May 15, 2010

Registration open now!

Mark those calendars and register now for the WCRA Spring Seminar, Saturday May 15th. The event will be held at the Green River Community College in Auburn Washington. The day will be filled with excited speakers, amazing vendors, networking, and an ice cream social. Topics that will be covered range from generational diversity and social media, to working with legislatures and ergonomics.  So don’t miss out on this great opportunity to get up to date with the latest technology and issues affecting the court reporting profession and sign up today! Click on the link below to register for the Spring Seminar as well as membership renewal options. Please note that special rates apply if you renew your membership before 6/30/10.

Click here for seminars and membership renewals

January 27, 1937- November 19, 2011

The court reporting community has lost a friend, mentor, and a tireless champion for our profession.  Karen Louise Larsen, CSR, RPR, passed away Saturday, November 19, 2011, at the age of 74.  A warm and gentle soul, Karen will be sorely missed not only for her contributions to the profession, but for her kind and giving nature.

 Karen was born January 27, 1937 in Palmer, Alaska.  After graduating from Anchorage High School in 1955, Karen attended the University of Washington “on and off”, as she put it, from 1955 through 1962.  Karen then went on to the fabled Auerswald’s Business School from 1971-73, where she began her journey toward becoming a court reporter.  She finished up at the Northwest Institute of Stenographic Arts in October of 1973.

Karen began her career in October of 1973 with Donna Davis & Associates.  She went on to form her own freelance agency, Larsen & Smith, Inc., with her dear friend, Sharon Smith.  The firm grew to approximately 10 reporters; in June of 1996, Seattle Deposition Reporters and Larsen & Smith joined forces and enjoyed a remarkable merger of talent that continues to this very day.

Not one to sit around and let someone else steer the boat, Karen joined and volunteered for NCRA in 1974, the WCRA in 1976, the Freelance Shorthand Reporters of Washington in 1977, and STAR in 1983.  She spent countless hours in service to these various organizations up to her very last days.  Just last September, Karen presented an ethics class to WCRA members at the Spokane convention.  As part of WCRA, Karen was Secretary from 1980-84; Vice-President from 1984-86; President Elect from 1986-88; President from 1988-90; Past President from 1990-91; Editor from 1985-87; and CSR Board Liaison from 1990-94.  In 1993, WCRA presented Karen with its Distinguished Service Award.  Still full of vim and vigor, Karen was the 1998 Spring Seminar Chair, and the Chair for the Court Reporters Task Force regarding contracting.

If you thought Karen only spent her time on WCRA matters, you would be amazed at the amount of work Karen did for NCRA.  She was the Local Convention Chairman from 1986-87; NCSA delegate from Washington from 1986-90; served on the Nominations Committee from 1990-91; was NCSA Vice Chairman from 1992-93; was NCSA Chairman from 1993-95; served on the Ethics Committee from 1991-94, and as Chair of that committee from 1993-94.  She was Director from 1995-98, and worked on CASE from 1997-2000, and as chair from 1999-2000.  She also was a part of the convention planning task force, and the student seminar chair from 2000-01.

Along the way, Karen wrote several publications for our profession’s magazine, the Journal of Court Reporting.  She also wrote numerous articles for WSR.  Karen participated in many presentations to court reporting classes, to the UW Law School, and a WSBA CLE class on how lawyers can best work with court reporters.  She also presented a CLE class on the use of realtime.

Karen held many certificates attesting to her proficiency as a court reporter:  Oregon Certificate of Competency (1974); Washington Statutory Exam (1975); Registered Professional Reporter (1979) Washington CSR (1989), and three of the four parts of the RMR (1985).

Believe it or not, while undertaking all of the above, she actually spent a lot of time on many hobbies.  Karen was an accomplished pianist, and loved the symphony and ballet.  She was a voracious recipe hoarder and also loved to knit.  Her greatest joy, of course, was her family, son Hans and his wife, Sara, and their daughters Jordan (7) and Megan (4), and son Mark and his wife, Karen, and their daughters, Caitlin (23), and Sarah (21).  Karen’s sons built a stream and pond in her beloved garden, and just two weeks ago, her new deck was completed.  Karen’s family feels comforted by the fact that she passed away surrounded by all of the beauty of her Brier home and garden.

Karen’s passing will also leave a great void with her Seattle Deposition Reporters family.  Her warmth, humor and passion for her profession will be greatly missed.

