Santa Ana resident develops free software to help cover SoCal court & deposition jobs

Santa Ana, CA, April 9, 2020—CoverCrow, Inc., a SoCal software startup, has launched a new website to simplify job-matching for court reporters and court reporting agencies. The site, CoverCrow.com, is the first customized job platform for stenographers to offer real-time data and automated job-matching tools. And it’s free for professionals who sign up for the service.

“We like to call it a combination of Uber and Upwork for the court reporting profession,” said CoverCrow president Cassandra Caldarella, a resident of Santa Ana. “We came up with the idea because there’s a growing court reporter shortage, and the demand for our service continues to grow. Also, we human court reporters need to be able to compete more effectively with digital reporting and electronic recording.”

Currently, stenography jobs are posted on agency email blasts or Facebook job boards, and are usually assigned to the first court reporter who responds. But that often doesn’t makes sense, according to Caldarella. “A lot of the time, there’s no thought given to geography, when it would be much more efficient to hire reporters who are physically closer to the job location.”

Also, the way job notices are shared now, a court reporter working “on the record” has no chance to respond. Even if a reporter is a strong match for a job, if the reporter doesn’t become aware of it until a break or they’re off the record, it’s often too late to accept the assignment.

Real-time Map and Automatic Job Assignments

“CoverCrow.com has a ton of great job-matching tools,” said Caldarella. “Two of the coolest are our real-time map and our automatic job-assignment algorithm.”

The website’s map gives a bird’s-eye view of locations where both jobs and reporters are currently available. An agency can match them geographically, in real time. Caldarella notes that this can help agencies save their clients time, as well as manage bonus costs. And it can help reporters take on more jobs with less travel time, for more work and more pay.

The site also lets reporters set up job preferences by location, case type, hardware needed, experience required, favorite agency, and availability. Then, when a matching job is posted on CoverCrow, the platform can accept and schedule it automatically, even while a reporter is working.

“And that,” said Caldarella, “saves time, improves productivity, and makes more money for everyone in the business.”

More Job-Matching Tools

The CoverCrow website provides many other features that are useful for both agencies and court reporters. These include:

• Support for remote jobs by telephone or video.
• Customized job board to post, assign, accept, and track jobs.
• Real-time dashboard, plus live reports, to monitor current job status.
• Automatic alerts that filter out “noise” to show only the types of jobs that users define.
• Document vault to keep all key documents in one place, including rate sheets, agency onboarding paperwork, previous transcripts, witness lists, W-9 forms, and more.
• Direct messaging in-platform between agencies and court reporters.
• Two-way ratings and reviews to give agencies and reporters more transparent relationships.

Private Beta Success, Visions for the Future

The public beta launch of the CoverCrow.com website comes after months of testing and refinement.

“We private-beta-tested the site over the last half of 2019, and after a lot of tweaks and refinements, we’re ready to scale up with more users,” said Caldarella.

Court reporters and agencies can sign up for the service for free at CoverCrow.com.

“We also plan to expand our services to more people in the legal profession,” added Caldarella. “We’d love to provide the same kinds of job-scheduling tools for interpreters, videographers, notaries, and other legal service providers. We’d also like to add attorneys as schedulers, both directly and through the agencies.”

Caldarella concluded, “Our motto is calendaring – coverage – collaboration. We aren’t trying to ‘disrupt’ our industry or the relationships in place now. We just want the system to work better! We want to give reporters more job security, provide agencies with better scheduling tools and cost controls, and ultimately have every legal service job pass through the CoverCrow platform.”

About CoverCrow.com

CoverCrow.com is a cloud-based job-calendaring system designed specifically for legal service professionals, like court reporters. It uses proprietary algorithms to match legal service freelancers with court reporting agencies at the touch of a button. CoverCrow’s online platform is feature rich, highly automated, and mobile-friendly—with real-time location data and automatic job acceptance tools—for both on-demand and scheduled job fulfilment.