Free Roughs, Hidden Costs – How AI Transcription Is Quietly Rewriting the Legal Record

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On October 7, 2025, news broke that the Indian state of Kerala will become the first jurisdiction in the world to mandate the use of artificial intelligence for witness transcription in every trial court. Beginning November 1, all depositions will be recorded using Adalat.AI, a speech-to-text platform developed under India’s national AI mission.

It’s a bold, public policy move designed to modernize court processes. But while Kerala has laid out its plans in full view, a parallel transformation has been unfolding in the United States — not through policy, but through corporate product rollouts and quiet judicial practice.

Two of the country’s largest reporting firms, Esquire and Veritext, have begun supplying free AI-generated rough drafts to clients who use their speech recognition systems. And inside the nation’s largest trial court — Los Angeles Superior Court — some judges are privately using AI rough transcripts during remote hearings, without public disclosure.

The future of the legal record isn’t arriving with a bang. It’s slipping in through side doors.

Kerala’s Transparent AI Mandate

Kerala’s High Court issued a memorandum on September 27 mandating that all trial courts record witness testimony using Adalat.AI starting November 1. The system, trained in both Malayalam and English legal terminology, replaces handwritten and dictated statements that caused significant delays.

Once testimony is recorded, reviewed, and signed, the transcript will be uploaded to the district court’s case management system for immediate access by lawyers and parties. Nodal officers are being appointed to oversee compliance.

Kerala’s approach is top-down, uniform, and publicly announced. It’s a state-run modernization program with governance structures, accuracy testing, and clear procedures.

Corporate Roughs – Esquire and Veritext’s Quiet Innovation

While Kerala is implementing AI openly, two major U.S. deposition vendors — Esquire and Veritext — have already normalized AI transcription through a different channel: “free rough drafts.”

When law firms conduct depositions through these companies’ speech recognition systems, they often receive a machine-generated transcript almost immediately, at no extra charge. These drafts are created by AI, not human reporters, and are delivered to clients well before the certified transcript is finalized.

Traditionally, attorneys who wanted a rough draft paid for an expedited service produced by the reporter. Now, the vendor’s software is generating it automatically.

This shift:

  • Bypasses reporters as the initial source of the record.
  • Locks clients into the vendor’s proprietary platforms.
  • Consolidates transcript data inside corporate infrastructure.

It looks like a client perk. In reality, it’s a strategic power play: the first version of the record now lives on the vendor’s servers, not with the officer of the court who captured it.

Why Free Roughs Matter

Legal transcripts aren’t mere paperwork — they’re evidentiary artifacts. Every word counts. Human reporters are trained to flag inaudible passages, stop proceedings for clarification, and ensure accuracy. AI doesn’t. It generates what it thinks it heard, often without indicating uncertainty.

When these machine drafts are distributed to legal teams immediately, they influence case strategy before anyone verifies their accuracy. Lawyers draft motions, analyze testimony, and make strategic decisions based on text that hasn’t been reviewed by a human.

And because these drafts are free, they also undercut reporter revenue streams that traditionally supported rough-draft services, further consolidating power in the hands of a few large vendors.

Ownership, Access, and Discovery Gaps

The rise of corporate AI roughs raises thorny questions about who owns the transcript and how errors can be challenged.

When a stenographer produces a rough, they retain legal control of their notes and drafts. When a machine produces it, the text lives on the company’s servers. Lawyers access it through vendor portals; the underlying audio and system logs are rarely disclosed.

If an AI error slips through, how can a party challenge what was circulated? Are the machine drafts discoverable? How long are they stored? Who has access? These questions remain unanswered in most service agreements — leaving significant legal blind spots.

Behind the Bench – Judges Quietly Using AI Roughs in Los Angeles

Perhaps the most consequential — and least transparent — development is happening inside the judiciary itself.

Multiple attorneys and reporters have confirmed that some Los Angeles Superior Court judges are privately using free AI-generated rough transcripts during remote hearings on LA Court Connect, the court’s Microsoft Teams–based platform.

The platform’s built-in speech recognition produces live, unedited text streams. Judges receive these machine drafts directly during or after proceedings. No formal policy exists, and no public disclosure is made to litigants. There is no published error rate, no official record of what the judge saw, and no way for parties to review or challenge those drafts.

This quiet judicial use of AI raises fundamental due process concerns:

  • Are judges consulting unofficial, unverified text to make rulings or notes?
  • Does this material become part of the “record” even if parties never see it?
  • Can litigants appeal based on something they were never told existed?

Unlike Kerala’s public program or corporate marketing, this is judicial adoption by practice, not policy. It happens in the shadows — invisible to litigants, unacknowledged in court rules, and entirely unregulated.

Three Models, One Direction

These three models — Kerala’s policy, corporate roughs, and LA judges’ quiet use — reveal different pathways to the same destination:

ModelWho drives itTransparencyGovernance
KeralaGovernmentHighFormal
Esquire / VeritextCorporationsModerate (marketing)Contractual only
LA Superior Court judgesJudiciary (informal)NoneNone

All three shift the locus of the legal record away from human reporters and into AI systems. But only one is subject to public debate and oversight.

What’s at Stake

The implications reach far beyond stenographers’ livelihoods. These changes strike at the heart of:

  • Due process — Parties must have equal, accurate access to the record.
  • Transparency — Litigants should know when and how AI is being used.
  • Accountability — Courts must be able to audit, verify, and correct errors.
  • Legal control — The judiciary must retain authority over the record, not surrender it to hidden systems.

Kerala’s model may be controversial, but it’s at least visible and structured. The American shift is happening quietly, driven by market power and judicial convenience, not public deliberation.

Control of the Transcript Is Slipping Away

The age of AI transcription has arrived — not with a legislative act, but through free drafts, corporate platforms, and undisclosed judicial practices.

What Kerala has done by policy, Esquire and Veritext have done by business model, and LA judges have done by habit. Each move chips away at the traditional framework that defined who creates, controls, and certifies the record of what happens in a courtroom.

If courts and bar associations don’t step in soon, they may discover that the legal record itself has migrated — into systems no one sees, controlled by entities no one elected, governed by rules no one wrote.

StenoImperium
Court Reporting. Unfiltered. Unafraid.

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

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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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