Coalition of Court Reporters(CCROLA) is a full-service court reporting agency that emerged from the ashes of major layoffs at the Los Angeles Superior Court in 2012. In order to keep themselves and their colleagues gainfully employed and create a necessary solution for the impacted legal system, its six partners worked together to establish a staffing agency that quickly became the number-one provider of official court reporters in California, working directly for attorneys on trials, motions, depositions, and arbitrations. Prior to the layoffs, attorneys turned to court reporting agencies primarily for depositions while the courts provided court-employed official court reporters. CCROLA introduced the agency model to court reporting and now takes California lawyers from discovery to verdict with experienced, court-approved reporters in every specialty.

TURNING LAYOFF LEMONS INTO LEMONADE

The LASC layoffs in 2012 left more than 100 court reporters laid off and CCROLA has since been able to employ 60 of them. That did more than just mitigate the fear and financial woes of a difficult time; it created a new system that streamlined the emerging private market for attorneys who were suddenly expected to find and hire their own court reporters. Those attorneys turned to CCROLA to make the new paradigm seamless with similar rates and processes, and access to many of the specialized, official court reporters with whom they’d built trusted professional relationships over many years in the courtroom.