Department of Business Administration

A Rewarding Profession

From the courthouse to TV studios, court reporters, deposition reporters, and broadcast captioners are in demand! Embark on a career that's vital, exciting, and rewarding, with coast-to-coast opportunities at your fingertips. Court reporters can work in the legal community, provide communications access for people with hearing loss, be an independent contractor, or run their own reporting firm.

Court reporters are part of exciting events and history in the making - from reporting high-profile trials to captioning the Super Bowl!  For a brief video overview of the exciting opportunities in court reporting, click here!

To view the videos on the linked page, you may need to download the QuicktimeQuickTime viewer. Click on this link for a free download.

Quick Facts

  • Court reporters - including deposition reporters and broadcast captioners - earn an average of more than $60,000 a year.
  • The U.S. Department of Labor projects that court reporting job opportunities will grow as fast as the average for all occupations through 2012. See current Court Reporting labor statistics at www.bls.gov/oco/ocos152.htm.
  • Captioning of live television programs is done by specially trained court reporters called broadcast captioners. Federal rules require captioning of hundreds of hours of live programming each week, creating a surge in career opportunities for people with the right skills.
  • About 27% of the court reporters in the United States actually work in court. The majority are freelance reporters hired by attorneys to create verbatim transcripts of pretrial depositions of potential trial witnesses.
  • Some reporters use a form of captioning to provide more personalized services for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing through Communication Access Realtime Translation. CART reporters accompany deaf clients as needed - for example, to college classes - to provide instant conversion of speech into text. Reporting companies that provide this service cannot meet the demand.

For more information, contact the Court Reporting Department of
Del Mar College at 361-698-1419

 

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