The integrity of the privately hired court reporters is under attack or is it a professional group trying to fix prices, or simply legitimate business competition?
In return for fee discounts, insurance companies and law firms are making exclusive contracts with court reporting firms. The new arrangements, recently made by Beacon Mutual Insurance Company and others, take the hiring power away from individual attorneys and leave court reporters with lower wages if they want to work for Beacon. As a result, privately employed court reporters, the predominantly female stenographers who make verbatim transcripts of depositions, see their economic independence slipping away.
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Court reporters, said Elaine Piccirilli, president of the Rhode Island Shorthand Reporters Association (RISRA), “are being HMO’d to death.” The new system, she said, endangers the impartiality of the court record by making court reporters financially beholden to one of the parties in the court case. To solve the problem, RISRA is lobbying the Rhode Island General Assembly to ban contracting.
But Raymond DeSimone, president of the New York based company AmeriNet and former president of the National Court Reporters Association (NCRA), said Piccirilli’s efforts, and similar campaigns around the country, are simply “a price protection thing” designed to prevent his national company from under bidding small local firms. Defenders of contracting also buttress their position by pointing to a 1995 U.S. Department of Justice letter warning the NCRA not to discourage long-term contracts or discounts.
And not all Rhode Island court reporters agree with Piccirilli. Robert Gemma, president of the Capitol Court Reporting of Providence said efforts to ban contracting are a violation of anti-trust laws. Gemma, who recently was selected as Beacon Mutual’s exclusive reporting firm, also charged that Piccirilli merely wants to eliminate contracts so that her company, Allied Court Reporting of Cranston, can make more money.
The problem, said Gemma, began five or six years ago when AmeriNet and other national firms began to win contracts with national insurance companies to provide all their court reporting services. Once their clients have a court reporting contract, insurance company lawyers lose the power to select a court reporter to record a deposition. (Court- room reporters employed by the state to record court proceedings are unaffected by the change and remain state employees.)
The emergence of AmeriNet, a $25 million a year company, cost him business, Gemma said. AmeriNet did offer him work, Gemma said, but he refused because its rates were too low.
Instead, Gemma said he responded by offering local law firms and insurance companies discounts if they would hire Capitol for all their court reporting. Last November, he made an arrangement with Beacon Mutual which he estimates will bring about $40,000 of business a year. In return for the work and timely payment, he said, he gave Beacon a 20 to 30 percent discount.
That deal, which Gemma and Beacon president Donald Vass said is not a written contract, angers Piccirilli and Patricia Quirk, president of Rhode Island Court Reporting. Quirk said the Beacon deal will cost her small three-person company about 30 percent of its business, or $50,000.
Gemma’s arrangement with Beacon also “compromises the impartiality and the integrity of the record,” Quirk charges, because the court reporters are now effectively employees of Beacon, one of the parties in a court case, not independent contractors working for a lawyer. Because Beacon controls so much work, Quirk argues, it could potentially pressure reporters to alter legal transcripts for its benefits.
That charge is the center piece of the Rhode Island Shorthand Reporters Association’s campaign to promote legislation at the General Assembly and new court reporter certification rules. A Rhode Island court system committee has endorsed a ban on long-term contracting, but state lawyers’ organizations have not.
John Barrette, deputy administrator of the Rhode Island Superior Court, and chair of the committee appointed by the Rhode Island Supreme Court to establish certification rules for court reporters, said the committee’s draft rules prohibit court reporters from contracting with clients for more than one case at a time. While cautioning that the Rhode Island Supreme Court has not approved the committee’s work, Barrette is concerned that court reporters will be open to charges of partiality in cases involving companies to whom they “owe (their) living.”
Piccirilli agreed. “The public and everybody should know the court reporter is totally neutralWe shouldn’t be put in the position of looking like we’re working for one side of the litigation,” she said. Those concerns have led 11 states to ban contracts between court reporters and litigants, Piccirilli added, noting that The American Judges Association and the Association of American Trial Lawyers also support the court reporters.
In Rhode Island, the court reporters legislation has some important backing – it is sponsored by the chair and vice chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and four members of the House Judiciary Committee. But the issue has not roused major concern from either the Rhode Island Bar Association (RIBA), or the Rhode Island Trial Lawyers Association (RITLA).
