By Sheila Pursglove
Legal News
A freelance certified court reporter, Caitlyn Hartley loves to type in a “secret language” that only she or fellow court reporters can read.
“On our screens it can translate into English, but if we closed that and only showed what we were typing, it would be gibberish to anyone else,” she says. “Also it's a skill-based profession, unlike all those academic tests you could pass but that don't determine how good you are in your actual career. A skill-based profession, you can’t fake it or study hard and pass and then forget everything. You have to type a minimum of 225 WPM at 95 percent accuracy. Not everyone can do that. It’s very rewarding as well and you get to meet many amazing reporters from different areas of the profession.”
Hartley previously worked as a clerk in a law office; after several years she became a secretary, and then a paralegal. Her mother, a judicial attorney, suggested the niche career of court reporter.
Attending the Academy of Court Reporting in Clawson, Hartley graduated top of her class.
As an independent contractor using a Luminex machine, by Stenograph LLC.she enjoys creating her own schedule, and says the work is in high demand.
“They’ve tried to replace us with recording devices and Dragon technology but they see how flawed it is,” she says. “Court reporters have to be able to distinguish multiple male and female voices, sometimes talking over each other, which artificial intelligence still can't do, as well as understanding thick accents.”
Courts use a court recorder—a certificate requiring one class and a test to get certified—who logs attorney and party names, and records the proceedings, on and off the record when indicated by the judge.
“However, if an attorney wants a transcript of court proceedings, the court has to reach out to freelancers like myself to type it up because court recorders are not certified to type transcripts,” Hartley explains. “That takes extra certification, a CSR, which is also what I am. I’m also a RPR—a Realtime Professional Reporter—meaning I'm certified nationally to type on the specialized Realtime machines at minimum 225 WPM.”
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, a lot of trials were pushed back and adjourned, and attorneys did not do many depositions.
“We started working remotely for the safety of everyone and I’ve continued to work remotely,” Hartley says. “Some depositions have gone back to being in person, but it's at the discretion of the attorney and/or court. Most courts have maintained that all hearings and pre-trial matters stay virtual while trials can be in person with precautions. I personally prefer working remote because before I'd have to drive all over metro Detroit for jobs and when you're assigned multiple jobs in a day having to drive from one to another, not ever being certain how long a witness or attorney may take, was sometimes difficult. It's much easier for me to be assigned multiple jobs and be able to take them all.”
In one of her early jobs, Google maps indicated the location was a foreclosed home. She found herself in front of a dilapidated house with boarded up windows. She waited for an attorney to show up, who knocked on a board where a door window should be.
When a man let them in, Hartley and the attorney followed him through a lot of clutter to the kitchen, where Hartley—with her large rolling briefcase containing her machine, computer, cords, and recording devices—sat at a simple table with a bench, and the attorney sat on a log bench.
Hearing loud wheezing, she turned out to see four cages of pit bulls, that seemed to be suffering from the man’s second-hand smoke and smoke-filled room.
“The poor dogs are asleep or resting and wheezing. But you can imagine how terrifying it seems,” she says. “The funniest thing is the man and woman—witnesses to a car accident—were the nicest people I’d ever met and the pit bulls, while having a scary reputation, were very well behaved and silent, besides wheezing the whole time. What I thought was going to be the scariest deposition of my life turned out to be fine, but looking back on it, it was a very unusual situation, one that has not happened again.”
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