Most people who become court reporters take a great deal of pride in their profession, considering it a respectable career that allows them to earn a living and feed their families. Once in a while, however, there are individuals who make the career of court reporting something even more – something to be envied. Alan and Sheila Atkinson-Baker have done just that.
It is estimated that there is a new lawsuit filed every two seconds of every single day in the United States. There are also more than one million lawyers and more than 20,000 court reporters. With numbers like these, it is easy for court reporters to miss a deposition and when that happens, firms will call on the Atkinson-Bakers.
Sheila Atkinson has been a court reporter for the better part of the last 3 decades and early on in her career her husband Alan began managing her activities. Court reporting firms did quite a bit of networking back then because of the rampant shortage of reporters.
Alan developed an uncanny ability to locate court reporters on the fly and at a moment’s notice and between that ability and his wife’s knack for court reporting, they started a business that now has nearly 200 employees and which uses custom proprietary software that schedules and manages over one thousand court reporters per week.
The Atkinson-Bakers have their home office in Glendale, California but their business has flourished to the point that they assign court reporters to cover depositions all over the world.
In the 26 years that the husband-wife team has been running their enterprise they have delivered more than 600,000 depositions in all fifty states as well as in more than 30 countries around the world. They have set a standard in the world of court reporting and have done so in places like Israel, Thailand, Argentina, Australia, and of course, throughout the United States of America.