#10 - Getting Into Realtime with Joshua Edwards

Court reporters hold one of the most important roles in the justice system. We're entrusted with the official records of the courts, and we also have to run our own businesses, which is not something most of us were prepared for. I'm Bryn Seymour, freelance court reporter and life coach, and I invite you to join the discussion about the problems we face and the solutions we create on the unique journey of a stenographer. Welcome to the Entrepreneurial Court Reporter Podcast. Today I'm here with my mentor, Joshua Edwards. Joshua is a registered professional reporter, registered diplomat reporter, registered merit reporter. So that's RPR, RMR, RDR. He's also a certified real-time captioner and certified real-time reporter, CRC and CRR. Wow. He has like every single NCRA certification, so I call him a master certified court reporter. He is the co-owner of Steno Captions, LLC, the owner of JB Reporting, Inc., the past president of the New York State Court Reporters Association from 2019 to 21, and he's now a full-time CART captioner, where he works in accessibility, providing high-quality stenographic captioning for all types of events, such as college classes, board meetings, Broadway plays, and lectures, as well as captioning the American Theatre Wing's Tony Awards four years in a row. Joshua is the founding member of Steno Masters, the first online public speaking club for stenographic court reporters, captioners, and students. Also, I want to throw in a fun fact about Joshua. While he was in school, he was so dedicated to building his dictionary that he entered every single word from the dictionary one by one into his software, so that no matter what word comes up in a proceeding, he would have it ready to go in his dictionary, ready to come up accurately on the screen. I just wanted to share because it's like a fun fact about Joshua. All right, so let's jump right into this episode about real time.

I mean, if I make a silly comment, like I say, oh Brynn, you're gonna take that out, right?

You want, I mean, if you say that, then we can take it out.

It might actually be more funny for me to say that, and you leave it in, and then they see you say it, you know, it keeps things lighthearted.

It's like when they do that on the record, they're like, oh, you're gonna take that out, right?

Yeah, it's like, not only am I not gonna take it out, I'm gonna put in your comment to take it out, because we weren't off.

I noticed you had a virtual background before.

That virtual background, I know this is completely off topic, but this is something called the Cicero Forum, which is something Dom Tursi and I are working on to bring training to court reporters. Basically, everything that they should teach in school that isn't speed building or real time, but all the knowledge.

Oh, I'd love to hear more about that sometime, because that's one of my topics. So yeah, all the things school didn't really prepare us for.

One day you should interview Dom. I think he may have been on my list that I sent to you, Dom and Reed, the incoming president.

I'm glad that we're doing this, because I feel like whenever I have a conversation with you, or like you teach me something, it should be shared with more people, because it's really valuable, and you know, we have, there are so many things that we're not trained on.

Well, I'm glad to be a resource.

Okay, so hi, Joshua. Hello, Brent. We're going to talk about getting into real time today. So you wanted to share a little bit about yourself.

Sure, and I'll do bullet points to make it quick. So I did five years of freelance court reporting, where I did everything imaginable, real time, you name it. Then I spent one year in federal court, decided court wasn't for me, even though it was a beautiful job. So I left court, managed a freelance agency that actually hired me to develop their stenographic division. And then I missed writing. So I left that job and went into CART. And that's where I am now. And I'm a co-owner of a full-time CART captioning agency called Steno Captions.

Awesome. So I want to talk about your experience as a freelance court reporter, those five years you did before you worked in the federal court. Can you tell me how fast you started doing real time? Was it right out of school? Or like, when did you start doing real time jobs?

Well, I think we have to break it into two parts. You probably mean when did I start doing real time hired to provide it for somebody like an attorney or a witness or someone to read a device? I was writing real time for myself every single day. As soon as I learned how to turn on Case Catalyst on the computer in the computer lab at school, I was always hooked up to the computer and watching the translation. And every time we would take dictation class at every speed level, I would always go back and I would define everything in my dictionary. So I was writing real time, I think, from the from the double digit speeds.

