There are two certainties about court reporting. The work pays well, and there is a significant, ongoing need for those who excel at it. This is true in Virginia and across the country.
“Anybody who is a trained steno reporter could have a job tomorrow,” said Cynthia Bragg, a stenographer in both Virginia and Tennessee. “Not only is this a job with 100% placement, it’s also very portable.“I know many court reporters that are making over $100,000 a year. Some are making $50,000, which is still a good living.”
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median pay is $57,150 a year, about $27.50 an hour, and the field will see a growth rate of 7% by 2028, a rapid increase for any occupation.
While that degree of security and compensation might be a comfort, the work is also demanding, multifaceted labor that’s often misunderstood.
Unless you’re a lawyer, judge, plaintiff or defendant, it’s likely the last time you saw a court reporter was in a movie or on TV.
In fiction, they sit over on a bench, hunched over what looks like an old adding machine, usually just waiting for a prosecutor to grab a spool of their text or to bark at them: “Read back what the accused just said!”
This is a false dramatization.
What they do is create painstaking word-for-word transcriptions of depositions, mediation meetings and trials, using digital stenotype machines, recording devices or a combination of technologies.
The Virginia Court Reporters Association estimates that between 800 and 1,000 court reporters work in the state and, in general, they do not recite testimony for the court, incriminating or otherwise. Most of them are women, and many act as independent contractors.
The stenotype itself has just 22 character keys, representing the most-used consonants and vowels. They can be pressed in groups, like piano chords, to form other letters or words phonetically. The devices is also predictive and can draw from a database of hundreds of thousands of words.
While standard typing speed on a “Qwerty” keyboard is roughly 200 characters a minute, a trained stenographer can produce in excess of 200 words per minute.
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