I still have not figured out how court reporters charge or what they are charging for. All I know is I generally pay something like $800 for an inch of double-spaced pages with 1.5″ margins in a large, mono-spaced font.
I do not mind paying the fee when I hired the court reporter, but those fees seem exorbitant if I am just buying a copy of a court hearing or deposition transcript. Even so, I never would have thought to use a public information request to get a cheaper copy of a hearing transcript.
One New Mexico attorney did, and the city and court reporter sued him for the higher fee. Not so fast said the Tenth Circuit. Court proceedings are public record, and forcing a lawyer to obtain them only from the court reporter would amount to giving the court reporter a copyright.
So when it comes to public court proceedings and public records, if you can get them cheaper, the light is green.
10th Cir.: Court reporters do not own a copyright in the transcripts that they prepare | Copyright Law Blog
(photo: Klaire_Lee)
Sam Glover is a business and consumer rights lawyer and the creator of Lawyerist.
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Fascinating!
This begs the question: What are some of the ways of alternatively getting the transcripts? Also, since they are public hearings, can we just audiotape them?
I have to comment that, no, a reporter does not “own” a transcript. However, this is her life-blood and she trains just as long as you, sometimes longer to engage in her profession. Additionally, she invests much in equipment as well. So, similarly, when someone devalues your profession (aka, i’m just paying this lawyer so much for his TIME! it’s ridiculous! what exactly is he doing to charge ME $1000 for half of a day’s work). Your clients pay you for your training, your knowledge and your expertise. You do the same for the reporter.
Secondarily, this is also a protection mechanism. Imagine 10 parties to a case and a reporter gets 10 people all splitting the cost of one transcript. It greatly limits her income producing capacity. And, yes, they make a pretty penny for what they do – but, their work-span is short (very hard on hands and joints) and they are held to the utmost perfection (you know you’d be upset if even one sentance was wrong).
So, consider the other side of this, please. And perhaps mitigate your costs by calling around and ensuring that your copy rate is fair, often times clients never think to ask about this. Or call the reporting agency as soon as you know who’s handling and ask BEFORE the deposition what the copy rate is…and, you can and should negotiate with the “Rule of 5″ (more than 5 depos in one case or more than 5 parties, call and ask for a discount up front).
Thanks, Kristina
In this case, the court reporter worked for this city or county, so he or she was presumably paid a salary for preparing the transcript. Selling to lawyers was just gravy.
Mr. Glover -
This article and your comment show a complete lack of understanding of the business of court reporting. Court reporters that work for the government are paid a salary to work in court making a verbatim record of the proceedings in case a transcript is needed in the future (not to produce transcripts). Court reporters are paid a salary to type correspondence and whatever other legal typing that the judge requires him or her. Court reporters are paid a salary to answer phones, deal with the public, open courtrooms, fetch mail, keep their judge’s calendar, be a confidante to the judge, support the law clerk in his or her duties, etc. The list of things we do for our salary is endless. Those duties take up most of a court reporter’s time at work. If all of the work at the office is done and the judge doesn’t need assistance of the court reporter, then there are times that a court reporter can work on a transcript at work. I assure you, however, that most of the transcripts that lawyers request are done after hours at home in the evening and on weekends. Producing transcripts in the evening and on weekends after putting in 40 plus hours at work is exhausting. It is tedious and incredibly time consuming. Court reporters don’t just have one boss, our judge. We have multitudes of bosses that come in the form of attorneys and private citizens that require us to produce transcripts. Frankly, many of us would like to say “no thanks” to that work, but our day job requires us to have a night and weekend job as well. We cannot say no. So our lives consist of working all day long in court and then working most nights and many weekends providing the transcripts that you seem to think are just “gravy” for us. Your suggestion that court reporters are paid too much for transcripts reminds me of the three different tax preparers I have used over the last 20 years who have suggested that I quit this “part time night/weekend job” because after time and expenses I am just not making enough money from it to make the “part time job” worthwhile. I can also assure you that the state that pays our official court reporter salaries has figured out that it is less expensive for them to allow us to bill a page rate for transcripts than to have to pay us overtime and other leave benefits to make up for all of this extra work that we produce on our “free time”. My salary is also kept artificially low to compensate for all of this “gravy” money that I’m getting from my evening and weekend job. Court reporters also have to invest thousands of dollars in equipment to do the job we do. That “funny little machine” we type on costs each of us approximately $5,000. The software we use to translate our transcripts cost us between $4,500 and $6,000. Not to mention the $1,500 computer, $500 printer, toner, paper, transcript covers, and all of the other accessories we pay for to produce these “gravy” transcripts. We also must update our equipment reasonably often, so these fees are not one time fees. And here’s the shocker for many people: The state doesn’t pay for this equipment that we use in our jobs in court. The individual court reporter pays out of his or her pocket for this equipment. I, personally, have invested over $20,000 of my own money in equipment to produce the transcripts that you call “gravy” on my evenings and weekends for you and other customers of the court system. When you look at a one-inch transcript and only see an outrageous $800 fee…I see a lot of hard work and time that I wish I could have spent with my husband and children. It is always easy to look at another person’s job and say how “their job is easy” and “they’re overpaid,” but the reality is each person is generally paid market value for their hard work and nobody truly understands the complexities, stresses, costs or time consuming nature of another’s work that justifies that fee. I have to go. I am exhausted after working all day in court and I have an evening of transcripts that need to be prepared to protect your client’s rights.
