What matters to my Record

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.

This entry was posted on 4. July 2008 at 07:36 and is filed under Blogroll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.