t have to scan the document later if you are using a scanning protocol for your documents in the office.  One less document to worry about.

Once the reporter fills out the file from the Master document, he/she will then Save As and name the job whatever your naming convention is in your office.

Naming conventions can be things like just the simple job number for a job such as 12345 or something with a date like 090107 or a combination like 12345_090107 or 12345090107 or 1234502CR123 or 12345JSmith.  It can vary depending on your needs.

Your scanning protocol should be considered carefully because you want to decide on the best way to retrieve your infomation at a later date should it become necessary.  Personally, I like to break out the exhibits and billing documents in different folders, even though I will use the same job number.   I could have a Billing folder on my network and then have an Exhibits folder on my network, each containing the same job number or job name.  Makes it easier to pull the exhibits up quickly and not have to sort through and cull out the billing/worksheet/etc. and then print them.   Conversely, if a client calls up and has billing questions, I don’t have to cull through the exhibits to find the billing information or worksheet.

Backing up:  Reporters should back up their dictionaries, at a minimum once a month…..AS WELL AS their user settings and stuff pertinent to their page settings.  To not do this is just asking for problems.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a reporter call me with problems and haven’t made copies of anything.  So, when you get through reading this post, get your thumb drive, jump drive, external drive, network drive and make a copy of the important files and workfiles and front pages and dictionaries and user settings of your stuff.  If you work in an office that utilizes a network drive for their backup, it doesn’t hurt to send the file to the network drive at the end of the day to back it up, even though you’re not finished with it.  You can overwrite the file the next day or whenever you finish the job for production.  If you’re not in a network, it takes two or three minutes to copy to a thumb drive at the end of the day.  I’d much rather re-edit a few pages versus have to re-edit the whole job over again.

I’m on a roll here.

Scopists:  Scopists should retain your files for you for at least a couple of weeks after they are finished with your work….just in case.  Once you’re gotten the file billed, delivered and backed up on your end, then let the scopist know that it’s to delete the file on their end so they’re not backlogged storing your stuff for you.  If you don’t have a good place to back up stuff, you can always get an online drive like www.flipdrive.com or www.xdrive.com.   They have huge amounts of storage space for very cheap.  What’s your stuff worth?  You decide on how much you want to gamble with your livelihood.

Are you writing realtime?   Why not????  There’s no time like the present to start.  Don’t tell me, “Oh, my dictionary is not built up.”   Mine isn’t either and I’ve been writing realtime since ‘90.  If you value your profession, get on board and get on board fast.  I have yet to have an attorney actually stand behind be and watch me write for the whole hearing or deposition; so, if you are afraid that’s going to happen or try to use that as an excuse, spare me. 

I love my job.  I love my career.  I love the people I’ve met over the years that I would not have met otherwise.  It’s up to me to protect your career by being the best I can be in my career just as much as it is up to you to protect my career by being the best you can be in your career.  Let’s all work together to keep this profession what it is and protect each other the best we can.  Hold your leaders accountable.  Hold me accountable.  Hold yourself accountable.

Lastly, again, get your thumb drive out or whatever means you use to back up your “stuff” and go do it.  You’ll be glad you did.

(tipping hat)

Posted in Blogroll | No Comments »

4. July 2008 by admin.

I’ve been sitting here over the last week and thinking about all the discussion on the topics regarding the record and Voice Recording, etc.  I just have to weigh in ….a little bit here.

I’m just a country boy from a small cotton-farming community north of Lubbock, TX, and probably don’t have all the knowledge coming from a small town like that, but I’ve worked very hard to get where I’m at today.  I’ve met a lot of interesting people in my profession that I never ever would have met if I were to still sack groceries at the local grocery store or be a gas station attendant in my home town.  Now, I’m not putting anyone down who does that kind of work and I don’t want anyone to think I am.  Shouldn’t even have to mention that, but want to be politically correct. 

That all being said, we all should think that the record matters, from the court reporter down to the client who is suing or being sued.   Why?  Well, I know when I go to look for a new car, I look for quality and dependability and that normally leads me to a Toyota or a Honda.  Why?  Because they make a great product.  That’s how we should be viewed in the legal community.  

How has the reporting profession come to the point that we are not dependable or reliable?  Yes, we are probably more expensive than ER, but we provide quality and dependability.  If I didn’t want that in a car, I’d go find the cheapest car I could find, but, I would spend more time on repairs because I chose cheap over quality. 

I still, to this day, am very proud to call myself a court reporter.  “What do you do for a living?”  Proudly, “I’m a court reporter.”  I don’t hold my head down or feel sorry for that.  The only thing I’m sorry for is that we are a necessity in this world in the legal community to keep the record, and to keep it correctly.  That is an amazing burden and responsibilty that I don’t think a lot of new reporters realize coming out of school.  I know when I got certified that I KNEW everything there was to know about court reporting and could write fast.  Boy, weren’t we all amazed at just exactly how much we really didn’t know.

