Recently, the Texas Court Reporters Association (TCRA) announced the launch of MyTexasCSR.com. It is a new website that is dedicated to connecting legal professionals with court reporters. CourtScribes thinks this is quite an interesting concept. This might be an idea that takes off all around the country.
The site was developed after much debate on solving an ongoing challenge in the legal community. According to an independent industry outlook report, the retirement rate of court reporters has now surpassed the rate of new Certified Shorthand Reporter (CSR) certifications. This has resulted in a national court reporter shortage with Texas owning the second-biggest shortage in the country. There are currently over 2,200 CSRs in Texas.
Mellony Ariail, the President of TCRA, said, “TCRA developed a multi-pronged and comprehensive plan to address the shortage of court reporters, including the creation of MyTexasCSR.com. Our mission was to develop a tool that ensured that 100% of Texas court reporter jobs were filled.”
MyTexasCSR.com is a first of its kind website that Ariail describes as an “Uber for Court Reporters.” Attorneys, judges and their administrators and assistants can use MyTexasCSR.com to notify Texas court reporters of their need for a CSR for court proceedings, hearings, depositions, conferences, meetings or other events that require verbatim reporting and transcribing.
Attorneys have expressed frustration with the difficulty in hiring a court reporter when needed and may feel the need to resort to using non-human alternatives. Some companies are promoting digital recording and voice recognition as a way to fill the gap but the National Court Reporters Association describes those methods as “a loss in accuracy, timeliness and value.”
All court reporters in Texas are invited to register for free on the website to receive immediate alerts for jobs that need to be filled. After an attorney registers on the site and posts a request for a reporter to cover a job, the poster will get an email notification each time a reporter replies to the request. The email notification includes a link to the applicant’s profile as well as their email address and phone number for direct communication.
MyTexasCSR.com was launched in September 2020 and has already connected dozens of Texas CSRs with attorneys, judges and court administrators in need of court reporters.
If you need court reporting services that handle digital recording then CourtScribes.com which supports all states and programs that aid in the court reporting world are ready to serve you in your court reporting, videography services, interpreters, live-streaming, and video-to-text synchronization.
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