ODE TO THE CALIFORNIA COURT REPORTER

Dear Court Reporters, This goes out to all 8,000 of you who are still licensed. Reverence and thanks to the 4,752 reporters who were licensed by the California Shorthand Reporters’ Board after its establishment in 1951 by California Business and Professions Code Section 8000, et. al. and are still at it. You’ve been required to be with us, in the California courtroom, since at least 1872 when California Code of Civil Procedure Section 269 was enacted. Back then you were literally shorthand reporters. For 152 years you have been the official reporter, and also the only truthful version of the happenings in court.

I can’t exactly say when I first encountered one of you. It might have been before I was 16, and started working for a plaintiff’s trial lawyer during my first semester of college. When I worked for the second plaintiff’s lawyer, my second semester of college, and then until I graduated, some of you brought devices into the conference room that worked without electricity. Everyone, from young law clerks, to lawyers first licensed in the 40s or 50s, told stories of reporters who still took it by hand onto the steno book, maybe even by pencil. Steno books were all over the law office. It was a privilege to write on one. Legal secretaries, the receptionist, and even the head bookkeeper who I worked for did. These books were narrow, about a third higher than their width, bound by wires on the top, and green in various form including their pages and lines.

Somewhere into my 38-year voyage in the plaintiff’s office, the machines the reporters carried around started plugging in. Once I was a lawyer, there were all sorts of innovations. We could get, “Simultaneous,” but since we were advancing our own costs that never happened. At first, when CSR machines were hooked up to laptops the laptops spent a lot of time crashing. One day in court, the judge announced we were being electronically recorded. This must have been around 1995. Then, I heard it was abandoned because, “It didn’t really work.” California Court Reporters Assn. v. Judicial Council of California (1995) 39 Cal.App.4th 15 paints a slightly difference picture. Apparently the California Court Reporters Association asked the court to declare court reporters were the only means of recording official legal proceedings. The Judicial Council was declared unable to make rules regarding the recording of events in official legal proceedings if those rules contradict statutory law such as California Code of Civil Procedure Section 269.

Since my fun with reporters started, there have been days CSR machines and/or laptops and/or software have crashed. Sometimes a little time was lost, sometimes a lot. An arbitration day shortened. Until Covid, those were most of the interruptions. The time tested truism, “A good reporter never interrupts the proceeding” was virtually infallible. Before Covid there was also a thing called a court reporter’s office. They stocked the best snacks, finest surfaced tables, all the pens, post-it pads, mouse pads, calendars, and sometimes even mints in metal boxes carrying the report’s logo. If a lawyer needed to take a deposition out of county, or out of state, there was a court reporter’s office ready to accommodate all the quibbles of counsel and their clients.

My experiences have included many court reporters who knew me by first name. One who sat on the reception desk strategically placed to make it difficult for random people to begin ascending the staircase to the floor where important persons such as myself and the file clerks work. In her fishnet stockings, she recounted to the audience before her how I took off my jacket and suggested the bombastic defense lawyer accompany me back to the parking lot after he made the first move before becoming quite agitated when I took my suit jacket off. There have been court reporters who called me years after they left the state to ask me a question about employment law, the ones who referred someone they knew, the secretary who worked for me eight years before gaining the speed to finally pass the test, the reporters who wanted tours of the Oxnard office I built that led out onto its own south facing boat dock, and my former neighbor Kathleen who told me lots of things not the least of how beautiful the Stanley Mosk Courthouse was when it was first built, pure amazement, up until the 70s, but more importantly how the land I built on was the former Hollywood Hills Country Club which I had never heard of but proceeded to become the foremost expert on over a period of 20 or more years. And recently, the reporter who first covered all seven plaintiffs’ depositions before the thus far 19 days of arbitration hearing he covered during which time we realized we were both on air and off air DJs who spun world music.

COURT REPORTING AFTER COVID

If what I am about to say will ruin my reputation amongst all of you who I have formed bonds, caused me to devote an entire study spanning three decades thus far, or even bragged about how I showed up a bully, I do apologize for I truly cherish all of you. I do intend to practice at least another 15 years as a trial lawyer, and worry none of you will respect me again. It is not that I do not respect you. Any sane litigator knows the court reporter must be treated with the same dignity as the arbitrator or the judge. But here goes.

You have priced yourselves out of the market, interrupted the proceedings for the last time, refused to come back for live depositions, worked for agencies that charged $550 for you to show up to a report for 5 minutes in court and now want maybe $1,500 or $2,000. You no longer print or bind transcripts. Lawyers and their staff are left directing our printers how to properly bind a deposition transcript after your agency has charged over $2,000 for a single day plaintiff’s deposition. And yes, very bad of you to conspire together and end the Southern California stipulation. Do you realize we do not always have the extra $1,700 or $4,000 to buy the plaintiff’s transcript? Our client will not authorize it? The plaintiff and defense bar were happy knowing plaintiff’s counsel lodged the original of the plaintiff’s deposition. And how dare you give us deposition transcripts without exhibits! Why are you forgetting to attach so many of the exhibits from virtual depositions? Blame it on counsel, but what about the email that shows it was sent to your email? Did you know for the last few years you failed to provide notice to many of my clients that they had an opportunity to review their depositions? Do you know how that plays out in trial? Honestly, the quality of deposition transcripts has become so unreliable how can it be said an electronic version would be worse?

Look, all of us real trial lawyers have gone back to the four cornered world of live legal proceedings. Even for those of us who have heavy arbitration practices we are not stupid enough to allow anymore attenuated virtual hearings where the arbitrator sees a very small part of everyone’s head on the screen, the witnesses cannot see the electronic exhibits, who knows what the witness is doing besides testifying, the arbitrator might be falling asleep, or we are still talking but the fact finder’s hands and fingers fell off from typing. We are done with endless technical problems, scrolling through 1,000 page or more exhibits on screen, and people even less afraid to lie remotely. We know you are in demand. We know there are not enough of you. We know all of your organizations were bought up by giants not run my CSRs, your test is hard to pass (as if ours was not), not enough people are entering the field, we know you do not want to drive to Century City or Downtown (even though we have to). But we need each other. If you are unable to fill in person orders, unable to provide offices when we come to town, unable to print transcripts because in the real world of trials the judge may want a printed deposition or we might be more effective reading from one, and you are unable to work for fair prices your reign over official reports will have to end. Appellate courts need your work, or a viable alternative. So do practitioners. It just isn’t working anymore. We cannot and will not go on much longer this way.