(These comments do not represent the view of all court reporters and are only the opinion of the writer.)
p.s. An attorney I know once said, “A lawyer complaining that a court reporter
makes too much money for their work is like a turd telling a burp it stinks.”
“These comments do not represent the view of all court reporters and are only the opinion of the writer.”
I would suggest that while your statements may not represent the view of all court reporters, your thoughts are definitely not only the opinion of the writer, Kritter.
So much of what we do as court reporters, freelance included, is done outside of the view of others. For every hour on the record, there is two to three hours (sometimes more) of post-production work involved to make an accurate final record.
Just in dollars and cents, our records save attorneys time, and as a result, the litigants money. If attorneys needed to review eight hours of trial audio or video at, say, $300 a billable hour, do the math.
The problem is that some of the unitiated view those of our profession as mere typists when what we do is more similar to that of an IT professional and concert pianist, all rolled into one.
Outsourcing our transcripts to mere typists? What’s next in order to save money? Paralegals and secretaries making legal arguments? Like law, court reporting is a skill, an art, a profession, not just a job.
Ho-boy, I don’t want to be you at your next depo or court proceeding, once your court reporter reads what you’ve written here! Have you ever said something stupid while you were on the record? Yep, you’re gonna see that stupid remark blasted all over the internet. Serves you right, too.
Guess you’ve never heard the saying: “Never pick a fight with somebody that buys ink/toner by the barrel.”
On another popular legal blog you would be called a douchbag by your professional peers for posting this. Just sayin…
Don’t worry, you aren’t invited to my next depo or court proceeding. Also, you misspelled “douchebag.”
I am not sure you read the article, specifically this part:
(Emphasis added.)
I concede the original may be worth the high price we pay, but is every copy really worth the same price? At that point, the labor has already been compensated, and we are just paying for paper.
Sam, to answer your last comment, yes, every copy is worth the same price, although many, if not all, agencies give a discounted rate to the attorney who orders a copy, which is a practice that I don’t agree with. At that point, you are paying per page for the transcript despite whatever labor has been expended, so whether it’s a copy or not, you’re still receiving the same high-quality product. You should not get a break on the price when the ordering attorney has to pay full price for the exact same product. Same product, same price, period.
I think the problem here is that Sam has identified a legitimate criticism of a court reporter/transcript system that has been in place for a very long time.
The people who operate (with a lot of skill, without a lot of compensation, and often under a lot of stress) within that system are clearly very protective of their hard-earned source of income. But that doesn’t mean that it is an appropriately-designed system or that the compensation incentives—as they currently exist—make a whole lot of sense.
I don’t think Sam is trying to hurt court reporters.
I think he’s trying to raise the question of whether our professional court reporter/transcript compensation system is structured in a sensible way. Just because it’s been this way for a long time doesn’t mean it’s unfair to have a conversation about whether there could be better ways to structure it.
I’m interested as to where you practice that the court reporters are charging the same price for the original as for the copies. Certainly, here in Missouri copy rates are much lower than that charged for the original, probably averaging one-third of the cost of the original. I’ve done work for a number of firms here in Missouri; I’ve done work for out-of-state reporting firms; and that’s been the norm.
