I am just wondering from the reporters out there how many have their scopists do a Rough and send it to the attorneys? And if so, do you pay your scopist any extra for doing the Rough and then providing a Final as well?

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Christie,

I think you're going above and beyond what a reporter should expect from a scopist. I have a problem with you sending the rough to the client, not the reporter. That's her job. Do you ever get e-mails from the firm after the rough comes from your address? I know I get e-mails once they have my e-mail address from roughs. I find it odd that she doesn't want to take two minutes to look through the file before sending it.

I am in no way criticizing you. In fact, I can tell you care enough about your work product that you would go above and beyond. Just don't let someone take advantage of you. You need to be paid for what you're doing, without question.

Janet
Hi, Janet. I agree that expecting the scopist to "do" the rough draft is above and beyond what's expected of a scopist. And on the client's end, they should be getting everything from the same place, don't you think? And no criticism of the scopist ... looks like it's a new market opening up for scopists, and if you can leverage that for your own benefit, good for you. Point is, use it to your benefit. Janet's right. You should be paid and paid well for preparing the rough draft.

So ... I'll ask rhetorically, what's happening to "We should be paid extra for providing rough drafts because it takes a reporter with superior writing skills to provide a rough draft?" Guess that's falling by the wayside, huh? I'm again quite puzzled and, indeed, saddened to know that the bar is being lowered. The valuable benefit of receiving a rough draft Right Now! before the final transcript is available is obvious. But stretching that out to 24 hours, or one or two days ... I've even heard of roughs going out in a week ... I'm sorry, but what the hell is that? And how does the reporter charge for that? And if the reporter's not charging for that, yet putting (by necessity) a ton of work into it just to get it into rough draft form, again, what the hell is that?

Obviously, I find the whole thing quite disturbing from the reporter's end. It's as disturbing as a thread I read on another forum that wondered how much a scopist should be paid for actually, again, "doing" the entire transcript from audiotape because their reporters (MULTIPLE!) couldn't write anymore and just pretended to write, gave their scarce notes to a "scopist," who pieced together the transcript from the scanty notes, but mostly transcribed from the audio. How embarrassing, from the reporter's point of view. I hate to know that's happening. And we're wondering why ER is taking over some courtrooms? When topnotch realtime writers lose their jobs to ER, that's a crying shame. But when so-called reporters with nothing but a sense of entitlement because they can write a few words on a steno machine (not all the words, just a few) ... when they lose their jobs to ER, they don't have any reason to squawk about it because they asked for it by not keeping their skills up. Too late for "don't get me started."

M.A.
Amen, Mary Ann!
Again, I agree with all the posts. I'm just shocked to hear there are reporters who are "pretending" to write and relying on their audio. What do they do if they have to read back? I had an attorney ask me once if I used some sort of taping device to record the proceedings. He told me he only asked because he did a depo and asked the reporter to read back and she played the audio for him!!!! I was totally shocked and actually appauled a reporter would do that.

As has been pointed out, this is a skill that we are paid for. Why are there reporters out there faking it? Maybe these are some of the same reporters Kelli is getting complaints about that are not turning in the jobs or are taking 3 to 5 weeks to turn in a job. It's very sad and I don't understand it.

Christie, it sounds like you are a great scopist. You've also done the entire rough on it yourself. I personally think the entire amount for the rough should go to you and not the reporter. Good luck

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