Where the Record Is Really Being Written – A Quiet Transformation Hidden in Plain Sight

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

For more than a century, courtroom and deposition records have been entrusted to one group of professionals: stenographic court reporters. Their role has been both visible and invisible — sitting in the well of the courtroom, or on the edge of a conference table, capturing every word as it is spoken. But beneath the surface of modern litigation, something profound is happening. The control of the legal record — who creates it, who owns it, and who is accountable for it — is quietly shifting. And the public hasn’t been told.

From Guardians to Middlemen – The Slow Drift

For decades, certified shorthand reporters (CSRs) served as the guardians of the verbatim record. They were officers of the court, bound by statutes and ethical obligations, certifying the accuracy of every transcript. Their names appeared on the certification page; their licenses were on the line. If an error occurred, they could be held accountable — professionally, legally, even personally.

Today, however, that direct line of responsibility is fraying. The record is increasingly being captured, stored, and even drafted through layers of intermediaries: remote platforms, digital recording systems, AI transcription tools, and large, privately held court reporting agencies that treat testimony as just another asset to monetize. What was once a simple chain of custody between the witness, the reporter, and the court has turned into a tangled web of hidden practices.

The New Custodians of Testimony

In many jurisdictions, testimony is no longer being captured exclusively by licensed professionals. Digital recorders or uncertified operators hit “record,” while the actual transcription is outsourced — sometimes overseas, sometimes to algorithmic speech-to-text engines riddled with errors. Then, agency staff or AI “reviewers” clean it up, and a reporter is sometimes brought in after the fact to “certify” work they didn’t actually produce.

Meanwhile, some courts have quietly adopted internal practices that bypass reporters altogether. Judges in major metropolitan areas have begun offering free “rough drafts” to themselves through proprietary or remote platforms, using the audio from Teams or CourtConnect feeds. These roughs aren’t official. They aren’t certified. And yet they are being relied on for judicial work. This shift, done by practice rather than public policy, fundamentally changes who is actually writing — and controlling — the legal record.

The Record Has Moved — And No One Told the Public

In the past, if you wanted to know what was said in court, you ordered a transcript from the reporter who was physically present. The chain of custody was transparent. Today, that record may be born inside a cloud server owned by a private vendor, transmitted through a remote platform, partially transcribed by an algorithm, edited by anonymous staff, and then delivered to parties under the agency’s banner. The reporter may be merely the final signature on a document they didn’t actually write.

This is not a theoretical concern. It has real consequences for due process. When a transcript is challenged on appeal, who stands behind it? When testimony is garbled by faulty speech recognition, who is accountable? When records are stored in private databases instead of court archives, what happens to public access, to chain of custody, to authenticity?

The record has already moved. But the legal community, litigants, and the public have largely been left in the dark.

Sharper Lines of Accountability — or None at All

The beauty of the stenographic model has always been its accountability. Every transcript bears a name, a license, and a certification page. A single, identifiable professional stands behind the words. This sharp line of responsibility has protected the integrity of the record for generations.

The emerging model blurs — or erases — those lines. Instead of one certified professional, you may have a patchwork: a digital audio recording from one person, a transcription by a second, AI post-processing by a third, “editing” by a fourth, and a rubber-stamp certification by a fifth. When errors emerge — and they do — responsibility is diffuse. No one is clearly accountable. The very structure is designed to make accountability slippery.

From Verbatim Record to Hearsay — The Collapse of Accountability

At the core of our evidentiary system lies a simple principle: the record is not hearsay because it’s certified by a neutral, licensed officer who was physically present. Every line of a reporter’s transcript is backed by statute, oath, and personal liability. That’s why it’s admissible. That’s why appellate courts rely on it as the single source of truth.

But the new model — digital recordings, AI transcripts, agency-generated “roughs” — severs that chain. What judges, attorneys, and even juries increasingly rely on are unverified textual products, often generated by machines, edited by anonymous staff, and “certified” after the fact by someone who didn’t actually take down the words. This isn’t just sloppy procedure. It’s hearsay masquerading as the record.

And hearsay, by definition, lacks accountability.

  • There’s no human witness to question.
  • No identifiable reporter to hold responsible.
  • No statutory standard applied at the moment of testimony.
  • No clear custodian who can swear under penalty of perjury that what’s on the page is what was said.

