By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

To most, they are the silent fixtures of televised courtroom dramas, both real and imaginary. Always seated. Back straight. Ever attentive. And before them a stenotype spewing ribbons of paper covered in Gregg shorthand.

But to J. Lynn Clark, those characteristics aren’t just images glimpsed on “Law & Order” or one of the numerous CSI programs. They are reflections of her professional life.

For most of her working life, Clark has been one of the more than 50,000 court reporters working in the United States. In 1989, she moved on to business ownership, founding Clark & Associates, a freelance court reporting agency in Charleston.

Since establishing the business, revenues have grown 650%, and she recently moved her offices from James Island to North Charleston in anticipation of further growth.

“We’ve never been busier,” Clark said, surrounded not only by a stenotype, but also by several laptop computers, a digital video camera and a large television used for video conferencing. “As technology has changed, so too have the services law firms and other businesses seek from agencies like mine.”

Clark found her vocation in, of all places, a typing class in an Iowa high school and pursued it at the American Institute of Business in Des Moines. She was the perfect candidate for this line of work, she said. About 89% of court reporters are women, and all must be extraordinarily good typists with excellent listening skills and a good command of the English language

She can accurately type 225 words a minute while taking down dictation of two people talking.

Roughly 27% of those who go into it are “official reporters,” those who work directly for a local court system and do most of their work at trial. The rest, including Clark herself, are “freelance” reporters who take depositions for attorneys in the discovery stage of a trial.

Because there is no discovery for criminal trials in South Carolina, Clark and her employees work exclusively with attorneys involved in civil litigation.

“Most of the cases we do stem from construction accidents or product liability, divorce or traffic accidents, where the accuracy in taking down individuals’ accounts is critical,” Clark said.

Clark relocated to Charleston in the mid-1980s and worked briefly for another agency. When Hurricane Hugo inspired her employer to move on, Clark decided it was time to strike out on her own.

At about the same time, Clark said, “a revolution in technology was about to change the business almost completely.

“Before technology got into the mix, the turn around time from attorney interview to a printed copy of a deposition could take three to four weeks, depending upon the length of the interview and how technical the testimony was,” Clark said. “You’d literally translate the shorthand transcript into words, then take it over to Kinko’s to reproduce.”

Because the process is so much less time-consuming than in the past, Clark and her eight full- and part-time reporters can do more depositions in any given week. “That’s where the money is,” Clark said.

It has given Clark the time to expand the services her company can offer attorneys and other businesses.

“In recent years, we’ve moved into video conferencing, enabling attorneys to take face-to-face depositions from people no matter where they are in the world, and we can also videotape depositions and transfer those directly onto DVD, videotape or any other format an attorney desires.”

Another service the company has begun to offer to both the legal and non-legal community is document management services. “We started this service by simply scanning and archiving documents for use at trial,” Clark said. “Over time, we began to see a demand for the archiving of business records, so we folded that into our business as well.”

Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.

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