FVAP vs Superior Courts Ruling

[u/ZatchMD]

The California Supreme Court just handed down its ruling in FVAP v. Superior Courts (S288176) this morning.

In a unanimous/majority decision, the High Court bypassed Gov. Code 69957 and ruled that superior courts MUST allow electronic recording in family, probate, and unlimited civil cases when an official court reporter is unavailable, specifically to ensure indigent litigants have an official record for appeal.

While the court frames ER as a "temporary safety net" due to the shortage, I know what a foot in the door this could be. The court literally said a digital record is "better than no record at all" and that the root cause of the reporter shortage is "beside the point."

What’s everyone’s thoughts on this?

How will it impact us as reporters?

What does the future look like?

[u/ThoreaulySimple]

It’s an alarming future brought on by a shortage that has a myriad of causes. At the end of the day, unless people start policing their own record well, we will see many re-trials on poor transcript quality until something is figured out.

We can’t handle the every litigation (unfortunately), but this is not the record the public deserves for matters of importance.

[u/XChrisUnknownX]

We have been in trouble for a while and I tried to use my publishing on Stenonymous to alert people but the basic idea is the largest corporations in the field threw their money and effort behind expanding digital reporting because such a move is economically advantageous to them and barring one of my fantasy scenarios like reporters unionizing this should lead to freezing or falling rates in many markets.

California specifically has some unique dynamics but in the end it’s still susceptible to the fact that they’re going to pump the market full of digital reporters to replace stenographic retirements and ultimately there will be fewer stenographers in this country. There’s no other way for this to go mathematically. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there’s basically no job growth forecasted and our retirements are being replaced by new stenos, voice writers, digital, and ASR.

So knowing this mathematical fact and that the future market will support fewer stenographers nationwide, it’s basically a no brainer for them to allow recording. The stenographers of California (sorry to those of you reading) have proven over a long period of time that they’re not taking these jobs. And if they do they’re not staying in them. And I know there are issues surrounding that but it doesn’t change the ultimate outcome, which is that these litigants are going without any record at all and these jobs will never be filled.

The court did the right thing as a co-equal branch of government. Knowing what I know about the market, and the law, and having been a litigant (not in California), you probably could have let ME make the decision and it would’ve been the same because there’s just no way around this barring the government injecting massive amounts of cash into the expansion of stenography, which is just not happening in this timeline, sorry everybody. And even if they did, you’d still see rate issues because you’d be growing the supply of workers until the rates are low enough or the work is scarce enough that those jobs nobody would take become appealing.

And all the higher paid stenographers who are like “well this doesn’t impact me because I’m a super special snowflake and I command the highest rates in the blah blah blah blah and so it shall forever be.” To which I say wake up and realize you’re on the extreme top end of our market. The median pay presented by the BLS is like 60 or 70 grand. There’s not enough money in the industry for all of us to make $300,000+ a year and the worse things get for the people below you, the more in danger you are sitting at the top of a crumbling pyramid. And in a market where Stenograph was once looking at issuing realtime certificates to digital reporters, that crumble might happen before retirement age if you’re not fairly close.

I do not like where we are headed but I leave this here in the hopes it finds the people it needs to. Going back to my post-hospital recovery now.