I remember one time a new reporter came to me and said, “Breck, what are certified questions?” 

I said, “Didn’t they teach you that in school?”

“No.”

“Well, what you have to do is you edit your transcript just like normal and then you take those questions where the attorney wanted them certified and you extract them into a new transcript and then you go to the witness’s house and make them answer the questions that they refused to answer in the deposition.”

(Pause)

“Do what???!!!!”

“Yes, you have to go to their house and wait for them to answer.   It sucks, but we’ve all had to do that.”

“They didn’t teach us that in school.”

You get the point here.  I had a blast with the reporter getting all excited about having to go to the “bad side” of town and wait for this 6′8″ guy to answer the question.

I say all this as an aside because it just reemphasizes the fact that as a newbie we don’t know everything.  How can I sit here and justify having someone that is cute, just out of high school, be my typist??  I can’t.  I have had student reporters work for me as scopists as they are training in school and when they first start with me, I’m amazed at just how much they don’t know in the beginning.  It’s not the fact that you can write fast or that you can type fast or edit fast; it is the fact that you have to be an “expert” right now in the field of what you’re editing.  There’s is no way to be an expert and know what a seasoned reporter knows coming out of high school.   Maybe editing a car accident case is an exception here, but we have got to really educate the public about the importance of why the record does matter.

I tell clients and attorneys all the time that I come across about how I have to be an expert in their field of discussion that day and I think it really gives them a new perspective on how difficult our jobs are when put that way.  They never think about what comes to them so easily and whether others might have difficulty with the lingo or the words or acronyms.  We only are able to do what we do by being able to say, “Wait a minute, what was that?  I didn’t get that phrase you just used.”  Show me a machine that can do that and I’ll embrace it, but I’m still convinced the reporter is what makes the record matter.

Whether it’s NCRA, TCRA or a local boy from a small town in north Texas, it is all of our responsibility to educate the public on what we do and how important our job is.  This should be done, whether we are threatened by new technology or not.  All I have to do in my office is keep messing up jobs and deliveries with one of my clients, and there’s another firm right down the street that would be very happy to take over that client’s business.

As associations, they should get out there with campaigns stressing how important the reporter is to the record in court and deposition.  The firm owners should stress to their clients how important the record is to them.  The reporters within the firm — yes, even them — should do what they can to promote the profession, because, again, there’s always a firm down the street or new technology on the horizon just waiting for us to mess up or sit back on our laurels and jump in and take over.  

We all have a responsibility to ourselves and our profession to keep it to the standards those who came before us have it set at.  Realtime is what will probably save our professions, but if all we do is hook up the writer to a computer and never try to improve ourselves or actually provide interactive realtime to clients or judges or whoever, what have we done to promote ourselves?  Nothing.  I’m no expert on realtime or the best realtime writer, but if I hear another person say, “Oh, but Breck, my dictionary is not ready” I’m going to scream.   I’m a better realtime writer now than I was when I started trying to write realtime in ‘91……a heck of a lot better.  I know how my program translates now, I watch my writing and I see right now what my problem areas are.  I’ve had to change quite a few things in my writing style, but it’s for the betterment of what the client gets at the end of the day.  It’s not about me; it’s about the client.  Being flexible is important and if we’re set in our ways, we are going to have problems.  If we’re willing to adjust, adapt and overcome, we will be better in the long run. 

This is not an easy profession.  I’ve said it before, you got to want it to be good and make your record matter.  If we all do nothing, we are doomed.

I don’t make a distinction between freelance or official here…..we are ALL Court Reporters.  We should all work together.  I’ve seen too many times where officials and freelancers don’t work together in the local community.  I’ve worked on both sides of the fence and it’s sad to say that there are many on both sides who are doing nothing to improve themselves.  Who am I to call anyone down?  I’m just an ol’ country boy, but I love what I do for a living and I plan on doing this for a long time.  If that means calling anyone out to wake up, then so be it.  We all need to wake up here and have a reawakening in the profession and promote ourselves the best way we can.

I’ve become a managing reporter now and have seen the other side of things from an owner’s perspective and I can appreciate the bottom line from the firm’s perspective.  As a firm owner, I can see how the firm might look at digital reporting when their reporters are not servicing the firm’s clients the way the firm wants the client taken care of.  I can appreciate how it’s easy to want to make a higher percentage on the profits when you’re paying the bills.  We all want to make money.   That’s a given.  I’m sure many firms struggle with how to keep the reporters excited about the work they do and how to keep the reporters current on all their work.  I don’t know the answers, but it’s going to be fun to try to figure it all out.  

Now that I’m out here on a limb, hopefully others will join me and we can swing together.  Doyle Brunson said, “Sometimes you have to go out on a limb…..because that’s there the fruit is.” 

