Once you are trained in stenography and become a certified court reporter in your state, there are few limits on where you can go. Whether you have completed a home study court or attended a leading school offering court reporting courses, you are free to work directly with lawyers, within the court system itself, or expand into other related fields. From closed captioning to supervising a large team of seasoned court reporters, the road you take can go in a number of different directions.

Court Reporters And Deposition Services

While legal proceedings may be settled inside of the courtroom, much of the information used by lawyers and litigants is actually gathered offsite. If you are a court reporter you may choose to transcribe depositions if you do not want to work set hours or be assigned to cover a specific courthouse. Having the ability to choose which dates and times you want to cover will allow you to have more control over your income potential as well as schedule vacation times when most convenient.

Closed Captioning And New Coverage

You may not make use of closed captioning on your television, but rest assured that their are trained court reporters who work as Computer Access Realtime Translation (CART) service providers. In short, CART providers provide transcripts of both live action television programming and events set to be aired in the future. Everything from your favorite soap operas to presidential addressed must be captioned, sequenced, and aired so that it syncs with whatever programming is being displayed on the air.

Court reporters who choose to go into closed captioning can work exclusively from home in many instances. Some choose to transition from the courtroom to closed captioning early in their careers while other court reporters who are reaching retirement age may venture into providing CART services on a freelance basis.

Heading A Court Reporting Firm

Although most successful court reporting firms are founded by court reporters who have become intimately familiar with their local court systems, it is also possible to offer independent support services to attorneys on a smaller scale. Court reporters can hire transcribers and scopists to assist them in lightening their workloads, while taking on clients in other industries such as insurance, education and movie production. If you are skilled at capturing the spoken word and putting it down accurately on paper, working as a court reporter will continuously challenge and intrigue you during what will be a remarkable career.