It’s always important to know who’s advice you are taking with regards to your equipment that controls your career, so I thought it best to give everyone a little background information on who I am and why I’m qualified to make the recommendations and comments that I do.

First of, my name is Scott Friend. I’ve been involved in IT for a little over 20 years, with the last 10 years of that time focused on IT as it relates to the court reporting profession. I took a job with a company called eVerbatim a little over 10 years ago, just after my first son was born in 2005. Although I had gobs of experience with IT in general, this was my first experience with court reporting in general. As I said, I have loads of IT experience all across the board, but I have to say that working beside John & Marybeth Everhart of eVerbatim, Inc. has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career and life.

eVerbatim, Inc. is an authorized re-seller of Advantage Software products (Eclipse CAT Software, Passport Writers, etc.) but beyond that, they also sell and support their own solutions to all members of the court reporting profession from scopists all the way to captioners and voice reporters, including custom configured laptops. In the 10 years I have been with eVerbatim I have put my IT skills to good use as their Senior Technician, and I’ve learned what it takes to make a court reporting professional successful from a technological standpoint. John Everhart, the owner of eVerbatim, is a wealth of information on everything from CAT Software to Voice Reporting and everything imaginable in between. In my time with him I have helped countless reporters, CART providers, scopists, captioners and more with their technical issues, solving all sorts of problems along the way. I’ve also attended many, many state and national conventions, giving seminars teaching CAT Software operations to Windows Best Practices and everything between.

In 2013 I was given the opportunity to work with Jim & Lynda Barker for their company SearchMaster. I was contracted to build them a new website to accommodate online ordering and subscription management, which was brought online just before Thanksgiving in 2013. During this time I got to know both Jim & Lynda VERY well and came to think of them both as mentors. After Jim’s untimely passing in April of 2015 I took over responsibility of technical operations of SearchMaster, including assisting all their court reporting customers with various issues both related and not related to their SearchMaster software itself, which has given me even more insight and experience with court reporters and scopists.

I say all this in the hopes that you will understand that the information I dispense comes not only from someone with a long history in Information Technology, but more importantly from someone with years of experience working directly with the Court Reporting Profession, which has its own unique quirks and interests. This is important because it takes someone who has either been a member of this profession or has worked within it for a reasonable amount of time to understand all the nuances of reporting, how everything fits together and what being a reporter, captioner, CART provider or scopist really means. This doesn’t mean you can’t get solid, reliable advice from someone who doesn’t even know what this profession is all about – you can; but having the best of both worlds is always the best possible scenario, which is what I try very hard to bring to the table.