Capturing the Spoken Word
How a Law Student’s Startup Disrupted Court Reporting in Ohio — and Laid the Foundation for OverDrive
Long before OverDrive, before ebooks, before Libby — there was a tape recorder, a courtroom, and a rule of civil procedure that almost nobody had noticed.
In the mid-1970s I was attending law school at night at Cleveland State University and clerking part time for my older brother, Lester Potash, at his Cleveland law practice. I had just wrapped up the Around the World Auto Race (AWAR, Inc.), a U.S. Bicentennial event I helped create and lead in 1976, and I was already restless for the next venture. The 1970s were a decade of startups for me — a value-added PC and networking reseller called Megabyte, law office software and services through Potash & Nigbor Legal Applications, and the launch of my own law practice with the support of attorney Loree Potash. But it was a company I founded in 1978 that would prove the most consequential, because it taught me how to capture, index, and manage the spoken word — the very skills that would one day become OverDrive.
The Opening in the Rules
Every disruption begins with an opening, and mine was buried in the Ohio Rules of Civil Procedure.
When Ohio adopted its civil rules in 1970, they followed the federal model and assumed what everyone assumed: that the official record of a deposition would be taken down by a certified shorthand reporter. But in 1972, Ohio amended Civil Rule 30(B)(3) — together with its companion, Rule 30(B)(4) — to permit deposition testimony to be recorded by “other than stenographic means.” For the first time, Ohio courts could accept electronically recorded proceedings — depositions, hearings, and testimony — captured, transcribed, and submitted without a stenographer in the room.
Three forces drove that change, and each one pointed toward opportunity:
Cost. Requiring a certified shorthand reporter to take down, transcribe, and print a bound paper booklet for every deposition was enormously expensive. The new rule lowered the financial barrier to discovery for litigants who could not afford high court-reporter fees.
Accuracy and demeanor. A stenographic transcript is flat. It cannot capture a witness’s pauses, sarcasm, hesitation, or visual demeanor. Recording technology could.
Congested dockets. Ohio’s urban courts were badly backlogged. Recorded depositions meant trials no longer had to wait on busy doctors, experts, or out-of-state witnesses — their testimony could be secured early, edited for objections by the judge, and presented seamlessly.
Ohio was not merely tolerating this technology; it was pioneering it. In November 1971, Judge James L. McCrystal of the Erie County Common Pleas Court presided over McCall v. Clemens, the first trial in the nation in which all testimony was presented to the jury by pre-recorded videotape. The Ohio judiciary had seen the future. And alongside the civil rules, Rule 10 of the Rules of Superintendence for the Courts of Ohio began laying out concrete standards for electronic recording devices — the “how-to” for making a recording the official record of a proceeding.
The rules created the opening. But a rule on paper is not a service. Most law firms had neither the equipment nor the trained personnel to produce a recording that would hold up as a verbatim, legally defensible record. Someone had to build that.
Founding LER: Building the Process
In 1978 I founded Legal Electronic Reporting (LER) to do exactly that. LER was the first dedicated, professional electronic recording service in Ohio — the first private company in the state to offer a comprehensive, outsourced alternative to the stenographer for producing the official record of depositions and court proceedings, at scale.
And like so many ventures, it began close to home. Thankfully, my brother Lester and his friends in the Cleveland bar became our first customers. Every founder should be so lucky: clients who would take a chance on an unproven service, tell you bluntly what worked and what didn’t, and come back for the next deposition anyway. Their early matters were our proving ground — each one a chance to develop and refine the service and the processes, working out microphone placement, logging conventions, and transcript turnaround on real cases with real stakes. By the time we pitched lawyers who didn’t share my last name, the offering had been pressure-tested by attorneys who had every incentive to hold us to a courtroom standard.
The innovation was never just “using a tape recorder.” Judges had experimented with rudimentary recorders for their own notes for years. What I built at LER was a process — an end-to-end system engineered to meet the same evidentiary standard as a certified reporter’s ear:
Multi-track audio separation. Isolated microphone channels for each participant — judge, witness, plaintiff’s counsel, defense counsel — so overlapping speech could be untangled and every speaker positively identified.
