Like every industry, court reporting goes through waves of new technology. Marty Herder of Phoenix firm Herder and Associates says two trends will shape the field in 2018. One is putting to rest the idea that digital tools are replacing court reporters. The other is drawing attention to a shortage of reporters.
Herder said people have claimed for years that speech recognition software will take over from the verbatim court reporter. Those claims, in his view, ignore how messy trial and deposition testimony really is. Arizona courts are already running into these problems, he said, while also coping with too few reporters.
He pointed to situations like depositions, where people often interrupt or talk over each other. Speech recognition tends to produce very poor results there. The software also struggles with different pronunciations of the same word, background noise, homonyms, and individual dialects and accents.
Because of this, Herder said, there is a growing need to bring reporters back into courtrooms and proceedings that had switched to digital recording. The hard part is that the shortage is nationwide, so firms are struggling to fill those seats.
He finds that an odd position for the industry, given what the job offers. Court reporting suits lifelong learners and people looking for a new career, he said, and it can pay six figures.
Digital technology is in use in Arizona courts. Still, the Certified Professional Court Reporter remains the gold standard for a real-time verbatim record, though only if reporters are available to do the work. The shortage may slow down legal proceedings. Even so, experts like Herder see it as a short-term problem that can be solved.