I’m a court reporter in Texas, and at least at my firm, copies are roughly a $1.50 a page compared to the $4 to $5 a page you would pay for an original. Not sure why you’re paying the same for a copy.
Mr. Street/Mr. Glover,
My industry’s billing practices are certainly a question to be pondered. Some states have legislated what is a fair price to charge the parties in litigation, like Texas’s one-third rule. In most locales, it is typical that the taking attorney pays a higher portion of our charges. If copy sales were to diminish, the result will likely be a higher price for the original, or perhaps as an industry, we will migrate to billing by the deposition/hearing hour, a price that reflects the unseen hours we spend elsewhere producing the final transcript.
National court reporting companies that engage in contracting seem to think that the copy attorneys should pay the highest portion of the bill; offering a low price to the taking attorney gets the bookings in the door, but it leaves opposing counsel feeling
–well — screwed, to put it bluntly. Problem is, these national firms do not have staff in all of the locations where they gobble up work, and their only option for labor is to utilize local vendors and add an extra layer of profit to their overall bill. If calling one vendor nationally for all of your depositions is a service you are willing to pay for, you are paying for it, and dearly. For those complaining about what a copy costs when doing business with these companies, you’ll probably not even hear dissention from other court reporters.
For more information on how to be an informed consumer and to avoid any pitfalls, please visit the website I have created for the purpose of educating the bar on a number of issues involving my profession: saveourcourtrecords.org
Respectfully,
Lisa Migliore Black, CCR-KY
Court reporters prepare Reporter’s Records of court proceedings per written request and arrangements to pay by parties requesting same. The cost of preparation of the proceedings is the work product of the reporter and copies may be sold to parties which does help to keep the cost of the original transcript down. Stenograph machines run around $5,000 together with new technology in computer equipment and the yearly fees to keep up your software support, machine support, and computer equipment support make being in the court reporting profession very expensive. Court reporting rates are very competitive in the legal community.
Would you call on a plumber and then not pay them for providing competent and reliable services?
I’ve been practicing law for over 30 years. It seems to me that, independent of the increasing per page cost, which is simply a matter of inflation, the amount of printed text on each page of transcript has been shrinking over the years. I see increasingly very wide right hand side margins, and major indentations for non-dialogue notations. I suspect that there are some industry standards here, and I would be curious if those standards have changed over the years, resulting in more pages for the same amount of transcribed testimony.
Jeff,
The standards for page formats varies greatly, from very strict guidelines in certain states like Texas and California, voluntary guidelines promulgated by NCRA and the various state associations, and ABSOLUTELY NO STANDARDS WHATSOEVER. I agree; it’s a problem for consumers and a problem for the reporters who fill the page who are trying to compete. If price is a deciding factor for attorneys when choosing their court reporter (it shouldn’t be the only factor), with no standards in place, a consumer is certainly at a disadvantage in determining whether the price that is 10 cents less a page is actually a good value if there is only half the text included for that lower price. Ask when traveling and using a new provider and stick with a local reporter who provides you a good value for your dollar.
And for those who haven’t taken notice of the class action suits filed regarding the charges for inclusion of word indices with transcripts, here is some text from one of the educational flyers my volunteer organization distributes:
Is your transcript half-full or half-empty?
Page formats can be easily manipulated so that fewer characters and words appear on the transcript page. Additionally, some court reporting firms choose to add a word index at full transcript page rates at the end of the transcript. Both of these practices adversely affect your bottom line by artificially increasing the volume of pages for which you are being charged, leaving your wallet half-empty.
To avoid unnecessary expense, choose a reporter that adheres to the National Court Reporters Association’s transcript format guidelines.
You have to understand who you are dealing with. Not to sound brash or even rude but court reporters have obtained a very difficult skill of writing up to 225 words a minute. Even though you may be able to type really fast on your keyboard, it takes 100 times more skill to listen, write on their machines with puntuations and keep up. They deserve the money– they have earned it!! Before trying to cheat the system try doing a little more research than just getting upset beacause of the price. It is a legal document and you should treat it as such.
Please, Jacob, do audiotape your court proceedings. Then hook up the earphones and type up the transcript & have it certified to be admitted in court.
Just so you’re aware Florida Rules of Civil Procedure 1.300 state that you should get the transcript from the court reporter, so to tell people, “the light is green”, to get transcripts from other sources is advocating violating the Rules of Civil Procedure, at least in Florida
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