Vanessa Huerta has spent over a decade working to become a court reporter in California, a state that desperately needs her services. But she isn’t a court reporter yet.
Instead, Huerta and many other students are stuck in a system of trying and failing to fill this well-paying, much-needed role of creating and protecting verbatim records of court proceedings.
An eye-popping $120,000 starting salary lures many into court reporter training programs. That figure has been increased in recent years, as state courts struggle to hire and retain court reporters.
About one quarter of Los Angeles Superior Court reporter positions are vacant. Some courts across California, like Los Angeles Superior Court, have ceased to provide reporters in family law and probate matters, rendering appeals in those cases essentially impossible.
Meanwhile, many training programs in California have shut down, often over accreditation issues. Students in these programs have been left scrambling to complete their training and make it to the exam.
And the California skills exam is notoriously difficult, requiring a 97.5% accuracy rate compared to 95% in the rest of the country. Only 20% of aspiring court reporters in the state, on average, pass the test each time it’s administered, said Los Angeles Superior Court Executive Officer David Slayton.
Tara Ocaña, a friend of Huerta’s, has studied to become a California court reporter for ten years and has still yet to pass the qualifier for the certification exam.
“We’re constantly failing, which can be really heartbreaking at times,” Ocaña said.
Huerta first enrolled in court reporter training almost two decades ago in a San Diego certification program. But after studying there for two years, the school shut down.
Part of a military family, Huerta has since moved several times, enrolling in new programs, sometimes being forced to redo credits when she moved states. She continued her training but never passed the exam. After more than a decade of rigorous typing and strain, she developed tennis elbow and had to quit stenography.
Her school’s shutdown wasn’t a one-off. Thirteen court reporting schools in California have closed in the last two decades, according to the Court Reporter’s Board of California.
Those shutdowns are directly linked to the lower rates of exam passage, according to the board.
Shuttered schools “qualified a large number of students who did not pass the test, calling into question their true qualification for taking the exam. That situation is compounded by the fact that unsuccessful candidates have no school to return to for further practice,” it said in 2018.
Ocaña, for example, spent a year trying to study on her own while also working at FedEx after the school she was attending closed in 2018, something she says “put me behind.”
Because little is publicly known about the court reporting profession and its rigorous training process, some court reporting hopefuls say their main support systems are in online community groups. Ocaña runs one of those pages on Facebook.
One school, Bryan College of Court Reporting, didn’t disclose to prospective students that its program was unaccredited, meaning graduates would be ineligible to sit for the licensing exam, the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education said in a 2019 citation.
Another, the Court Reporting Institute, closed abruptly in 2006 after investigators found the school lied to students about how long it would take to graduate and earn certification.
Charles A. Jones Career and Education Center’s court reporting school closed in 2021, with an instructor and a program director citing funding problems, Covid-19, and “our administration’s misperception of a severe decline in job opportunities.”
The board currently recognizes eight court reporting schools across the state, although students can also enroll in other programs before taking the state test.
These programs cost $27,500 on average to complete in California, according to the Los Angeles County Superior Court.
But momentum has shifted since 2022, when Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) followed a majority of other states and legalized voice writing—where court reporters speak quietly into recording devices concealed in masks—as an alternative to stenographic typing.
Court reporting enrollment has increased at West Valley Community College from its usual enrollment of about 100 students to about 250 now, in part because of the state’s new licensing of voice writers, said Margaret Ortiz, the chair of the program. The department, which was among the first of its kind in California to offer voice writing instruction, has essentially doubled its instructor base to meet demand. West Valley’s court reporting program is free and offers live classes on videoconferencing, Ortiz said.
“The majority of our students are female. Many are single moms,” she said. “And a good number of our students are in situations where this is like salvation for them, in terms of being able to get a career where they can support their families.”
Los Angeles’ trial courts pay starting salaries for court reporters of more than $120,000. Still, court reporters who work in the private sector can make as much as $3,000 per day.
Court reporters in LA say the court’s administration accelerated the private sector’s growth when laying off about 250 reporters in the early 2010s.
When the court laid off about a third of its court reporting staff between 2012 and 2013 and those reporters went freelance or joined the private sector, “they created this world where reporters could now manage their own schedules,” said Cindy Tachell, president of the Los Angeles County Court Reporters Association.
“They also shifted the responsibilities of providing a record from the court to the court users,” said Tachell, who was laid off in 2013 and rehired in 2014. Litigants can shoulder thousands of dollars in costs if the court doesn’t provide a reporter.
The CEO of Los Angeles Superior Court decided this year to dip into the $30 million statewide annual fund allocated two years ago by the state to recruit court reporters. It has recruited in newspapers and on buses, and soon the court will train its own employees, like clerks who seek a career shift, to become court reporters. LASC also plans to advertise the job at high schools, junior colleges, and job fairs, said Los Angeles County Superior Court Presiding Judge Samantha Jessner.
This kind of military-style recruitment may be a tough fit for a position that requires so much training and specialization, but Slayton, the court’s executive officer, thinks it will work because of the significant upward mobility the job can provide.
When her injury forced her to quit stenographic typing, Huerta wanted to swear off court reporting. She almost ignored her friend’s message imploring that she sign up for a new voice writing program.
But when she heard voice writers could get jobs in California courtrooms after Newsom signed A.B. 156, she changed her mind and enrolled in the program at West Valley Community College.
“I felt like, ‘Wow. This is my second chance,’” Huerta said.
Speaking into sound-muffling masks while court proceedings unfold in front of them, voice writers use shorthand to create a verbatim transcript, like typing court reporters do. They’re trained to speak in hushed tones, like they’re “trying not to wake the baby,” Huerta said.
Voice writers can get trained in about a year. That’s a significantly shorter period than the average time to train a stenographic writer, which ranges from three to five years or more, according to Michelle Castro, a lobbyist for SEIU 721, the union representing certified shorthand reporters in Southern California.
“There’s a few students that can pass the test in, like, two to four years,” Huerta said of the typing stenography exam. “But there’s a lot of us, including myself, that are not able to do that.”
Voice writers, on the other hand, seem to be passing California’s certification exams at higher rates than the 20% for standard court reporting.
The July 2023 dictation exam pass rate—which included voice writers for the first time—was nearly 40%.
Huerta sat for her California voice writing skills exam at the end of November, and hit one final snag—a computer malfunction just as she was ready to submit. Many other students reported similar issues with computer programs and the ProctorU platform during the online-only exam, Huerta and Ocaña said.
Huerta was granted a re-do, but she was more nervous that time: “If something goes wrong, beyond my control, I’ll have to wait until March. That’s time where I could be working.”
But her second try was smooth, and Huerta feels she did well. She’ll hear whether she can get her license at the start of the new year.
“There’s a lot of new voice writers out there, and everybody’s excited to get into the field, just like I am,” Huerta said. “I’m excited to finally put all of these years to use.”
Continue ReadingTo contact the reporter on this story: Maia Spoto in Los Angeles at mspoto@bloombergindustry.com
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Stephanie Gleason at sgleason@bloombergindustry.com; Alex Clearfield at aclearfield@bloombergindustry.com
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