Major Impacts on Court Reporting if U.S. Adopts a “Voice & Likeness Property Law”

Posted bystenoimperiumPosted inAI and the Legal System, Court Reporting, Judicial Ethics Watch, Legal ServicesTags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Imagine a world where every person legally owns their voice, face, and likeness. Denmark is on the brink of passing just such a law — and if the United States follows, it could completely reshape our profession. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems and digital reporting firms would suddenly face massive legal and financial hurdles, while stenographers — who capture the record without recording voices — would stand in the strongest position we’ve ever had to reclaim our role as the gold standard in court reporting.

1. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Systems

  • Consent Required for Recordings:
    Every attorney, witness, juror, or judge whose voice is captured by an ASR tool would technically need to give explicit permission for that recording and derivative use.
  • Royalties & Licensing:
    ASR companies might have to pay per-speaker royalties to use voices for training or even transcription. This could make stenographers far more cost-competitive since humans don’t require licensing to “hear.”
  • Barrier to Large Language Model Training:
    Current ASR systems feed millions of hours of human voice data into training sets (often scraped without consent). Under this law, those datasets would become legally risky or outright unlawful.

2. Digital Reporting Firms

  • Exposure to Liability:
    Agencies using digital reporters who make audio recordings would face potential lawsuits if they failed to secure consent from every participant in a proceeding.
  • Costly Workflows:
    They’d need to add rights-management agreements before recording, track permissions, and possibly pay royalties — dramatically raising costs compared to stenographic services.
  • Client Backlash:
    Lawyers and witnesses may resist being recorded if it means their likeness could be monetized or misused, creating pressure to return to stenographers.

3. Stenographers (Human Court Reporters)

  • Competitive Advantage:
    Since stenographers produce a transcript without recording voices, they sidestep the entire intellectual property/royalty issue. This would strengthen arguments for stenographers as the gold standard for accuracy + privacy.
  • Marketing Leverage:
    Reporters could highlight “no royalties, no voice rights complications, no risk of AI misuse” as a selling point.
  • New Opportunities:
    Stenographers might be called in for more sensitive cases (celebrity trials, trade secrets, criminal matters) where voice-rights liability is too risky for recordings.

4. Courts & Judges

  • Increased Administrative Burden:
    Courts would need policies for obtaining consent from all courtroom participants before making recordings.
  • Risk of Appeals:
    If recordings were made without valid consent, it could create grounds for appeal or transcript challenges.
  • Shift Toward Steno:
    Many judges might prefer stenographers to avoid entanglement in intellectual property disputes.

5. Agencies & Market Economics

  • Insurance & Risk Costs:
    Agencies using ASR/digital recording would need liability insurance for voice-rights claims — costs that stenographer-based agencies wouldn’t face.
  • Fee Structures:
    If royalties must be paid per person, per proceeding, agencies may shift to subscription/royalty models — making ASR less predictable in price.
  • Agency Consolidation:
    Smaller digital shops may close if they can’t absorb these costs, pushing the market back toward traditional firms with stenographic talent.

6. Data Privacy & Transcript Integrity

  • Training Data Restrictions:
    AI firms couldn’t use courtroom audio to “train” ASR without explicit consent — meaning less robust models for legal language.
  • Chain of Custody Strengthened:
    Stenographic transcripts (with a human reporter as officer of the court) become even more legally defensible since they don’t rely on captured voice data subject to IP claims.
  • Auditability:
    Courts could no longer rely on “just play the audio” because the audio itself might be protected property.

7. Witnesses & Attorneys

  • Control Over Testimony Recordings:
    Witnesses could demand takedowns if their testimony were misused in media or AI training.
  • Monetization Concerns:
    Expert witnesses and high-profile attorneys might license their voice likeness for proceedings — or demand premium fees if recordings are required.
  • Confidentiality Strengthened:
    Attorneys could argue recordings inherently compromise privilege if voice IP rights aren’t properly secured.

8. Technology Vendors

  • Re-engineered Products:
    Courtroom software vendors would need built-in consent tracking, automatic takedown mechanisms, and royalty payment systems.
  • Business Model Disruption:
    Big ASR providers (e.g., Veritext’s vTestify, digital deposition firms) might face lawsuits if they continue current practices without licensing.
  • Possible Retreat from Legal Market:
    Some tech firms might abandon legal transcription entirely if compliance becomes too complex.

9. Professional Advocacy

  • NCRA / State Associations:
    Could leverage this law to argue that stenographers are the only safe, compliant option.
  • Union-style Negotiations:
    Reporters may even advocate that their own voices (when they read back testimony) also deserve protection — potentially opening small but symbolic royalty opportunities.

🔮 Long-Term Outlook

If the U.S. imported Denmark’s approach:

  • Stenography regains dominance — recordings become a liability, not an advantage.
  • ASR adoption slows dramatically — costs and legal risks outweigh benefits.
  • Litigation against ASR companies explodes — retroactive claims from millions of people whose voices were used without consent.
  • Transcript integrity strengthens — stenographers reclaim their role as the most defensible, compliant, and ethical guardians of the record.

Why Stenographers Become the Gold Standard

Contrast this with stenographers. Court reporters do not need to record anyone’s voice to produce a transcript. Instead, they capture the record through shorthand writing and real-time translation, sidestepping the entire consent and royalty issue.

This gives stenographers a decisive competitive advantage in a future where voice is legally protected property. Attorneys and judges would know that transcripts produced by a stenographer:

  • Carry no hidden licensing costs for voices.
  • Do not rely on recordings that could be manipulated, leaked, or misused.
  • Provide a human-certified chain of custody that AI simply cannot replicate.

For sensitive matters — trade secrets, celebrity trials, or criminal proceedings — stenographers would become the safest and most defensible choice.

The push to recognize voice and likeness as legal property could be the turning point our profession has been waiting for. While digital reporting and ASR companies would be mired in consent forms, royalties, and liability, stenographers would shine as the only method that bypasses these risks entirely. In an era threatened by deepfakes, our role isn’t just valuable — it’s indispensable to justice itself.

StenoImperium
Court Reporting. Unfiltered. Unafraid.

Disclaimer

“This article includes analysis and commentary based on observed events, public records, and legal statutes.”

The content of this post is intended for informational and discussion purposes only. All opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are based on publicly available information, industry standards, and good-faith concerns about nonprofit governance and professional ethics. No part of this article is intended to defame, accuse, or misrepresent any individual or organization. Readers are encouraged to verify facts independently and to engage constructively in dialogue about leadership, transparency, and accountability in the court reporting profession.

  • The content on this blog represents the personal opinions, observations, and commentary of the author. It is intended for editorial and journalistic purposes and is protected under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
  • Nothing here constitutes legal advice. Readers are encouraged to review the facts and form independent conclusions.

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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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