Oh, yes, I actually me too. I've also always provided real time for myself. But I guess what I meant was like being paid to provide real time to the attorney.

So specifically, I remember my first case and it was for an attorney who was deaf. And it was a lawsuit on landfill contamination. So I saw the caption, I asked for a prior transcript. And I saw these, these terms of hazardous waste materials and government acronyms that refer to, you know, to entities in that realm of hazardous materials, biological contaminants and all these things. So I was a little concerned, but then I just made my job dictionary got as prepared as I could, and then went on the job. And it was actually very easy. It was all day, I actually was called in for several of the depositions in that case. And so I had built up a nice job dictionary that I could apply to each each day's witness, and had a great time and made a lot of money with it. And the attorney appreciated the service.

Okay, so this was like, how long after you graduated and had been working? About two years, two years without providing it. And then how did that happen that they asked you to provide real time? Did you go to your agencies and say, I am ready to do real time? Can you get me a real time job? I'm ready. I want to try.

It's funny, because I didn't do what you just said. But that is how I got my first job. I went to the agency that I was interning with and said, I'm ready to work because I was sitting there writing in real time for myself as I was interning and watching the translation saying I could turn this transcript and get paid for it. But I didn't ask to work in real time. They came to me and said, we have an attorney that requested real time because she is deaf. Are you comfortable doing it? And I said, Well, I write real time all the time. And it's never been a problem even on hard jobs where the where it's technical, you know, sometimes I do get on translates, but then I go back and I fix them. So as long as they're understanding that there might be kind of a weird steno outline that shows up if I don't have the word in my dictionary. But I was so confident, basically, in my ability to write cleanly, based on all of my all the jobs I had taken up to that point that I wasn't daunted by taking my first real time job. The first the only thing that really daunted me was when I found out that it was about landfill contamination. And there might be a lot of unique terminology that I had never heard before. But that's no different than any other job. Honestly, it's all about confidence and preparation.

Okay, so you got asked you cover a real time job with that sounds amazing. I wish that that happened to me in a way that was like kind of gentle where it's like, okay, the attorney's hard of hearing, so he needs it. And if that sounds like kind of like low pressure, you know, there is pressure to do a job.

You certainly don't want to go out on a real time job and bomb and do poorly, because that puts a mark on your reputation. And we also don't want reporters to take jobs that the difficulty exceeds their skill. But to your point about you wish it had happened to you, I think that's sometimes the best thing in the world. Because when we have a can do attitude, if we're not really pushing ourselves into a real uncomfortable situation, that's how we grow, we commit to something, we say, Okay, I've just made a commitment to do this. Now I have to rise to the occasion and put my intellect, my skill, my ethics, my confidence, my acumen, my business acumen, bring all of that to the table and get into real time.

I just as you were talking, I just remembered why I was bringing up the fact and I wanted to share that you are known for how you entered and this could be a whole nother episode, but how you entered every single word in the English language pretty much into your case cat dictionary from the dictionary going one by one through the words. So you did that while you were in court reporting school, right? So by the time you graduated, your dictionary was like a lot better than most people's and was you pretty much had every word.

I don't like to say better than I like to say comprehensive. Because what's that?

Bigger than okay, comprehend more comprehensive.

Oh, I thought you said better. Use it better.

I did. I probably did say better, but definitely more extensive than most of our dictionaries.