 If you have the contact information for other friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, garden club members or others that you know Karen would want to say goodbye to, please help her friends and family by forwarding this email to them with our invitation to attend. Please have them RSVP to me by email at mlarsen@anchorqea.com.

Please Join Us to Remember Karen

When:      1:30-4PM, Sunday December 18^th

Where:     Thornewood Castle, 8601 North Thorne Lane SW, Lakewood  Washington (10 minutes south of Tacoma; on American Lake.

What to Expect:  Please arrive about 1:30. After a little mingling, we’ll be sharing stories, pictures and memories of Karen’s life, beginning promptly at 2PM. So don’t be late or you’ll miss out. Between about 3 and 4 we’ll have some hors d’oeuvres and a few drinks. We’ll have some fiddlers providing some music that Karen always enjoyed. Depending on the weather, you may also wish to take a walk in the garden. Even in the cold of winter, there are a few blooms on the rose bushes.

Bring Stories and Pictures:  Karen’s sons would very much like to hear your stories about their mom.  Please bring stories to share, or bring your favorite pictures of Karen. If you’d like to email them to us, that’s great

Directions to the Castle:

1.       Take I-5 to the Thorne Lane exit (Exit #123 ) about 10 minutes south of Tacoma.

2.       Turn right (west) on Thorn Lane. Go three-tenths of a mile.

3.       Turn right again on the first street to the right (Thorne Lane).

4.        Immediately after turning right off Thorne Lane you will see this gate into Thornewood Estates. Drive up to the entry phone on the left.

5.       If the gate is not open, Enter 016 on the key pad. We will answer and buzz the gate to open. (If you forget the code number to enter, just scroll the A-Z keys down until you see “Thornewood Castle”.

6.       Enter into Thornewood Estates, follow the private road around to the 5th driveway on your right until you come to this small sign on your right (about 1 block).  Turn right down this driveway.

In an August deposition, Ex-NBA star, Allen Iverson, let the opposing counsel know exactly what he thought of him.  The Detroit News, which had obtained a copy of the deposition transcript, noted that it “reads like a bad 1970s movie.”

Iverson was facing off against attorney Gregory Lattimer who had previously won a $260,000 judgment against him and had reached a confidential settlement in another case.  Iverson made it clear he thought the lawyer was specifically targeting him.

The Detroit News published this exchange:

Iverson: “I know you lurking. I know you lurking, man. I know you lurking. … How the hell you live with [it]? You’ve been involved with three suits against me. You know what to do. You got a plan.”

Lattimer: “I just go to work every day.”

Iverson: “I know, and I’m the one that pay you, and you know it. But not this time jack. … I die before I let you get me this time.”

In a subsequent interview Lattimer said, “It was quite something.  I don’t know why he was so outraged.  It’s not like I sue him every day.”

Our annual convention in Spokane was a great success. Many thanks to Dave Storey for putting on a wonderful event. It was great to see so many of our members from all over the state come together for a weekend of networking, learning, and advancing the interests of the WCRA.

And the Davenport Hotel, what can you say? For those of us experiencing it for the first time, we now know why it is “world famous.” Hopefully many of you got the chance to also enjoy Spokane’s shopping and entertainment district and sample the variety of award-winning restaurants and pubs. Of course, the meeting rooms and the banquet rooms were stunning and have retained the original magnificence of the hotel built in 1914.

Now that the convention is behind us it is time to look ahead to the coming year. We face many challenges and continued attacks that will require us to remain vigilant and be proactive in promoting and protecting our profession. We must build strong relationships and coalitions with the entire legal community. And, we must educate the public, attorneys, judges, and administrators on the value and importance of an accurate and timely record. This is not just a business issue, it’s a matter of justice.

One of our strongest weapons in this fight is realtime. No other form of record making provides the level of accuracy, immediacy, and value to the end user. No other form of record making promotes the same level of justice. “inaudible” doesn’t just make for a bad record, it makes for bad case law. We are not just the guardians of the record. The truth of the matter is that we are the guardians of justice and realtime is our golden arrow.

Over the course of the next year you will see a number of new initiatives. In addition to our traditional committees such as Membership, Communications, Events, Education, CART, Officials, and Legislative–this year we have created committees for Realtime, Pro Bono, Mentoring, Bylaws, and Direct Member Voting. Each of these committees are critical in advancing our profession and keeping WCRA healthy, relevant, and productive.

