As the nation’s courts race toward digitization, one group of professionals finds itself fighting for survival — and doing so almost entirely alone. Certified shorthand reporters, or “stenographers,” are the highly trained guardians of the official record in courtrooms and depositions across the country. Their precision under pressure has long ensured that justice is both seen and heard. Yet, outside of the court reporting community itself, few seem to grasp what’s at stake if the human stenographer disappears.
Attorneys, judges, legislators, and even accessibility advocates — all groups that depend on the integrity of the legal record — have largely remained silent. “They don’t know we need them,” one veteran reporter told me. “If they did, they’d be standing beside us.”
A Record in Peril
For more than a century, certified stenographic court reporters have been responsible for producing verbatim transcripts of trials, hearings, and depositions. These transcripts serve as the official record for appeals and form the evidentiary backbone of the justice system. But in recent years, many courtrooms and private agencies have quietly replaced human stenographers with digital recording systems or automated speech recognition software marketed as “AI transcription.”
The results, insiders warn, are often disastrous: missing testimony, misattributed speakers, privacy violations, and transcripts that are not legally certifiable for appellate use. Yet because the technology’s failures occur behind the scenes — long after the judge has left the bench or the deposition has ended — few outside the reporting profession see the damage directly. By the time attorneys or litigants realize their record is unusable, it’s too late.
“Our legal system assumes the record is accurate,” said one California reporter who has covered hundreds of civil trials. “But when that record is made by an uncertified machine operator or an algorithm trained on internet audio, accuracy becomes guesswork. That’s not modernization — that’s negligence.”
The Allies Who Don’t Know They’re Allies
Court reporters aren’t the only ones who stand to lose if stenographic reporting fades. Attorneys, judges, legislators, captioning professionals, and even the general public all rely — often unknowingly — on the infrastructure stenographers uphold.
For attorneys, the connection is direct and existential. Every trial lawyer knows the transcript is the spine of an appeal. Yet many assume their depositions and hearings are automatically handled by certified professionals. In reality, digital recording firms now dominate large swaths of the deposition market, often sending uncertified “recorders” in place of licensed reporters. Some attorneys don’t realize the difference until they receive a flawed transcript, or worse, discover that the “record” cannot be authenticated in court. “Protect your record, protect your case,” one veteran reporter warns. “If your transcript isn’t certified, your appeal isn’t safe.”
Judges also depend on stenographers — not just for transcripts, but for realtime feeds that allow them to monitor testimony, review objections, and issue rulings efficiently. Despite this, many trial courts have adopted hybrid or fully digital systems under the guise of budget efficiency. Yet under California law, for example, the Code of Civil Procedure (§269 and §2025.330) still requires that proceedings be taken down by a certified shorthand reporter unless waived by the parties. When courts ignore that mandate, they invite errors that can upend entire cases. “Judges have no idea how fragile their record becomes without us,” a Los Angeles reporter said. “They assume the red light on the recording machine means everything’s fine. It doesn’t.”
Legislators and policymakers, meanwhile, are being sold a version of “innovation” that confuses automation with progress. Technology companies and venture-backed reporting agencies have poured millions into lobbying for “digital modernization,” promising cost savings and efficiency. The pitch is seductive, particularly to budget-strapped state courts. What lawmakers rarely see, however, is the fine print: low-wage operators, inconsistent audio quality, privacy gaps, and transcripts that fail to meet appellate standards. In reality, the cost savings are illusory. Once appeals are delayed or cases retried due to flawed transcripts, taxpayers end up footing a larger bill.
Even outside the legal system, captioning and accessibility services depend heavily on stenographic expertise. Real-time Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) providers, who deliver live captions for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals in schools, government meetings, and broadcast media, are all trained stenographers. When the pipeline of skilled reporters dries up, so too does the pool of qualified captioners. “Accessibility isn’t a luxury — it’s a civil right,” one captioner said. “Without stenographers, that right disappears.”
The Misinformation Machine
If so many institutions depend on stenographers, why aren’t they rallying to defend them? The answer, advocates say, lies in a combination of invisibility, misinformation, and misplaced faith in technology.
For generations, reporters have been trained to blend into the background — to remain neutral, silent, and invisible. That discretion, while essential in the courtroom, has left the profession without a public voice. “We’ve been too good at being invisible,” one reporter admitted. “People don’t know what we do because they’re not supposed to notice us doing it.”
Into that silence stepped the marketing departments of digital recording and AI firms. Slick advertising campaigns frame automation as modernization, portraying stenographers as relics of a bygone era. Corporate spokespeople use words like “streamlined,” “scalable,” and “future-ready,” positioning software as the inevitable successor to human skill. The reality, reporters argue, is far less glamorous: audio files corrupted by ambient noise, inaudible speakers, and AI models that routinely mistake “no” for “know” or “yes” for “yet.”