I like to call it from aardvark to zygotic, the first word in the A to the last word in the Z, and everything in between. And the reason I did that was, again, because I was practicing watching my translation from a slow speed, I had time to watch the translation and say, Oh, that word didn't translate, even though I wrote it stenographically correctly. So the in my mind, that triggered a very common sense, I think thought, which is the only way for me to know that if I ever hear this particular word on a job, and it will translate in English, at the moment it's spoken is for me to go ahead and enter the word in my dictionary now. So then you can extrapolate that logic to every other word. It's kind of like, you know, the notion of infinity, how high can you count? Well, you start with one, and then you go to two, and then you just keep going. And you basically never stop. Although you can't do that with dictionary building, you have to have some kind of boundary. So the easiest boundaries are the opening cover and the back cover of the physical Merriam Webster dictionary. So the word that came up in a slow speed dictation, that kind of prompted this, this journey was the word rhinoceros. Somebody said that word in a silly literary that I was that I was that we were transcribing, and I wrote it phonetically, very cleanly, but it didn't translate. So the word wasn't in my dictionary. And I said, Ah, I have to define that word. And I have to define every other word that starts with the letter R. And then I have to define every other letter that starts with the other 25 letters. So it was just a common sense thing to do. Was it incredibly hard work and a lot of hours of my life? Of course, it's not easy. But you have to sit down and do it.

I mean, when I made a plan to do it, I was pretty consistent until I met Anissa Nirenberger, where I purchased dictionary jumpstart. And I guess like an in dictionary jumpstart, it has like all these different categories. So it has like scientific, like, does the dictionary include all those scientific and, you know, all those different little niches of professions and things like are all those words in the dictionary, I had a, the abridged, let's say the 75,000 most common English words.

So there are going to be some very specialized words that are not part of that 75,000 core dictionary word list. But you also have to think someday, like if you get one of these huge dictionaries that weighs 20 pounds that you have to put on a pedestal to open up, I mean, that would take a lifetime to actually define. And most of those words, I would venture to say will actually never come up on a job. But that goes against my philosophy, which is you, you know, you're going to hear words, you just don't know which words you're going to hear. So preparing all of them, or at least the the 75,000 most common ones made sense to me. Now, mine was just A through Z alphabetical. So there was no rhyme or reason to the, you know, like having scientific words, or the names of the planets, the names of car brands, and so forth. But, but that you start you're building a foundation that is good enough, and strong enough to help you do real time on pretty much any job that you need. So that when you do encounter something really out of left field, you can handle it, you can fingerspell it, or you can, you know, J define it, double stroke the first syllable, and then J define it with a macro, for example.

Okay, so let's say that someone calls me up today and says, I have a real time job for you tomorrow. Do you want it? And I want it because I want to jump in and try, but what would you tell me I need to do to get ready? Like, okay, of course, I'm it might not be realistic for me to take a job tomorrow. But how can I and all the other court reporters who want to start doing real time, like if we were to get offered a job, like what do we do to prepare as soon as possible?

So you start? Yeah, you don't have to enter the whole dictionary. That's a lot to do. So you don't want to wait too long. But you also don't want to jump in tomorrow. Tomorrow would be too soon. Because in addition to the actual skill of writing and translating the words, you need to know how to use the technology. And there are now with the pandemic in the remote aspect, there are a number of ways of streaming the text, depending on what the client wants. They say, Oh, we want subtitles and zoom. That's really more of a captioning thing than a legal deposition thing. But okay, I can do that. I want stream text where I open a separate URL browser. Okay, fine. Or I want live note, where you need to be a CLR certified live note reporter, or I want bridge or streamcast or what's the other case for you net, which is stenographs products. So there are these different products that stream the text. So I would say it wouldn't be prudent to say yes, I'll take my first job tomorrow. But if they say to you, hey, in two weeks, or at the end of the month, and that's two or three weeks away, we have a real time job that we'd like to put you on, you have enough time to do enough preparation work to be ready to take that job. If you're a clean, confident writer, to begin with, you would want to ask for as much information about the case as possible, the caption and the appearances, which you normally get anyway. And then you want to approach it scientifically. I'm telling me if I'm going to into too much of the weeds here.

Wait, so okay, so you asked for the caption appearances and the past transcript.

And actually, ironically, the transcript itself is not so important as the word list, because you're not going to read the transcript.

I've never read a word list to send you.

Well, the agency that has the transcript can press a button and create a word list and email you the word list. And then you just spend 1015 minutes going through the word list. It's called a concordance index. Yeah, or all word index. Sometimes they call it a wi all word index.

