You could do worse than becoming a court reporter in New York state. 

It’s a relatively straightforward job that involves sitting in court, taking notes on a fancy keyboard that looks like a prop from “Severance,” and then emailing transcripts to law firms and other interested parties upon request. A union gig that comes with up to a whopping (and very European-sounding) 27 paid vacation days, being a court reporter also can pay doctor-level money: In addition to a six-figure salary at the senior level, stenographers in the system can pull in thousands of additional dollars a month by charging people fees in exchange for access to records.

In many states, including New York, court files like arraignments, decisions, and trial minutes aren’t covered by the state’s public records law. In New York, to get records, you have to request them from court reporters, who are able to store and sell records as they please, functioning like small, independent businesses that operate without meaningful oversight. In reporting for our Courts of Contempt project, we found that these 800 or so state employees often don’t respond to requests to produce these documents or charge seemingly arbitrary fees.

Perhaps most concerningly, this antiquated system injects massive dysfunction into the appeals process. One attorney told us that, in his experience, court reporters regularly ignore court order deadlines to produce the records needed to file appeals.[1] He didn’t mean by a couple of days, either. “I mean by months or years,” the attorney said. “I remember calling the head court reporter and saying, ‘I’m staring at a court order saying this needed to be done in 45 days. And it had been like 100 days.’ He said, ‘Yeah you must be new here. That doesn’t matter.'” 

The length of the delays often beggar belief. A 2020 report from the New York City Bar Association on delays in the appeal process also mentioned lawyers are often given incomplete transcripts and that getting the missing records can take months. The attorney who shared that court reporters have ignored orders to produce the transcripts he needed to file an appeal, described a case to us in which he waited two entire years to get the transcripts he required, only to find that crucial parts of them were missing. The relevant court reporter had retired, and his client is still incarcerated to this day—almost a decade later—while waiting for the records. “Your right to an appeal is often nonexistent in New York if you’re indigent and serving a term of under four years,” this attorney concluded. “The process takes a long time, and some of it’s unavoidable. But the time it takes for court reporters to produce a transcript is a huge part of that delay—and it’s entirely avoidable.”

Besides precluding the possibility of some appeals, New York state’s continued reliance on stenography also makes its courts less transparent than they could be. Lawyers told us that bench conferences often don’t get written down, although it’s standard practice to do so in federal court. And court transcripts rarely include things like a judge’s tone, which means that sarcasm and other disrespectful behavior goes under the radar. “When someone raises their voice at you, it’s not like the court reporter bolds and puts little stars next to it,” as another attorney put it to us.

Then there’s the fact that this overly complicated, expensive system makes what are supposed to be public records borderline inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t work for a deep-pocketed firm. In pulling together our list of judges for this project, we requested transcripts from various court reporters so that we could investigate past hearings. And we quickly found that reporters charged a wide range of rates—$5, $6.50, and sometimes over $7 a page. In one instance, a reporter added a large fee per page to send documents over email, while another invoiced for expedited rates, despite taking weeks and requiring multiple reminders to send the records.

To order a transcript in New York City, one typically needs to have four things handy: a case number, the date of the proceedings, the court part, and the name of the judge the defendant appeared before. The next step is to call that court’s clerk’s office to request the name of the court reporter who recorded the hearing that day, and then to call the court reporter’s office to obtain that person’s personal contact information. Those looking for court transcripts must then call these entrepreneurs on their personal cell phones to negotiate a price to be paid, using Zelle or Venmo. 

This is where the process can begin to break down.[2] Some court reporters are notoriously difficult to get in touch with, several lawyers told us, and may not respond at all.

Problems still arise even if one does manage to get in touch with the right person. The rates that court reporters are allowed to charge per page are regulated by the state’s chief administrative judge. The most that a court reporter is legally allowed to charge is capped at $6.50 per page, yet we were charged as much as $7.75 per page. We asked for an invoice, and were initially sent an apology email with nothing attached. After following up a second time, we were given the explanation that the transcript was emailed for an additional $1.25 charge for each page.

And sometimes, prices for these public records are so outrageous that it’s a stretch to call them “public.” Here’s just one example: We requested minutes from a case that appeared before a judge in Queens; for that, we were quoted a price of $2,125 per day for the several days we were after. Transcripts of a week-long trial would have topped out at the price of a decent used car.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As transcription technology improved in the early aughts, many states started switching to a digital model in order to cut costs. By 2015, more than a dozen states were using audio or visual recordings in lieu of reporters in at least some courtrooms. In fact, by 2022, New York was considered an “extreme outlier” when it came to its transparency. The issue got national attention in 2023, when people realized they wouldn’t be able to watch Donald Trump’s arraignment in Lower Manhattan. In response to the increased scrutiny, a spokesperson for the Office of Court Administration claimed it would take years and “over a hundred million dollars” to put cameras in courtrooms and have New York catch up to the rest of the country.

In the meantime, much of the process could be improved. That 2020 report from the New York City Bar Association suggested that OCA take seriously the 90-day deadline on reporters filing transcripts to appellate lawyers. “To that end, OCA might consider developing a system to monitor whether court reporters are generally meeting the 90-day deadline, and if they are not, then considering what can be done to address this issue,” the group wrote, in addition to suggesting filing the transcripts in a digital format. 

OCA did not respond to a detailed list of questions. 

It’s fair to think that the members of the New York State Court Reporters Association would have a suggestion for how the process could be improved. After all, they certainly have a flair for self-mythologizing. “When the transplanted shorthand writers, inventors, and teachers of Europe journeyed to America, they quite naturally made their homes in the Northeast,” their website opines. “Many of the greats settled here in New York.” But in what might be the most perfect possible metaphor for New York’s broken court reporting system, representatives from the union never responded to a request for comment.

“I could not imagine as a member of the public or even as a reporter having to go through that process as there’s so much institutional knowledge required,” another lawyer told us. “There’s something to be said for not having transcripts instantly available to the public, especially if a case was a long time ago and people have moved on with their lives. But I don’t know if CashApping random people is a reasonable solution for that.”