But none of that matters without the support and involvement of our members. If you have an interest in advancing our profession by joining one or more of these committees, please visit the “Leadership” link under the “About” menu and contact the committee chairs.

With your help and involvement we can win the victories we must to advance and protect the guardians of justice.

Hello, Members,

On Thursday, January 27 a hearing will be held in Olympia on our agency licensing legislation, HB 1205. This message is to give you a clearer understanding of the nature and intent of this bill.

After discussions with legislators, lobbyists, our board, reporters, and, most important, the Department of Licensing (DoL), we have adopted DoL’s advice as to the best way to deal with issues of reformatting (stretching), padding (charging page rates for word Indexes), overcharging, gifting, and other questionable practices which have arisen in the reporting industry in Washington in recent years. Some of the problems are mentioned in the RCW and others will be the subject of rule-making later in WACs.

Questions have arisen as to the nature of this change from certification to licensing and its impact on reporting firms.  It has been made clear to us by both our attorney and Susan Colard at DoL that we are not licensed.  In fact, we are the only profession they supervise which is not and there are significant differences.  A license is a property right issued by the police power of the state without which one cannot practice a profession.  A certificate is only a document attesting to the completion of some course of study or recognition of achievement in one’s field.  Nevada and other states have similar language which we have drawn upon.  One further comment, a license is a property right and may only by modified or removed by due process of law.  Thus, the provisions in Section 11 providing for hearings, etc.  Thus I believe a license is really more valuable than a certificate.

Here are some general concepts offered by our lawyer about license versus certification:

“A license is a permission to do something that otherwise is forbidden.  For instance, a driver’s license is considered mandatory to drive a car on the public roads.

“A license is given by the government and is a government privilege.  It therefore presumes that the activity in question is a privilege, not a right.

“The purpose of licensing, whether admitted or not, is to restrict entry and control a profession or activity.

“Certification is a statement or declaration that one has completed a course of study, passed an examination, or otherwise met specified criteria for certification.

“Certification is a private matter, issued by a private organization.  It does not involve the police power of the state and is not a state privilege.

“Licensing increases the power of the government.  The power to decide whom to consult for services shifts from the consumer to government licensing board.

“Licensing restricts entry into a particular field of activity.  Certification does not restrict entry at all.  It merely informs and distinguishes those who have completed courses or examinations pertaining to a field of work.”

To ease this transition, current CCRs will be “grandfathered” into the new system.  All business owners now need a state general business license (the UBI system).  If a reporter or firm contracts with other CCRs for pay, he or she will need a “business-specific license” from DoL which will substitute for the general license.  Fees should not increase.  The application form requires only basic information with no exam or experience requirement.

Please refer to House Bill 1205 as the “final” form of the bill rather than Senate Bill 5052.  Through inadvertence an earlier version was filed in the Senate and it has now been superseded by House Bill 1205.

Dave Storey

WCRA President

Click here to download the actual House Bill.

Create Higher Status and Higher Responsibilities

As Reporters, we sometimes lament our position of working with professionals such as judges, lawyers, doctors and engineers, but not being considered professionals or officers of the court, except when being admonished that we have ethical duties and responsibilities to the judicial system, but all the while feeling that system doesn’t have any outward respect for or even consideration of us at times.

Part of this problem is that our educational training is usually not done in a standard, four-year college system that is both recognized and accredited by our would-be peers, yet our training often takes that long, plus an extended apprenticeship in the field to build up the experience necessary to be a competent reporter in the many phases required in learning how to protect the record and exercise proper judicial etiquette when reporting trials, depositions, hearings, conventions, and multiple-speaker conferences with sometimes highly-technical medical, engineering and construction jargon, just to name a few.

The burden of protecting the integrity of the record has been assailed in recent years by competition from the outside sources of electronic or digital recording and second-hand transcribing, some of it actually being performed by court reporters who have been replaced by machines and need the work.

It’s important as verbatim shorthand reporters that we’re aware of these new attacks on our time-honored profession and why we need to have current information from the many studies that have been done regarding how to best make, preserve, and protect the record in the most economically prudent way possible, studies both pro and con using shorthand reporters. We must be advocates for stenographic verbatim court reporting as the preferred method of making the record, and to do that we must be knowledgeable of opposing arguments and the perceptions of the people with whom we work who are not Washington Certified Court Reporters.