Once hearsay becomes the operational record, every safeguard built into our legal system begins to unravel. The appellate courts rely on a record they can’t truly trust. Trial courts issue rulings based on roughs that were never verified. Litigants lose the ability to challenge errors because no single individual stands behind them. The transcript — once the gold standard — becomes a game of legal telephone.

And in that vacuum of accountability, power flows to those who control the technology. Whoever owns the platform, the database, or the algorithm becomes the de facto author of the record. That is not justice. That is information control.

Reclaiming Control — or Losing the Republic’s Memory

At its core, the verbatim legal record is not a mere administrative convenience. It is a constitutional safeguard. In the American legal system, the record is the mechanism through which power is checked: trial courts are reviewed by appellate courts; judicial actions are scrutinized; government overreach is exposed. The record is the spine of due process. It is how truth is preserved against the distortions of time, memory, and power.

When that record is outsourced, privatized, or digitized without clear lines of accountability, something far more dangerous than transcription errors occurs. The people lose control over their own system of justice. The transcript ceases to be a neutral, certified artifact of what happened and becomes a product controlled by private actors, algorithms, or bureaucratic platforms that answer to no one.

History is unambiguous: whenever control over information shifts away from transparent, accountable custodians and toward concentrated, opaque powers, tyranny finds its foothold. Totalitarian regimes have always sought to control the narrative, rewrite records, or make them disappear entirely. In the legal context, the official transcript is the narrative. If it can be manipulated, withheld, or altered without consequence, every right downstream is imperiled.

Think about it:

  • If the record is wrong, appeals fail.
  • If the record can be changed, accountability evaporates.
  • If the record can disappear, justice itself is memory-holed.

This isn’t hypothetical. We’re already seeing early warning signs: missing or incomplete transcripts in digital-only pilot courts; AI-generated “roughs” circulated internally without any clear custodian; agencies controlling access to testimony like proprietary data. These are not isolated quirks. They are the soft opening of a system where the truth of what was said in a courtroom is no longer verifiable by the people.

Reclaiming control of the record, therefore, isn’t about protecting a profession. It’s about protecting the architecture of justice itself. This means:

  • Re-establishing clear statutory custodianship: Only licensed, accountable professionals should certify transcripts, with a transparent chain of custody from spoken word to official record.
  • Ensuring courts—not private vendors—control archives: Testimony belongs to the people, not to agencies or AI platforms.
  • Mandating disclosure and oversight: Litigants must be informed who or what is actually producing their transcripts. There must be recourse when accountability is lacking.
  • Investing in the human infrastructure of justice: Reporters are not relics; they are the immune system against manipulation.

If we fail to do this, we invite a future where the official record of courtrooms can be edited like a Google Doc, monetized like ad data, or disappeared with a keystroke. And in that future, the line between justice and tyranny becomes paper-thin.

As James Madison wrote, “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.”
The verbatim record is one of those “means of acquiring it.” If we surrender it, we surrender more than words. We surrender the very mechanism by which a free people hold power to account.

The time to reclaim control is not “someday.” It is now.

From Verbatim Record to Hearsay — The Collapse of Accountability

At the core of our evidentiary system lies a simple principle: the record is not hearsay because it’s certified by a neutral, licensed officer who was physically present. Every line of a reporter’s transcript is backed by statute, oath, and personal liability. That’s why it’s admissible. That’s why appellate courts rely on it as the single source of truth.

But the new model — digital recordings, AI transcripts, agency-generated “roughs” — severs that chain. What judges, attorneys, and even juries increasingly rely on are unverified textual products, often generated by machines, edited by anonymous staff, and “certified” after the fact by someone who didn’t actually take down the words. This isn’t just sloppy procedure. It’s hearsay masquerading as the record.

And hearsay, by definition, lacks accountability.

  • There’s no human witness to question.
  • No identifiable reporter to hold responsible.
  • No statutory standard applied at the moment of testimony.
  • No clear custodian who can swear under penalty of perjury that what’s on the page is what was said.

Once hearsay becomes the operational record, every safeguard built into our legal system begins to unravel. The appellate courts rely on a record they can’t truly trust. Trial courts issue rulings based on roughs that were never verified. Litigants lose the ability to challenge errors because no single individual stands behind them. The transcript — once the gold standard — becomes a game of legal telephone.

And in that vacuum of accountability, power flows to those who control the technology. Whoever owns the platform, the database, or the algorithm becomes the de facto author of the record. That is not justice. That is information control.

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.
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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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