California’s AB 711 Is Out of Touch With the Realities of Court Reporting

Posted bystenoimperiumPosted inCourt ReportingTags:, , , , , , , , ,

As a freelance court reporter in California, I’ve grown accustomed to the unpredictability of legal scheduling. Hearings get bumped, trials settle, motions are continued at the last minute. This uncertainty is why many reporters like me accept only one solid booking at a time—there’s simply no way to reliably stack jobs. California Assembly Bill 711, introduced this session, either ignores this reality or fails to understand it.

AB 711 would require parties in civil matters to disclose whether they will provide a certified shorthand reporter (CSR) for motion hearings and in meet-and-confer declarations. On its face, the bill might look like an effort to bring transparency and planning to the use of court reporters in litigation. But in practice, it poses several problems that directly undermine the freelance reporter’s ability to earn a living and serve the courts effectively.

1. The Illusion of Predictability

AB 711 assumes that lawyers—and by extension, court reporters—can plan accurately around future court appearances. In the real world, the opposite is true. Cases shift. Hearings are vacated with no notice. A single change on the docket can ripple through a reporter’s entire week. Requiring attorneys to “declare” a court reporter in advance creates a false sense of certainty and pushes the burden of that uncertainty onto us.

If I reserve time for a “confirmed” hearing that gets rescheduled or dropped the night before, that’s work I’ve lost—not because I was unavailable, but because the system misrepresented the certainty of the job. Multiply that across a week or month, and the financial and professional impact is significant.

2. Normalizing a Reporter-Free Process

By turning the use of a CSR into a simple box to check, AB 711 may unintentionally normalize the idea that a court reporter is optional. If the attorney doesn’t check the box, there’s no reporter. If they do but plans change, there’s still no guarantee a reporter will actually be hired.

This not only undermines our role but signals to judges, litigants, and younger attorneys that live, certified transcription isn’t essential to due process. It is.

3. No Real Benefit to Reporters

Let’s be clear: this bill doesn’t guarantee us more work. It doesn’t mandate a CSR’s presence or provide courts with more resources to hire us. It creates the illusion of increased demand through advance declarations—without actually producing more jobs or providing enforcement if those declarations are ignored. In other words, it’s all optics, no substance.

4. A Competitive Opening for Low-Quality Alternatives

As declarations become the norm, lawyers may begin exploring cheaper, more convenient options, like AI transcription or uncertified digital recordings. The state, already struggling with court staffing, may begin to see human reporters as expendable. AB 711 opens the door to these substitutions, even as it pretends to elevate our relevance.

That’s not modernization. It’s marginalization.

5. More Red Tape, Less Real Support

Finally, AB 711 does what too many well-meaning bills do: it adds administrative overhead under the guise of reform. What we need is meaningful investment in training, recruitment, and retention of CSRs. We need courtrooms staffed with licensed professionals—not more paperwork that gives parties and judges a false sense of procedural propriety.

Conclusion

This bill doesn’t fix a problem; it manufactures one. It reduces court reporting to a pre-hearing checkbox, pretending that scheduling is predictable and that our presence is optional. It places the burden of legal uncertainty squarely on the shoulders of working reporters while offering no substantive support in return.

Published by stenoimperium

We exist to facilitate the fortifying of the Stenography profession and ensure its survival for the next hundred years! As court reporters, we've handed the relationship role with our customers, or attorneys, over to the agencies and their sales reps.  This has done a lot of damage to our industry.  It has taken away our ability to have those relationships, the ability to be humanized and valued.  We've become a replaceable commodity. Merely saying we are the “Gold Standard” tells them that we’re the best, but there are alternatives.  Who we are though, is much, much more powerful than that!  We are the Responsible Charge.  “Responsible Charge” means responsibility for the direction, control, supervision, and possession of stenographic & transcription work, as the case may be, to assure that the work product has been critically examined and evaluated for compliance with appropriate professional standards by a licensee in the profession, and by sealing and signing the documents, the professional stenographer accepts responsibility for the stenographic or transcription work, respectively, represented by the documents and that applicable stenographic and professional standards have been met.  This designation exists in other professions, such as engineering, land surveying, public water works, landscape architects, land surveyors, fire preventionists, geologists, architects, and more.  In the case of professional engineers, the engineering association adopted a Responsible Charge position statement that says, “A professional engineer is only considered to be in responsible charge of an engineering work if the professional engineer makes independent professional decisions regarding the engineering work without requiring instruction or approval from another authority and maintains control over those decisions by the professional engineer’s physical presence at the location where the engineering work is performed or by electronic communication with the individual executing the engineering work.” If we were to adopt a Responsible Charge position statement for our industry, we could start with a draft that looks something like this: "A professional court reporter, or stenographer, is only considered to be in responsible charge of court reporting work if the professional court reporter makes independent professional decisions regarding the court reporting work without requiring instruction or approval from another authority and maintains control over those decisions by the professional court reporter’s physical presence at the location where the court reporting work is performed or by electronic communication with the individual executing the court reporting work.” Shared purpose The cornerstone of a strategic narrative is a shared purpose. This shared purpose is the outcome that you and your customer are working toward together. It’s more than a value proposition of what you deliver to them. Or a mission of what you do for the world. It’s the journey that you are on with them. By having a shared purpose, the relationship shifts from consumer to co-creator. In court reporting, our mission is “to bring justice to every litigant in the U.S.”  That purpose is shared by all involved in the litigation process – judges, attorneys, everyone.  Who we are is the Responsible Charge.  How we do that is by Protecting the Record.

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  1. Pingback: When Disclosure Isn’t Enough – Why AB 711 Doesn’t Serve Court Reporters or Access to Justice – STENOIMPERIUM

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