The fact that most people don’t understand how we do what we do is a double-edged sword. Because not just anyone can sit down and replace us gives us some feeling of job security, but when it comes time for someone to argue in our favor that’s knowledgeable about why we’re important, very few can stand up and speak. In fact, sometimes we find ourselves unable to defend ourselves and the profession of stenographic verbatim court reporting with sound arguments. We need to acquire that knowledge and be ready to defend the necessity of our remaining in the courtroom.

Two recent bills that passed in the 2010 Washington legislative session have both raised our stature in the judicial system and our responsibilities to it. House Bill 2861 or the “oath bill” passed with very little opposition in the 2010 legislative session. It allows Washington Certified Court Reporters to put witnesses under oath before giving testimony without requiring them to be Notaries Public. This may seem like something of little import, but it raises the stature of court reporters to a higher level in the eyes of the judicial system and the general public, and it was seen by much of the rest of the world as something long overdue.

Senate Bill 6450 also passed in the 2010 legislative session with little or no opposition due to some tireless work behind the scenes in Olympia for the last two years by our current President, Roger Flygare. This bill was a recognition and affirmation by our State legislature that all professionals need continuing education in order to stay abreast of the rapid technological advances that are occurring in our particular profession and to keep our ethics strong.

If court reporters want to be perceived and paid as professionals, then we must adhere to the responsibilities that are required of other professions.

While many high-paying professions have continuing education such as doctors, lawyers and engineers, many other professions around the country are concerned about keeping up to date and current on new laws and new technology. Some of those professions are barbers, physical therapists, x-ray techs, real estate agents, teachers, plumbers and construction contractors.

Many people think the difference between a job and a profession is perception, but more often than not it’s the obvious commitment to quality and the maintenance of the technical expertise required to perform at a high level for those people using your services.

Stepping into the fray a few years ago, and not being an official reporter, I was first taken aback when learning of the fact that tape recordings or other digital recordings were being transcribed after the fact and then used on appeal in criminal and civil trials. Upon further investigation, I found a new standard was being promulgated in the legal community called “adequate for appellate purposes,” rather than accurate or verbatim. I learned that transcribers could be court reporters but didn’t have to be, that they were just guessing as to who said what since they weren’t there, if they couldn’t understand something they just said “inaudible” and kept going, and that was somehow being considered as adequate for appellate review. As a court reporter I found that practice appalling! So, what to do?

I knew I needed to get some knowledge to find out what was happening, so I joined WCRA and started asking questions. I found out that a lot of people didn’t know there was a problem, let alone how to fix it or come against it or even to be literate enough on the subject to debate an attorney who said, “Why do we even pay you people anyway? Couldn’t we just tape it and have my secretary type it up later? She’s a lot cheaper than you are.”

After getting involved in WCRA, going to continuing education seminars and workshops, and staying abreast of the current thinking around the country as best I’m able, I now feel like I can adequately argue for court reporting and defend against the idea that court reporters should be replaced by electronic or digital recordings. By golly, I’m a digital court reporter, utilizing computer-aided technology with digital audio-synch capabilities, creating a verbatim, instantaneous, realtime, direct-to-text technology.

But what if no one asks me the question? That’s why we as Court Reporters must educate the public, our lawmakers, the press, and our courtroom personnel, one person at a time if need be, on why we are irreplaceable, so that we don’t get replaced by an uninformed electorate trying to be penny-wise, or by vested interests in the digital recording community spreading incorrect information to an uninformed public.

Who will tell them the truth? We will, if we know what it is. And we’ll know what it is if we continue to educate ourselves. Sounds like continuing education is more than a good idea, it is job security through a more intelligent group of savvy reporters and a higher-quality product being given to the public. That’s win-win all around, I say.

Mark E. King, CCR #2812
Area 1 Director
WCRA Legislative Comm. Chair

May 15, 2010

Registration open now!

Mark those calendars and register now for the WCRA Spring Seminar, Saturday May 15th. The event will be held at the Green River Community College in Auburn Washington. The day will be filled with excited speakers, amazing vendors, networking, and an ice cream social. Topics that will be covered range from generational diversity and social media, to working with legislatures and ergonomics.  So don’t miss out on this great opportunity to get up to date with the latest technology and issues affecting the court reporting profession and sign up today! Click on the link below to register for the Spring Seminar as well as membership renewal options. Please note that special rates apply if you renew your membership before 6/30/10.

Click here for seminars and membership renewals