Hopefully this doesn’t turn out to be the “Jerry Maguire” letter like what Tom Cruise wrote.

In closing, to quote Richard Dreyfuss from “The American President” in a roundabout way:  ……..My name is Breck Record and I AM a Court Reporter and my record DOES matter as well as MY profession.

Posted in Blogroll | No Comments »

4. July 2008 by admin.

I have never been averse to looking at new technology, as long as it is for the betterment of our profession. I have an analogy I’d like to share in regards to scoping that might apply to other areas. One of the problems I have with scopists is whether to pay them by the page when they work for me, or whether to pay them by the hour. Over the years, I’ve fought with that because on the one hand, if paid by the hour, they know that they are going to make so much every hour and I see the production sometimes go down because whether they do 5 pages an hour or 50 pages an hour, the pay is the same. On the other hand, I have paid scopists by the page and have seen over the years at different times the push, if you will, to get pages out and edited at the expense sometimes of being accurate because “the more pages you edit, the more you make.”
 
Now, I am by no means picking on scopists, but the point is if paid by the hour, are they more inclined to be more accurate? If paid by the page, are they more concerned with quantity over quality? Those are questions I always ask myself and always wonder about. Do I give a scopist a nice hourly salary to edit for me, or do I pay them a nice page rate?

This can also be applied to associations. Do we keep things as they are, or do we push to add members at the expense of the longtime members who aren’t willing to change? I don’t know. I remember the church I attended while in San Antonio and the average age of the members. The age was in the upper fifties, with a few families who were like me….in their late twenties and early thirties. Well, to try to get the majority to want to change or to do something different in church or to modify the service or the routine sometimes was about as hard as trying to get Congress to pass legislation or agree on anything. Many times, after new change was brought about, all were okay with it, but, in the beginning, it was a struggle and a fight to bring that change about.

We are probably, as a profession, at this same crossroads, whether nationally or in our own local and state organizations. Change is on the horizon, and how do we address this change? What’s best for the reporter? What’s best for the profession? What’s best for the client? These are questions that we all have to ask ourselves and figure out what direction we are willing to go and what direction we are not willing to go. What changes are tough but okay in the future? I don’t know. Should we fight ER or accept that it works? I don’t know. Is embracing ER by using backup audio media with our software okay? Was that the right thing to do? I don’t know. These are all things that have to be figured out and examined over the next few years and discussed. Knee-jerk reactions are definitely not the way to go, but in the defense of a knee-jerk, it just signifies to me the passion one feels about what they believe in.
 
I’m very passionate about court reporting. I hope to do this for many more years. Where does voice recognition come in? Digital? Do they scare me? Sure they do. Am I doing what I can with the technology that I have to fight it or protect myself? You bet I am. Is it something I should embrace in some form or fashion next year? Five years from now?   Ten years from now? I don’t know. Am I so set in my ways that I’m not willing to look at it and examine it? Not at all. I like to know my friends, but I like to know my enemies even better. I can sit here and badger that which I don’t know all day long, but until I really look at something closely, I’m not going to be educated on what I like or don’t like about it. I’m in no way suggesting that voice or ER are the way to go here, but I’m trying to have an open mind about it and understand the enemy before I go after it and try to destroy it.

I know a couple of things about digital right now:

1. Yeah, it can make a good recording.

2. Yeah, a person can sit there and monitor it.

3. Yeah, a tape can be made from it to transcribe.

4. Yeah, there are going to be “inaudibles” if the “monitor” doesn’t speak up and say “You were talking at the same time.”

5.  Yeah, the judge, attorneys, monitor, won’t know if there’s a recording until after the fact, despite the monitor wearing headphones and monitoring the recording.

6. Yeah, you can get a transcript back within a few weeks or sooner, if necessary.

7. Yeah, you have to pay someone to transcribe that tape, be it a transcriptionist, or a court reporter, who will probably charge you more just because you didn’t have them there in the first place and charge you the “rekeying” fee to have to sit there and rekey the job so they can edit it.

8. Yeah, a monitor can keep a note file of events that happened. But…

There is no way on this green Earth that a digital tape has been able to beat me on the turnaround and give the client a transcript within hours of an all-day hearing when I’m writing realtime and a scopist is right behind me; and,
 
There is no way that anyone is going to be able to get a rough draft of the proceedings immediately at the end of the day; and,
 
There is no way that a scopist can sit right there behind a digital tape and start editing it like they can sit behind me and scope on-site right now; and,

There is no way that, in a depo, an attorney is going to get a transcript within an hour or so of the depo; and,

There is no way an attorney in a depo can leave the depo with a rough draft either printed or emailed to him at that moment.

When my clients want to “See it Write Now,” they call me to the job and not Sony or Memorex. “Is it a court reporter or is it Memorex?”  It’s a Court Reporter every single time
.

Posted in Blogroll | No Comments »