A Day Without a Court Reporter – A Legal System on the Brink

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

Imagine a day in America where courtrooms are silent, not due to lack of proceedings, but because the protectors of the record have vanished. Not a single court reporter—no stenographers, no realtimers, no veterans with decades of institutional knowledge—is present to capture what’s being said, argued, decided. If this sounds like the dystopian premise of a film, think again. It’s already happening.

Just as the 2004 satirical film A Day Without a Mexican showed how essential, yet invisible, a marginalized group is to a society’s daily functioning, the disappearance of court reporters exposes a fragile legal ecosystem poised for collapse. “If you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening in the stenographic court reporting industry in the past decade,” one advocate warns, “then you are about to be hit by the proverbial bus… more like an atomic bomb extinction-level event.”

For decades, stenographic court reporters have held together the integrity of court records with a precision no digital recorder can replicate. Yet behind closed doors, powerful interests—backed by Silicon Valley money and private equity—have been waging a silent war against them, replacing trained professionals with digital recorders and AI-transcription models, all in the name of cost-saving and modernization. It’s a tech solution in search of a problem, and the consequences are starting to show.

Let’s be clear: digital court reporting is not equivalent to live stenography. As StenoImperium documented, Planet Depos and other mega-agencies recruited “digital reporters” off the street, only to discover a 320% turnover rate. Their new hires couldn’t meet the rigorous demands of accurate legal transcription. They tried to recruit trained stenographers to edit the mess—at cut rates. This revolving door of underpaid, undertrained labor results in massive inefficiencies, poor-quality transcripts, and delayed justice.

Worse, the so-called “shortage crisis” that helped fuel the digital takeover was largely a fabrication. The infamous 2013 Ducker Worldwide study predicted a shortfall of 5,500 court reporters by 2018, especially in California. But by 2024, California still boasts over 6,500 licensed stenographers—only a modest dip from 2012. The doom-and-gloom graph used by agencies to justify their pivot to digital was based on fictional data, no real census, and not a single interview with working court reporters. As Steno Imperium exposed, “It was invented, fabricated, concocted, made-up, complete fiction to fit their sales narrative.”

When you replace the tried-and-true human experts with algorithmic approximations, you lose more than people—you lose standards, ethics, oversight. Court reporters are trained professionals who manage realtime feeds, preserve decorum, and ensure an accurate, secure record. In contrast, digital systems require post-production editing by anonymous proofreaders and scopists—many overseas—who weren’t present during the proceeding and are not accountable for the final transcript. This breaks the chain of custody and jeopardizes appeals. As one court reporter noted, “Once you’ve got missing or incomplete transcripts, you might as well kiss your appeal goodbye.”

But this story gets darker. There’s a shortage—not of court reporters, but of the support systems that make their work sustainable. The manufacturing of steno machines is in decline. CAT software vendors are closing shop or switching focus to AI. Associations are dissolving. Schools are shutting down. Mentors are aging out, with no one to replace them. Once that expertise disappears, it’s gone forever.

If the traditional model is cast aside without a safety net, what’s left?

Greedy middlemen. Legal service agencies now gouge attorneys while paying court reporters less. Steno Imperium uncovered an agency that charged an attorney over $1,900 for a transcript the reporter invoiced at just over $200. That’s not inflation—that’s exploitation.

And then there’s accountability—or rather, the lack thereof. With digital recording, there’s no one to clarify who’s speaking, ask for repetitions, or flag audio issues in real time. There’s no guardian of the record, no ethical firewall, no licensed professional on the hook if something goes wrong. In high-stakes litigation, that should terrify us all.

So what happens next in a world without stenographers?

Turnaround times explode. Transcripts take weeks, sometimes months. Appellate courts are left in limbo. Trial outcomes can’t be reviewed. Legal errors go unchecked.

Access to justice erodes. Communities that rely on accurate, affordable court records—especially marginalized ones—are the first to suffer. Digital systems fail to meet ADA compliance. Language access becomes a nightmare. Costs soar.

And finally, institutional knowledge dies. Stenography is not a plug-and-play job; it is a craft, passed from master to apprentice. Without schools, mentors, or standardized licensing, there’s no way to rebuild the profession once it’s gone. As one advocate put it, “The extinction of stenographers would mean the extinction of a vast body of knowledge on the creation of the verbatim record.”

This is not inevitable. But we must act—now.

  • Restore funding to steno schools and associations.
  • Enforce title protection and prevent digital encroachment in states where it’s illegal.
  • Pass legislation that secures the stenographer’s role as deposition officer.
  • Demand the NCRA reassert its stance against fake shortages and misleading data.
  • Sue agencies and government bodies that install recording devices without legal authority.

Because a day without court reporters is more than just quiet courtrooms—it’s the beginning of a legal system where truth is fungible, justice is delayed, and democracy is weakened.

We still have time to stop it. But we won’t get a second chance.

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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