What is a Court Reporter??

Last month marked my 11th anniversary of graduating from court reporting school. To this day, I still get asked, "What is a court reporter?" Well, to answer that in a simple way, it is that person in the court room that writes down everything that is said verbatim. Verbatim? Yep. Every uh-huh, every hmmm, every huh? You got it. That is what I do.

The next question that soon follows is, "How did you get interested in that?" Well, when I was a senior in high school, right around graduation time, I had a scholarship to Utah State and was planning on going up to Logan to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I was toying with Special Education and a couple other things, but my heart really wasn't set on anything specific. That last semester of my senior year, in Ms. Adamson's business procedures class, she had us take a career aptitude test. When my results came back, in the top five careers of my choice, based on how I answered the questions, was a court reporter.

Now, I had no idea what that even was or what they did, so I did a little investigative work and found out. My plans for college soon changed and I enrolled in court reporting school and started one week after high school graduation. About ten months into it, I transferred to a school in Phoenix, Arizona, where I would later get my bachelor's in court reporting and here I am, 11 years later and I still love my job.

I'm not a court room reporter. I do depositions, which are a question/answer session that occurs during the discovery process of a lawsuit. I go to attorney's offices and take down their depositions and then I go home, review the transcripts, print it off and turn it in. I love it. It has been such a good career for me and now that I'm a mom, it is even better because I can go to work for a few hours and then do the rest from home. It is such a huge blessing and I can help supplement our family's income when I need to. I feel really blessed to have sort of stumbled on this career and I just love it.

So, the next time you are watching Law & Order and you see that person sitting there supposedly typing, think of me. PS You type more than one key at a time. They need to hire a real court reporter to come and be an extra for those shows. Sheesh!!