But by the time those errors appear in transcripts, the decision-makers — judges, attorneys, and administrators — are long gone. “It’s easy to sell tech as progress,” said one court administrator who has resisted automation efforts. “But progress without accountability isn’t innovation. It’s abdication.”
Everyone Thinks Someone Else Is Handling It
Another reason for the silence is simple bureaucratic diffusion. Everyone assumes someone else is safeguarding the record. Attorneys think courts are hiring qualified reporters. Courts assume agencies are supplying them. Agencies assume the market will train more. Meanwhile, stenographic schools are closing, wages have stagnated, and veteran reporters are retiring faster than replacements can be trained. The result is a looming collapse of expertise with no clear plan to rebuild it.
Legislators often point to the “stenographer shortage” as justification for adopting digital alternatives, but the shortage itself is largely a product of policy neglect. “You can’t underfund a profession for 20 years, close its schools, and then claim no one wants the job,” said one educator who directed a court reporting program until it was shuttered. “People still want to learn this skill — they just can’t afford to when pay rates haven’t moved since the 1990s.”
What Stenographers Need From Their Silent Allies
Court reporters don’t need sympathy; they need advocacy. Every stakeholder in the justice system — from the trial bar to the legislature — has a role to play in restoring the integrity of the record.
Attorneys can start by insisting on certified reporters for every proceeding. The American Bar Association’s Formal Opinions 498 and 512 require lawyers to exercise technological competence and protect client confidentiality. Allowing an uncertified digital recorder or AI service to handle sworn testimony violates both principles. Attorneys should include explicit language in their notices: “This proceeding shall be reported stenographically by a Certified Shorthand Reporter.” That single sentence can safeguard the integrity of a case — and the attorney’s license.
Judges can enforce existing law by ensuring a certified reporter is present whenever a record is required. They can ask at the start of each hearing, “Is a certified reporter present?” and refuse to proceed when one is not. The judiciary’s moral and professional duty is to preserve the record; delegating that task to an algorithm undermines the very foundation of justice. As one judge privately acknowledged, “If there’s no reliable record, there’s no appeal. Without an appeal, there’s no accountability.”
Lawmakers should focus on modernizing support for stenographers rather than eliminating them. That means funding court reporter education, raising official pay scales, and incentivizing young professionals to enter the field. True modernization should integrate technology that assists certified reporters — not replaces them. There’s a difference between innovation that empowers humans and automation that erases them.
Bar associations and legal educators can also play a crucial role by informing attorneys about the risks of uncertified transcripts. Continuing Legal Education (CLE) programs could address “The Hidden Dangers of AI and Digital Reporting,” explaining how uncertified records jeopardize appeals and client confidentiality. Law schools, too, should teach students how records are created, who owns them, and why accuracy is a non-negotiable component of competent representation. The first time a young lawyer hears the term court reporter shouldn’t be in a deposition room.
The Cost of Ignoring the Record
Beyond the courtroom, the erosion of stenographic standards poses a threat to public trust. The legal record is not a mere technicality; it is the factual backbone of justice. When that record becomes unreliable, verdicts lose legitimacy, appeals become meaningless, and the rule of law itself begins to fray.
Imagine a criminal conviction based on a mistranscribed confession, or a civil verdict overturned because key testimony was lost to static. These are not hypotheticals. In states that have experimented with digital-only recording, cases have already been reversed due to incomplete or inaudible records. The fallout isn’t just procedural — it’s moral. “A transcript isn’t a convenience,” one reporter said. “It’s a promise. When that promise breaks, the entire system breaks with it.”
The Road Back
Advocates say the path forward is clear but requires coordination. The court reporting profession needs a unified public message and visible allies beyond its own ranks. That means partnering with bar associations, disability-rights groups, and legislators who understand that human accuracy is not an obstacle to progress but the foundation of it.
Campaigns like #ProtectTheRecord and proposed “Friends of the Record” pledges are already taking shape within the community. These initiatives invite attorneys, judges, and professors to publicly affirm their commitment to certified, human-generated records. Some reporters are even producing short educational videos titled “What Happens When AI Gets It Wrong?” and “A Court Reporter Saved This Case,” aimed at showing what’s truly at stake.
Still, awareness alone won’t be enough. “We have to meet them where they are,” one organizer said. “In bar journals, at MCLE events, in legislative hearings. We can’t expect them to find us — we have to go to them.”
A Call to the Legal Community
The survival of stenography is not a nostalgic cause. It is a matter of legal integrity. When a certified shorthand reporter takes an oath, that reporter becomes the living record of the proceeding — a sworn officer of the court, accountable under penalty of perjury. No microphone, algorithm, or cloud service can carry that responsibility.
The next time a trial lawyer rises to argue a motion, a judge rules from the bench, or a lawmaker debates “modernization,” they should pause and ask: Who is protecting the record? If the answer isn’t a certified stenographer, the system they serve is already weaker than they realize.
The fight to save stenography is not about resisting technology; it’s about defending truth. And truth, in every courtroom and every democracy, deserves a human witness.
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.
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