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1 HOUSE RESOLUTION
2 WHEREAS, The Illinois Court Reporters Association (ILCRA)
3 is the sole statewide association of freelance and official
4 court reporters in Illinois, with professional membership
5 exclusively comprised of licensed certified shorthand
6 reporters (CSRs), individuals who are highly trained and
7 skilled and ethically bound to write in real time each word
8 spoken at hearings, trials, arbitrations, and depositions; and
9 WHEREAS, Illinois licensed CSRs, also known as
10 stenographers, are the only professionals in Illinois for whom
11 the title "court reporter" is reserved by State statute; and
12 WHEREAS, Court reporters write shorthand at 225 words per
13 minute, and often much faster, to create the verbatim record
14 upon which the courts and counsel rely as the gold standard of
15 transcripts of proceedings and from which discrete case law
16 and citations derive; and
17 WHEREAS, Court reporters write each word spoken at legal
18 proceedings in Illinois using phonetic alphabetic keyboards on
19 stenographic machines that store the shorthand verbatim notes
20 on redundant electronic text backup so that the courts,
21 counsel, litigants, and defendants can rest assured that the
22 accurate, full record of proceedings is safe and secure not
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1 only for transcript production but also from the dangers of
2 the testimony being altered, publicly disseminated, or
3 entirely lost through the vulnerabilities of unlicensed audio
4 recorder operators who do not possess the inimitable skills of
5 CSRs; and
6 WHEREAS, Illinois shorthand reporters and real-time
7 captioners provide Communication Access Realtime Translation
8 (CART) by captioning for attorneys, litigants, defendants,
9 jurors, and the public at legal proceedings, business
10 meetings, educational classes and lectures, sporting events,
11 and arts performances for many Illinoisans who are deaf or
12 hard of hearing, who have auditory processing disabilities, or
13 for whom English is not their first language; and
14 WHEREAS, Stenographers and captioners produce a reliably
15 accurate and complete record of each spoken word and deserve
16 the public's confidence earned by the court reporters'
17 position of neutrality and adherence to confidentiality and
18 ethics guidelines necessitated by the CSRs' role as an officer
19 of the court; therefore, be it
20 RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE ONE
21 HUNDRED FOURTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that
22 we declare February 1 through February 8, 2025 as Court
23 Reporting and Captioning Week in the State of Illinois; and be
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1 it further
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