So if they had a prior sorry, interrupt. But this is if they had a prior case. How often is it with a prior transcript?

Usually, usually they do.

Yeah.

Unless you're coming in on the very first witness of the very first deposition in the case, which is, you know, the litigation would be in its very early stages. And then, you know, would they want real time for the first witness? Because normally, if it's if they're ordering real time, generally speaking, it's a bigger case. That's not a hard rule, of course. But it's I've never not had a prior transcript to work off of.

So caption, transcript, word list. What else?

That's enough.

You get that like the day before.

If you get it the day before, I want to get it a couple days before to have more time. Sometimes they sometimes do say we have a job. You know, the agency will put a big bonus on it, for example, to get it covered. And it'll say real time that's starting to happen more and I don't remember that ever happening when I was in in my freelance years. I would always have a lot of advanced notice of a real time job.

All right. So what's what's next? Can you talk about the technology? So you did say StreamText and you mentioned a bunch of other technologies. I did purchase CaseViewNet one year thinking like this is the year I'm going to do it. I'm going to be ready. I purchased it and kind of like learned how to use it. But I guess it's important to test it out with, you know, with someone before you actually. I don't know. I had a lot of anxiety about like just going and using it. And also I didn't get even asked to do a real time job.

So you were at a point where you could have asked an agency, I'm ready to do real time. I have the technology because you asked me that question earlier. When you're a new reporter, you probably don't want to approach them and say, I'm a new ambitious reporter and I want to take only real time work because they first of all have some really seasoned reporters, most likely that are their go to real time reporters. So a new reporter coming in with no reputation and just, you know, just graduated from school is probably not going to get a real time job. But after you've been in the field for a few years as you've been, then yes, when you feel that you're ready, you can approach it that way and say, for example, there are only certain types of jobs I'd like to take. I only want to take, let's call it what it is, the jobs that make me more money. So I don't want to take a personal injury. I don't want to take a car accident. That's just a waste of time. That's a great job for someone who just got their 225s out of school and they're ready to go take a 30 to 50 page job and make 100 or $200 that morning. What you need to really do is, and I'll talk about the technology since you asked about it, is to go in fully confident that not I hope I do a good job or gosh, I'm a really good reporter. I think I can do this. That's not going to cut it. You have to go in and say, I'm ready. This is my field. I know what I'm doing. I'm ready for this. And the way you do that, in addition to the dictionary work and all of the job prep stuff we talked about, is to know exactly how you're going to stream the real time. So I'll give you one scenario, which is a very common scenario, even though, like I said, there are several others. And that is the plain vanilla real time job is one person wants it and you bring them an extra, could be a laptop. Nowadays it's an iPad because they're lighter and easier to carry and they just kind of look nicer and more modern on the table. So there are a couple of things that you have to think through. And before you even facilitate the actual connection, is there a plug in the middle of the table? If there's not a plug in the middle of the table, then you're going to have to plug the iPad in to a wall outlet. And you know that those little cables that come with the Apple devices are only about, I don't know, not even a foot long. So you need either to have bought your own USB iPad extension cord, like a long cord or have an extension cord in your bag so that you can plug it in. Then how's it going to stand on the table? Is it going to stand upright or is it going to turn like this? So you need to have little, little metal brackets or stands that you can put the iPad on so that it stands up. So you have to think through these things. Also, you want to have it charged the night before. I've learned the hard way that if I leave an iPad turned on connected to Wi-Fi, it might be at 100% the night before. And then the battery is down, zero, dead at 0% the next morning because it was on all night and the Wi-Fi drained the battery. So then I went into the real time job and plugged it in. You know, it kind of sometimes it takes five to 10 minutes before it comes on and says I have enough charge to actually function. So then I plugged it in and we started the job. And fortunately, it slowly filled up with battery as the day went on. So it ended the day fully charged because it was plugged in all day. So battery management of all of our devices, the laptop that we're using, our cat, our steno machine, the iPad. And then so how to facilitate the connection, you just use a router. You could connect to the internet, but there's really no reason to be on the internet if you're not streaming the text to somebody in a remote location. So you just create a local area network with a little router, which is smaller than a cell phone. You can get one for 30 bucks, 40 bucks, maybe on Amazon.

