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Creating a record of what goes on in the courtroom is such an important function that state court officials are concerned about a growing shortage of qualified court reporters, the people — usually women these days — who sit quietly at the front of courtrooms everywhere and take down everything that’s said.
“This is really a big issue for the system,” said state courts director John Voelker. “Of our major business functions, making the record is one of them. We can’t have court without it. We don’t want to be in a situation where we have to cancel proceedings.”
With a growing number of state court reporters reaching retirement eligibility in coming years — about a third of the state’s 311 court reporters are expected to retire in the next 10 years — the problem could become even more urgent.
Currently, three of Wisconsin’s 72 counties do not have a court reporter because nobody who was qualified applied for open positions. Instead those counties use digital voice recorders to keep the record of court proceedings, Voelker said. That’s despite efforts by the state court system to attract qualified reporters to the profession and to the court system.
Part of the problem, according to some in the field, is that it’s a job that gets very little exposure and one that few young people consider as a career. Another is that the training for the job is difficult and demanding: nationally, only about 13 percent of those who start training for it finish their degree.
“A lot of people don’t know what judicial reporting is,” said Rachel Baker, who has taught the subject at Madison Area Technical College for about 20 years. “Unless you’ve ever been to court, you’ve never seen a court reporter. You don’t think as a child, ‘I’m going to grow up and be a court reporter.’”
But for those who make it in the field, the pay is good. It ranges from $36,000 to $70,000 per year in the state court system. Freelance reporters, who work at such things as depositions and arbitration sessions, can earn even more. And with a federal mandate to provide closed captioning for all television broadcasts, those trained for court reporting can also become television captioners, often working from their homes.
On any given day, Dane County court reporters Ann Albert and Linda Flakne will listen intently to a great variety of court cases, from serious crime to restraining orders to divorce. They’re among about 25 who work for the state court system in Dane County.
“Our job is to be quiet and listen,” said Flakne, who has been a court reporter for 29 years and is the “floater” for District 5 of the state court system, which takes her to courtrooms in and out of Dane County. She got into the profession at the suggestion of her father, who knew a court reporter, after taking secretarial courses in high school. It’s a decision she has never regretted.
“It’s the variety,” she said. “It’s like reading a book. We hear different things every day. It’s just fun.”
Albert, who has been a court reporter for about 24 years, got into the profession at the suggestion of her mother, who watched a reporter at work one day while attending court.
As a member of the Wisconsin Court Reporters Association’s public relations committee, Albert has been involved in finding ways to expose high schoolers to court reporting and get them interested in pursuing it as a career. She has worked with MATC students, gone to career fairs and met with high school classes and guidance counselors to attract young people to the profession.
The committee is also trying to attract job candidates from other parts of the United States to Wisconsin, she said.
The court system has taken similar measures, Voelker said, along with a few others. For one, it used to cap its experience credit — used to determine pay and seniority for new reporters to the state system — at 10 years. To attract experienced reporters, the cap is now 20 years.
The court system also no longer requires that job candidates pass the National Court Reporters Association speed and accuracy test, he said, which proved difficult for some qualified candidates who graduated from accredited school programs.
But even with those changes, Voelker said, looming court reporter retirements and the shortage of students getting into the profession leaves a gap that needs to be filled.
Bayfield, St. Croix and Grant counties are using digital voice recording systems because the court system was unable to hire court reporters for those counties, Voelker said. While a monitor runs the audio equipment and prepares transcripts when needed, live court reporters are preferred.
The shortage is a widespread problem. Pete Wacht, spokesman for the National Court Reporters Association in Vienna, Va., said it’s partly due to growing government mandates for services for the hearing impaired. Real-time reporters, who use the same technology as court reporters to provide voice-to-text services for the hearing impaired, are in great demand. The government has also mandated closed captioning on television programs.
“The demand is really continuing to grow exponentially,” Wacht said.
Voice-to-text computer software has not been the answer, he said. It doesn’t work in situations where more than one person is speaking, as in a courtroom, because in order to work, the software needs to be “trained” to the sound of an individual’s voice. It also requires speakers to speak slowly.
“We don’t know when it will be there, if it will be there,” Wacht said.
In the meantime, Madison Area Technical College’s court reporting program, one of only two in Wisconsin, produces about five graduates per year out of the 25 or so that start taking the two-year course every year. Most people take 33 months to complete the coursework.
The numbers alone show how demanding the job can be, said Baker.
“You have to concentrate,” she said. “You have to really enjoy words and the English language. You need to be strong at grammar. You just need to have that interest in what you’re doing to keep you sitting at that machine and building your speed. So you need to have a good vocabulary. You need to be well-read. And then, just the tenacity to stick with it.”
And it takes practice, practice and more practice. To graduate, court reporters must write 225 words per minute for five minutes at 95 percent accuracy.
“You can’t just wait until the night before a test to practice,” Baker said. It’s got to be every day, and we recommend two to three hours a day outside of class.”
The machine that court reporters use, called a stenotype, consists of 23 keys, each representing a phonetic sound. Those keys are pushed individually or in combinations to re-create those phonetic sounds into a kind of coded format. Creating words and sentences on a stenotype is not unlike playing several keys at once on a piano to create a chord. Computer software is used to translate those coded phonetic sounds into English. In the old days, court reporters had to type out transcripts from their phonetic notes.
Students learn how to write typical phrases they might use on a daily basis, such as “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and to do it in one stroke using a combination of keys.
“I liken it to, you’ve never played the piano before, but I’m going to teach you to play the piano and in two to three years you’re going to play Carnegie Hall,” said Lisa Hubacher, who also teaches at MATC. She said it’s a tough skill to learn, “but it’s worth every painstaking moment.”
Ed Treleven is a reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal.
