No one to tap the keys of justice

While many Americans are out looking for work, Jane Worthen Eaton has more paying assignments than she can handle.

Able to type 280 words per minute despite faltering fingers, Ms. Eaton is a card-carrying member of what was once a male fraternity of "silent men" hulking in judges' shadows, typing transcripts.

But the fraternity has shrunk to one of America's forgotten professions, even as demand for court reporters and real-time typists has grown - leaving superior courts from Chicago to Charlotte scrambling. Nationwide, court administrators are canceling depositions, even postponing criminal jury trials, because they can't find enough limber-fingered folk to man the little black instruments with the weird keys.

These are heady times for the torchbearers of a profession whose first known practitioner was Roman secretary Marcus Tullius Tiro. In 63 B.C., he used a metal stylus to transcribe an oration by Cato. Today's court reporters are more likely to transcribe Kato Kaelin than Cato - but they can often make well over $100,000 a year.

Increasingly, though, the reporter's success is the court's misery. "There are now quite dire shortages of court reporters," says Denise "Mitz" Drill, a 20-year stenographer in North Mankato, Minn. "It's having an impact because the only person besides the judge who has no personal interest in the trial is the court reporter, and they guard the record."

While the fields of TV captioning and "real-time" transcription for lawyers and deaf people are growing, enrollment in stenography schools has seen an eight-year slide. Johnson & Wales College in Rhode Island graduated its last steno class in May - as nearby Massachusetts slogs through one of the biggest reporter shortages in the nation, up there with Virginia, the Carolinas, and California.

With gigs ranging from PBS documentaries to juvenile-court hearings, there are some 75,000 super-typists in America today - not nearly enough, experts say, to fill a growing demand among lawyers for "real-time" documents - not to mention all television programs, which the FCC demands be captioned by 2006.

"The general perception in the public is that we are an antiquated profession. But, in fact, there's a huge demand for reporters," says Peter Wacht, a spokesman for the National Court Reporters Association in Vienna, Va. But that demand is draining public courtrooms, most of which pay about half of what a freelancer can make working for private lawyers and TV companies.

In Noth Carolina's Gaston County Superior Court, a judge recently had to delay a criminal trial for want of a spare reporter. A civil trial was delayed for six months for the same reason. Canceled depositions are a daily bane for hundreds of lawyers across the Florida panhandle. In Boston, depositions and appeals hearings get bumped regularly, says Robert Panneton, a court administrator at Superior Court in Suffolk County. "It happens everyday," he complains.

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