Only about 27 percent of the court reporters in the U.S. actually work in court. Most of the rest are freelance reporters hired by attorneys to report depositions of potential trial witnesses. Captioning of live television shows is done by specially trained court reporters called stenocaptioners. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and FCC rules mandate that more programming be captioned to so that people with hearing impairments can be informed through television. Whether they work in court or as freelance deposition reporters, court reporters capture the words spoken by everyone during the proceeding and, if requested by one or more of the parties, prepare a verbatim transcript of it.
Attorneys use deposition transcripts to prepare for trial.
Official court reporters and deposition reporters are front and center at controversial or famous cases - criminal trials, millionaire divorces, government corruption trials, lawsuits against everyone from rock stars to business leaders. A court reporter not only records history but also contributes to it through realtime technology that keeps all parties in litigation working at a swift pace and that enables counsel to quickly analyze each day's events. Stenocaptioners work for local stations and for national channels and networks captioning news, emergency broadcasts, sports events and other programming. What this means for the reporting community is an enormous increase in the demand for realtime captioners to cover local news broadcasts all around the country, mornings, afternoons and evenings. We are already experiencing a severe shortage of qualified people in certain areas of the country and so have developed technology to be able to do the job from a remote site.