Freelance transcriber - Freelance Transcriber eScribers Employee Review

There are opportunities for further training and to increase your pay. I received a raise for performance, then another for completing the digital legal transcriber certification. I now earn $0.90 cents per page, but I know there are further opportunities for raises were I to qualify as a proofreader, etc. I had an amazing experience with the mentor I started with - she was extremely communicative and explained expectations and rules thoroughly, altogether setting me up for success. I've learned extremely valuable skills in this role: legal terminology, legal processes, attention to detail, etc. This could be very valuable experience if you are interested in the legal field and could turn out to be a gateway into legal assistant or court reporter roles. Flexibility due to the remote nature of the work.

Based on my research into eScribers before starting work with them, eScribers has a very good pay rate as far as contract transcription work goes, but unfortunately it still isn't very much.

Remote and you get to pick jurisdictions you prefer to work in.

The audio quality is frequently substandard, particularly for videoconferences, which have become commonplace since the COVID pandemic. I found myself spending more time correcting errors in the voice recognition software's transcripts than it would have taken to transcribe the recordings manually from the beginning. As someone who worked as a transcriptionist before becoming a scopist, I can state with complete confidence that this was true. The company implemented a formatting system called WebScribe, which resulted in substantial pay reductions for long-term contractors like myself. While marketed as a workflow enhancement tool, it proved to be the exact opposite: highly inefficient and unnecessarily cumbersome. My responsibilities included extensive unpaid research to verify names, locations, terminology, abbreviations, citations, company names, and more. I also had to complete assignments and fill out case-specific documentation for each project. Although I didn't object to this additional work, since I wanted to ensure my transcripts were accurate, it translated into MANY hours of uncompensated labor. The proofreading process presented another significant problem. While some proofreaders were highly skilled and offered valuable feedback, others made changes that were not only incorrect but frequently bore no relation to the actual audio content. Since their names didn't appear on the final transcript and mine did, I was held accountable for their errors. Although compensation is technically calculated per page, the current rates have declined to an unsustainable level.