Is that like a hotspot?

It's not a hotspot because that's a phone. What it creates is a small internet within the room, meaning, you know, I'm in one state, an attorney is in another state or another country or on another continent, but they can read the text and that's a wide network. So that's basically I was distinguishing using a router versus connecting to the internet. You don't need to connect to the internet if you're only providing real time within the room. So when I do cart in a college class, very typically what I do is I bring an iPad, I turn on my router and I connect my laptop with my cat software and the iPad both connect to the router. So the router streams the signal, the text from my laptop to the iPad. If you're doing remote real time, now we're talking about using the internet.

In that case, you don't need to buy 10 iPads. Well, I mean, I don't think you need to buy 10 iPads.

Hey, I would love for you to need to buy 10 iPads because that means you're you're going to get to bill a page rate for each of those devices. If you're doing on site work, you don't obviously need an iPad if you're doing remote work.

Let's go to the rates now. Why should we want to do real time?

Like how much? Oh, it's going to open up a new stratosphere of income potential. But even before that, pursuing the real time makes you a cleaner writer, which reduces your editing time when you're off the job. So if you think, you know, the fewer untranslates you have, the less time you have to spend stopping and fixing the transcript as you're editing. So that is reducing your cycle time. If you think about a conveyor belt where they make cars, the faster the line can move and the parts can get assembled, the more cars you can produce and then the more profit because you can have more sales. So it's the same with how long does it take you on average to produce one page of a transcript? You know, some pages you get are freebies because they're just really fast Q&A with no mistakes and other pages are really, really arduous because it's a big long question or a long answer from the witness. And if they're going fast and you're making a lot of mistakes, that takes a lot more time to go back and fix. So the cleaner the real time, the more money you make. Then if you're paid to stream the real time to participants, you get paid your page rate plus a surcharge per page per device.

And what is that? What is that price?

So pricing, my prices are on my website for everyone to look at JBreporting.com. JB is my middle initial. So I have a tab for rates. So for a regular transcript, $4 a page for real time, an additional $3 a page per device. So if I had both, let's pretend both attorneys, the questioning attorney and the opposing attorney use real time, I'm going to charge the four plus three to the attorney that hired me. So that's seven. And then I'm going to charge three to the other side. So functionally, my page rate is $10 a page, but that's not even taking into account an expedited rate if they want the transcript daily, meaning the next morning, or expedited, but not so fast, meaning usually within two to three business days. So my rates go up, of course, based on if they want the transcript faster. So now we're talking $10 a page. And that was just with two attorneys, both using real time with no expedited order. Add that factor and imagine, like you said, 10 iPads. Think about the multiplication factor that that would do to your page rate. You can be making $20, $30 a page. And if you write 100 pages, you do the math, you figure out what that is. If you make 200 pages, the number you just had in your mind is now double. And if you have a really long day and you write 300 pages, or God forbid, even more than that, you are making five digits on that job.

$20 or $30 per page, you said?

$20 or $30 per page. And that's without an expedite. If they order expedite, the four goes up higher. The way I got up into the $20, $30 range was by using your example of if you were to buy 10 iPads, which would, if an iPad costs $600, that would cost you $6,000 to buy 10 iPads. Well, that's a lot of money, obviously. But if you're making $20 to $30 a page, and you write 200 to 300 pages, 100 pages at $20 a page would be $2,000. 200 pages would be $4,000, and so forth. And if you get several jobs like that throughout the year, you can see that you could have the iPads paid off in one or two of those jobs. And then you have your army of iPads to use for future real-time work. Now, not every real-time job has that many real-time devices. Sometimes it's just like I called it the plain vanilla, one or maybe two iPads. Or if you're working remotely, you don't need iPads at all.