Trained monitors. A professional in the room logging the proceeding in real time — noting speakers, exhibits, and key moments — so the record was annotated, not just captured.
Indexing and marking. Standardized methods for marking the recording so transcribers could instantly locate specific testimony — an early form of the content indexing that would define my later work.
Chain of custody and redundancy. Strict custody protocols and redundant capture, so testimony could never be lost to a technical failure or challenged on authenticity.
Transcription workflows. Production pipelines built around the recordings that turned transcripts around faster than manual shorthand could.
Together, these processes moved electronic court reporting out of the experimental phase and into a commercially viable, legally defensible industry standard.
The Battle for Acceptance
Even with the rules on our side, this was a fight. In the late 1970s the court reporting industry was almost exclusively the province of stenotypists and stenomask reporters, and the stenography community did not welcome a challenger. Their argument was always the same: a machine cannot catch nuance, cannot tell speakers apart, cannot be trusted with the official record.
That is precisely the argument our multi-channel system was built to defeat. Isolated tracks per speaker mirrored — and in overlapping colloquy, exceeded — the accuracy of a single reporter’s ear. As a law clerk becoming a lawyer, I was positioned to argue the case in both languages: I could talk engineering with the technicians and evidence with the bench. I worked with courts to demonstrate that LER’s recordings satisfied the verbatim-record standard contemplated by Civ.R. 30(B)(3) and Rule of Superintendence 10, and case by case, deposition by deposition, the skeptics in the Ohio bar came around.
LER proved something larger than any single transcript: that electronic court reporting could operate as a high-volume professional business. Our success in Cleveland became a blueprint for firms across the country, helped seed the professional standards that organizations such as the American Association of Electronic Reporters and Transcribers (AAERT) would later formalize, and fundamentally shifted a market that had been a 100% stenographic monopoly. Today, electronic recording is standard equipment in municipal and common pleas courtrooms across Ohio and the nation.
The People Behind the Process
Of everything we built at LER, what I am proudest of is the workforce we created to make it run. Every recorded deposition still had to become a transcript, and rather than hire a room full of typists, I built something that barely had a name in the late 1970s: a network of home-based workers, willing to be trained, who transcribed the audio recordings from their own kitchens and dens on their own schedules. We trained them in our methods, paid them for their diligent work, and gave people — many of whom could not work a conventional office shift — a real income and a real craft. Their drafts then went through a separate quality-control and verification process before a transcript ever carried the LER name, which is how a distributed network of part-timers produced a record that could stand up in court. Decades before anyone said “remote work” or “distributed workforce,” LER was running one — and the model of trained people plus rigorous verification became a template I would return to again and again.
And the network had special meaning in my own family. My mother, an immigrant, became a notary public and then took up work as an electronic reporter for LER — and she did it with great pride and joy. She would sit in on civil lawsuits, monitoring and logging the proceedings, utterly absorbed in the human drama unfolding in front of her: the feuding business partners, the contested wills, the witnesses who said more than their lawyers wanted. She used to say the lawsuits gave her more pleasure than daytime TV — better than any soap opera, because it was real. Watching my mother find that kind of purpose and delight in work this company created remains one of the quiet rewards of the whole venture.
From the Courtroom to OverDrive
People sometimes ask how a court reporting company leads to the world’s largest digital reading platform for libraries and schools. The answer is that LER and OverDrive are the same idea at different scales: take valuable content that exists in one cumbersome, expensive, gate-kept format, and build the trusted process that converts it into something digital, indexed, portable, and accessible.
At LER, the content was sworn testimony and the gatekeeper was the stenographic monopoly. The disciplines I learned there — digital conversion, secure storage, indexing for instant retrieval, and managing “content” to an evidentiary standard — became the foundational blocks of OverDrive, which I founded in 1986, and ultimately of the Libby app used by millions of readers today. The bridge from the analog era to the digital one was built, plank by plank, in Ohio courtrooms.
A rule changed, an opening appeared, and a night-school law student bet that the spoken word could be captured better, faster, and cheaper than the incumbents believed possible. Every disruption I have been part of since has followed that same pattern. LER was where I learned it.