On a bookshelf in my office, I have a 4″ black binder with the letters AAERT scrawled vertically down the spine. Its contents are divided by colored tabs: AAERT, Board Minutes, 1994 Convention, Membership, Newsletters, Financials. The binder has sat on the shelf for over 18 years and been given very little attention except for an occasional dusting. Its creation at the time was of course dictated by the need to organize the growing number of documents I had been accumulating from my involvement in a new professional association.
The first item in the binder is a letter dated September 24, 1992 from Dennis Borlek and Connie Meadows (later Connie Rill, AAERT’s first President) soliciting membership to a new professional organization. This association is being founded to “establish and maintain professional standards, render legislative support…” and continues in the next paragraph with “the Association will provide a certification program…for reporters and transcribers.”
At the time, I was President of the fairly-new Certified Transcribers Association of NJ and saw the worth of a professional association promoting the above values on the national level. So, without any idea of what lay ahead, I sent Connie a two-page letter dated October 26, 1992. The letter concluded with “I would be willing to come out…and assist you with setting up this organization.” A year or so later, the original Incorporators, Connie Meadows, Janet Harris and Steve Townsend, asked if I would serve on the first Board of Directors.
Fast forward to November 2012. I sit at my office computer with my AAERT President’s hat on, a hat I had previously worn 13 years earlier, and I have been tasked with creating an article for the AAERT Blog. Thanks to the great work of our Strategic Task Force and our subsequent adoption of a new Strategic Plan, AAERT has identified a need to be more involved in the social media arena as a way to better connect and communicate with our members and the industry as a whole. As a result, AAERT now has Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and WordPress pages.
As I typed the last paragraph and looked over at that dusty black binder, I could not believe what has transpired in just 20 years. In 1992, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were at least a decade or more away and social media described a cocktail party of newspaper journalists. My first e-mail address contained only numbers, 75223.1764@compuserve.com. Reel-to-reel recordings were replaced with audiotape cassettes in the analog age. We now have moved to the digital age where court audio and transcripts are routinely sent through the internet.
As an association, we have grown and adapted to these changes and our growth has been nothing short of phenomenal. Tasks handled by committees of one now need committees of many, not to mention an Executive Director and his staff. And with all of this growth, AAERT has held true to the promise it made to me in the letter I received in September of 1992. And I am certainly most proud of our certification program as I had a hand in bringing that to fruition and I consider it the greatest asset offered by AAERT.
About the author: Jim Bowen is the Vice President of J & J Court Transcribers, Inc located in Hamilton, New Jersey. Jim has been a long-time active member of the American Association of Electronic Reporters and Transcribers (AAERT) and currently holds the role of President of the organization. Born and raised in Hamilton, New Jersey Jim spends his downtime playing and watching his favorite sport, soccer.
Reposted from STATELINE, The Daily News Service of The Pew Center on the States
By Maggie Clark, Staff Writer
(AP)
In his novel David Copperfield, Charles Dickens describes the difficulty of learning "the noble art and mystery of stenography." Dickens wrote from experience: Before becoming a novelist, he worked as a court stenographer. People have practiced the "noble art" for millennia, from the Ancient Greeks to the actor Harvey Keitel, who worked as a court reporter before launching his acting career.
But 162 years after Dickens published his classic novel, a shrinking number of U.S. courts rely solely on human beings to record legal proceedings. In an era of tight budgets, courts in all 50 states have replaced court stenographers, many of whom can type more than 250 words per minute, with digital recording systems. These systems range from simple tape recorders to multiple-camera, motion-sensitive systems.
Undoubtedly, digital recording saves money. For instance, a salaried New Jersey stenographer will cost a court between $50,000 and $60,000 per year, says Jeff Newman, deputy clerk for New Jersey's Office of Reporting Services, as opposed to a $5,000 per year cost to set up and maintain digital recording equipment.
In Kentucky, video recordings of court proceedings have served as the official court record for 30 years, ever since judges wanted to take back control of the record during a stenographers' strike. But Kentucky's experience also demonstrates that relying entirely on digital recording can be risky: In 2010, a judge in Jefferson County had to rehear a murder case after the court's digital recording system malfunctioned.
Cost-cutting measures
While there surely are non-fiscal benefits to digital systems, like speeding up the time it takes to certify the record, a desire to save money is the primary reason courts move away from in-person court reporters.
In 2009, Utah shifted all transcription to private transcribers and created a web-based system where reporters could access all the audio and video files of the court proceedings online. "The impetus for this change," wrote Utah State Court Administrator Daniel Becker in an article about Utah's reengineering, "was...a result of budget reductions." Since the transition, Utah has saved more than $1.3 million, eliminated nearly 50 full-time positions and cut the time from transcript request to delivery from an average of 138 days to 12 days for cases not on appeal.
Similarly, in California, the state Legislative Analyst's Office recommended in a 2011-2012 policy brief that the state courts could save $113 million if every court used electronic court reporting. San Francisco Superior Court installed audio recording equipment to replace court reporters in misdemeanor and traffic trials earlier this year and expects to save $1.5 million in ongoing salary savings following the layoffs of 29 court reporters, says Ann Donlan, communications director for the court.
Maintaining control
In addition to cost, many courts have moved away from human stenographers because they want to maintain ownership of the court record. In fact, it was this tension that led to the first digital recording system in Kentucky more than 30 years ago, says Kurt Maddox, known as the "chief evangelist" of video court recordings at Louisville, Kentucky-based Jefferson Audio Visual Solutions.
"If (the stenographer) didn't show up, you couldn't have court," Maddox says, "and from a process point of view, you can see how judges weren't too keen on having others control the workflow of the court." Over time, Kentucky expanded video recording systems to every court in the state, making it the only state to completely abandon stenography.
