In The News
Speedy court reporter's flying fingers in high demand
Story by Emily Mathieu, The Toronto Star. Originally published Nov. 29, 2007.
It would be a glaring inaccuracy to confuse the perfection produced by Teresa Forbes with the work of an average court reporter.
Based in Toronto, Forbes, 52, is a real-time court reporter. Think of her as the bionic woman of the typing world, capable of documenting complicated dialogue at the finger-breaking rate of 260 words per minute.
That's not a personal record, just the highest level she's been tested at – a point she adds with obvious pride.
Court reporting was recently added to a list of "Great Six-Figure Jobs You Don't Need a Degree For," on Forbes.com. A starting salary could be $60,000, but cranking out an exact figure is tricky.
"That's part of the problem," said Kimberley Stewart, founder of ASAP Reporting Services Inc.
The business is slow to attract new blood in great numbers, she said. Real-time reporters can make more than $200,000 a year, she said. But with fewer than 100 in Canada with an average age of 50, a shortage is looming, she said.
Stewart's solution? Cough up $500,000 of her own money to create the Canadian Centre for Verbatim Studies on St. Mary St., near Yonge and Bloor Sts.
Classes, full- and part-time, start in January. Enrolment is ongoing. To graduate, students must produce 225 words a minute with 98 per cent accuracy.
Which means students will learn to type like Forbes. She uses a shorthand steno machine writer that turns a combination of keystrokes into a digital transcription.
"Sometimes I am under a lot of pressure, I try to stay focused," Forbes said.
Along with titanium-laced fingers, real-time court reporting requires nerves of steel. She has worked on high-profile police trials and at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. She can't let gory details shock or slow her down, she said.
"It's like music coming in and the words go down in shorthand," Forbes said. "You just have to think of it as words to paper."
As for the 38-year-old Stewart, she got into court reporting after high school. She apprenticed as a court reporter in Ottawa and got hooked. Her first teacher, now 74 and still working, is one of the top real-time court reporters in the country, she said.
"I was smart enough to hang out with smart people," Stewart said.
There are few places to train to be a real-time court reporter in Canada, she said, adding the U.S. has more than 140 schools.
The Centre for Verbatim Studies will be just the third of its kind in Canada. There is a program in Alberta and a small school in Montreal that trains exclusively in French, Stewart said.
There's room for 46 students in each program. The tuition for the two-year full-time program – classes run Monday to Thursday – is just more than $30,000. That includes all equipment and supplies. It's the same cost for the part-time program, with night classes two days a week for three years.
Real-time reporting is also how closed-captioning for television broadcasts is produced. Those practitioners are "basically the concert pianists of court reporting," and can make more than $200 an hour working from home*, Stewart said. They provide the text running with live broadcast programs, like sports events. Typically, the service is geared toward the hearing impaired.
"What is driving the demand is the baby boomers," said Fred Sharp, president of the Chartered Shorthand Reporters Association of Ontario.
Canadians working in broadcast captioning deal with feeds from across North America, he said. They could be sitting in Toronto but working for U.S. companies willing to pay top dollar for skilled people, he said.
"There are more jobs than there are people to go around."
*The author of the article gleaned this information about Broadcast Captioning from the NCRA website, which actually was referring to Webcasting: “Internet information reporters, who remotely caption to the Internet or provide Webcasting services, are usually paid at an hourly rate of $100-$200 per hour.”
Source: http://www.ncraonline.org/NewsInfo/MediaRoom/Facts/default.htm
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