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COCRA is happy to announce our 2010 Fall Seminar which will be held Saturday, September 25th, 2010, in San Francisco at the Hyatt Regency. We are very proud to announce that Margie Wakeman Wells, grammarian extraordinaire, will be devoting a full five-hour block to grammar and punctuation tips for reporters. COCRA’s own Linda Harris and Gordon Aiavao will also be giving a session on codes and Rules of Court that every official reporter should know.
Early registration for iPod product drawing has closed!!
Thank you to all of you that registered by August 28th to have your name submitted into our iPod product drawing. The winning name will be drawn September 25th, 2010 at the COCRA Fall Seminar.
1st Prize – iPod Touch
2nd Prize – iPod Nano
3rd Prize – iPod Shuffle
You can download the program brochure by clicking here.
At a press conference today in Sacramento Governor Schwarzenegger continued his assault on the use of court reporters in superior court. At the press conference the governor pointed to a board that listed “savings” to the state if the legislature enacted his version of a budget. Included in his list of savings was a supposed $100 million that the governor claimed the state would be able to save annually by implementing ER.
I’ve embedded the video of his press conference and you can view his comments at the 6:18 mark. I’ve taken his comments and posted them below.
We have electronic court reporting. A 100 million dollars. We do not need any people there. We have the technology now to do the reporting and the recording.
When you add this to his comments last week in which he said that court reporters were “old fashioned,” it’s more than clear that the Governor is itching for another fight to bring ER into more courtrooms and eliminating court reporters completely.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution has published one of the most misleading articles about officials and how they charge for their transcripts. The article has already spread nationwide in the court reporting field and particularly among officials. COCRA has learned that the Georgia Certified Court Reporters Association and NCRA are forming a response to this article shedding light and setting an accurate picture of why officials are paid separately for transcripts.
The New York Times recently published a three-part series of questions and answers in its “Taking Questions” column featuring federal court reporter Rebecca Forman on the Manhattan federal court.
Since becoming a court reporter in 2000 what are the major changes that you have seen in the field? Do you see court reporting phasing out or growing?
— Posted by Sharon
Answer:
The biggest change that I’ve experienced is the use of realtime. Realtime reporting is when lawyers and/or the judge get a realtime rough draft of the proceedings as I’m writing it on my steno machine.
When I was in court reporting school, the teachers mentioned realtime, but it wasn’t something that I thought I would ever be able to do. When I started working in federal court in 2003, realtime for the judges was required here.
Now almost all the judges get realtime feeds for trials, and more and more lawyers are asking for it as well. They like it because they are able to read the proceedings as they are occurring, annotate the testimony, highlight passages and search for key phrases.
SANTA CRUZ – A half-dozen lawyers arrived in Judge Timothy Volkmann’s courtroom Tuesday to argue a hotly contested question about the right of UC Santa Cruz to request increased city water service for expanded campus housing.
But one vital person wasn’t there to participate, the court reporter, whose record of the proceedings would be critical to any potential future appeal. The absence caused just a week’s delay in the matter – a nanosecond in the world of criminal justice – but it pointed out a larger problem the court system is facing as it adjusts to a wave of layoffs.
Thank you to everyone who showed up for COCRA’s 2010 Spring Conference in Anaheim. It was a smashing success. We had a great turnout and we had lots of prizes given out during the event. Margie Wakeman Wells’ Bad Grammar/Good Punctuation book sold like hotcakes.
If you’re a court reporter working in California then you may have already heard by now that when Governor Schwarzenegger released his revised state budget on May 14th, he continued his assault on the court reporting profession by continuing to promote a plan to replace court reporters with electronic recording in California’s superior courts.
COCRA has been monitoring the situation since news broke of ER’s return and COCRA has been diligently gathering information from all of the various legislative advocates that represent court reporters including SEIU, AFSCME, IFPTE, and COCRA’s own legislative advocate Shane Gusman from the offices of Broad & Gusman.
Over the weekend, COCRA learned that the Senate decided not to place the issue of ER on their budget hearing agenda. However, COCRA understood that the matter was still on the Assembly’s budget hearing agenda.
We have just received good news on both fronts. COCRA has been told that the Assembly has NOT placed ER on their agenda. What does it mean that ER is not on the agenda for both the Senate and Assembly budget committees? It means that ER will not be discussed or recognized and it’s now a “dead” issue.
However, as Governor Schwarzenegger once promised when he was an actor many years ago, it does not mean that ER won’t be back. But COCRA continues to monitor the situation and continues to work with all parties involved in the fight to protect the court reporting profession, and more importantly, protect the public’s access to justice.
Yahoo has compiled a list for an article titled “Training Times for Top Jobs” and the court reporting profession has made the list. The average annual salary they have listed for a court reporter is $49,710 with an average completion time of 2 years. You can view the entire list to see what other proffessions make the list by clicking here.
ALOYSIUS v. MARK KISLINGBURY AND STENOMASTER, INC.
JENIFFER ALOYSIUS, Appellant,
v.
MARK KISLINGBURY AND STENOMASTER, INC., Appellees.
No. 01-09-00365-CV.
Court of Appeals of Texas, First District, Houston.
Opinion issued March 18, 2010.
Panel consists of Justices JENNINGS, HANKS and BLAND.
Appellant, Jeniffer Aloysius (“Aloysius”) appeals the trial court’s denial of her special appearance. Aloysius complains that the trial court erred because she lacks the necessary minimum contacts with Texas to establish its jurisdiction over her. Aloysius also complains that the trial court erred by failing to dismiss this suit because Appellee, StenoMaster, Inc. (“StenoMaster”) lacks capacity to bring suit, Texas is an inconvenient forum in which to litigate this case, the parties are engaged in an ongoing discovery dispute, the petition fails to state a claim against her, and StenoMaster and Appellee Mark Kislingbury (“Kislingbury”) have engaged in sanctionable conduct. We affirm.
Courts in Iowa, Minnesota and New York are considering replacing at least some court reporters with digital recording systems to cut costs.
If they do, they would follow Utah, Vermont, New Hampshire, Alaska and Kentucky in using electronic recording systems. Utah and Vermont switched exclusively for budget reasons in 2009, according to SueLynn Morgan, president of the National Court Reporters Association (NCRA), and officials in those states.
“The budget crisis since January 2009 is behind the push now,” Morgan said.
Posted in: COCRA 2010 Fall Seminar
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