Right. And so you said that you charge $3 extra per device. But what if you don't provide any devices, but you still do provide real-time to all parties that order the transcript? Like, you know, remote.

That's a good point. The iPad, the device itself is not really the item that they're paying for. What they're paying for is the skill that I'm using to translate the text. So it doesn't matter if I'm remote. They're still getting all of my training, all of that dictionary building, all of the rhinoceros example and the aardvark zygotic. I'm bringing all of that. That's the foundation I was talking about earlier. That's what they're paying for when they pay for real-time. If they're in a room with me, sitting in the room, an iPad is just kind of a, it's just a screen to display my skill. That's all it is. It's like the, think of the famous painting, Mona Lisa, you know, by Da Vinci. It's on a canvas. Canvas is cheap. It's next to, well, I won't say worthless, but it's not expensive. It's just a piece of fabric. The painting itself is priceless beyond imagination because of how famous it is. But the piece of paper that it's on is just the medium, just the backdrop on which the skill is displayed.

Okay. So the real-time itself is just for each client, $3 extra per page.

Yeah. And then I'll, let me add one quirk. So the audience understands sometimes you have multiple attorneys from the same law firm. And in that situation, it is a little different because we typically bill and some agencies handle it differently, but one party rather than per device. So you, if you have three attorneys using real-time, but they're all from the plaintiff's firm, then you might bill the plaintiff's firm one real-time fee. And then you might do something like a rental fee. If you are using iPads, if you are on site, you might charge a flat rate of a hundred dollars, let's say per additional device to that law firm.

Got it.

So when I said 10 iPads, let's pretend 10 separate law firms, all representing 10 separate parties, one plaintiff, maybe in nine defendants. And they're all represented by different parties, by different law firms. They would each get their own individual real-time fee.

Got it. Okay. So now my question, my next question is, because I'm doing some market research here. So how much do you charge for an expedite? So let's break it down. When you have an expedite, it could be like the standard turnaround time is 10 business days in most cases. So if you have an expedite, they might want it five days, one day. I mean, of course there are different levels.

It always makes me laugh because agencies sometimes have a drop-down box and they say, when do they want this transcript? And they will have numbers one through 10. And I'm like, what, nine days versus eight? Like, does that really make a difference? So I guess at some point in the past it existed because their drop-down menus exist. So I make it simple, my regular delivery and I'm looking at my website. So within 10 business days is $4 a page. And then I have two premium categories just to call them that. Expedited is within three business days. And my four goes up to six. Daily, meaning early the next morning, that's the most expensive. My four gets doubled. So it goes to eight. Some law, some court reporting agencies have a category for same night delivery. I don't offer that. I keep that. I will do that if I'm asked, but I keep it as a back pocket card. Like you're playing a game of cards. You want to keep a secret in your back pocket in case you need to win the game at the last minute. So the reason I do that is I don't really want to put myself under that kind of pressure. And so I want my highest price category to give, to still give me the flexibility to say, well, I know at the end of the day, I'm going to have the rest of the night to actually go through and produce the transcript and proofread it. Even if I'm up until one or two in the morning, and we've all had those kinds of jobs. So if somebody says, look, I need this transcript because I have to write a memo to a judge and the memo is due in court the next morning. Can you get this to me tonight? I'll say yes. And I'll charge them the $8. So what I don't disclose publicly on the website is that I do that because I don't want to encourage it or that I do it and I don't charge more than my daily rate, which is $8, which is essentially a 100% increase over the price of my original of $4.

Got it. So you do it as a courtesy if they ask.

Yeah. And it hasn't happened a lot, to be honest.

Yeah. I had, as you were talking, I did have another question and I think it was more about the market research.

Market research. That was an interesting topic to introduce.

Well, I mean, I just basically knowing what is a standard good rate to charge for every different level of service. There are so many variables in it. So that's why I have another topic on the podcast schedule for bookkeeping, because that can be a whole, you know, a stressful thing for a lot