Court Reporter/Stenographer

The occupation of court reporter or its other title of stenographer is one of the only job opportunities you can find with a legal recruiter that doesn’t involve an intense knowledge of the field of law itself but rather involves a lot of concentration. The sole job of court reporters is to write down whatever is said during the course of a trial over the course of the whole day. The road to this job is also tough since there is a lot of training that you must have before you’re able to get a job in court reporting.

The road to becoming a court reporter requires at least an estimate of a year and a half of training due to major requirements of the job, which can prove complex. A typical court stenographer must have a long attention span since they’ll be making transcripts of one or many cases during a normal work day and the stenographer will have to do this in real time. This task is very hard and even impossible for most people to do since typing at the rate that people talk requires great skills in focusing your mind towards a particular area and keyboarding.

Since keyboarding is such an essential skill in court reporting, mastering the stenotype machine is also necessary in order to be a great stenographer since this machine is different from using a computer because they have a much different shape and key pattern than a computer’s keyboard designed to help the court reporter type faster. Since this job will have you sitting in the same position for quite a while, you can get work-related strains and injuries, specifically carpel tunnel syndrome in the wrist and the elbows.

The typical work week in the field of court reporting is usually 40 hours because of how the courts run. Whether you’re looking to do many smaller cases per day or one large case per day, any legal recruiter will tell you that the court stenographer is a very important job since his or her documentation will provide the legal team physical proof of everything that was said and heard by all parties involved in a case (lawyers, witnesses and so forth). There are enough disputes where this has become a significant part of the job and has gone as far as asking the court reporter what was said at a certain time so the jury can hear it again.

Depending on the preference of the stenographer, he or she can work in a few ways. They can:

• Work for an individual attorney
• Work at a single law office
• Work for agencies that only hire court reporters and assign them to cases

Since the court reporting industry is becoming very popular, any legal recruiter such as Boston Legal Recruitment is willing to look over your curriculum vitae (or CV) and can arrange to see where an appropriate fit would work for you.