Beginning January 1, 2026, Georgia courts will enter a familiar but uneasy chapter in judicial administration. Under House Bill 179, judges are granted discretion to replace traditional stenographic court reporters with digital audio or audiovisual recording systems in criminal and civil proceedings. The law preserves a role for certified court reporters—at least on paper—by requiring that a reporter transcribe the digital recording if a written transcript is requested. The promise is flexibility. The risk is something far more fundamental: the erosion of the official record itself.
On its face, the statute appears modest. It does not abolish court reporters. It does not mandate artificial intelligence. It does not prohibit stenography. Instead, it offers judges an “alternative method” of creating a verbatim record. But in court systems across the country that have already traveled this path—from Arkansas to Michigan to parts of Virginia—the consequences are well known. The problem is not the technology. It is the assumption that a recording is the same thing as a record.
They are not.
A recording is inert. A record is active. One captures sound; the other captures meaning, attribution, and procedural integrity. The distinction is not semantic. It is the difference between a trial that can be reviewed and one that must be retried.
In theory, digital recording systems are simple. A judge authorizes their use. The system records the proceeding. If a transcript is needed, someone—often a certified court reporter—listens back and types what they hear. In practice, the process breaks down almost immediately. Microphones fail. Speakers overlap. Jurors turn away from the mic. Witnesses whisper. Lawyers interrupt. Judges speak from the bench while papers shuffle. Entire segments are lost when the “record” button is never pressed.
This is not conjecture. It is routine.
In Arkansas, where only circuit courts employ official stenographic reporters, district courts often rely on digital recording. Circuit court reporters are then asked—sometimes compelled—to transcribe hearings they did not attend. In at least one such instance, half of a proceeding simply did not exist. The system had failed to record it. There was no remedy. No reconstruction. No verbatim backup. The record was gone.
Digital recording systems are only as reliable as the least trained person in the room. Often, that person is tasked with monitoring the equipment while also juggling courtroom logistics. Unlike stenographic reporters—whose sole job is to preserve the record in real time—recording clerks are not trained to recognize when the record is breaking down. They cannot interrupt overlapping testimony. They cannot ask speakers to slow down. They cannot flag inaudible responses. The failure is discovered only later, when it is too late.
That reality exposes a second contradiction embedded in laws like Georgia’s: the insistence on labeling the downstream work as “court reporting.” A certified court reporter is a licensed professional trained to create a contemporaneous verbatim record, identify speakers, mark exhibits, and certify accuracy. Listening to an incomplete recording after the fact is not court reporting. It is transcription.
This distinction matters—not for professional pride, but for legal clarity. When statutes invoke “certified court reporters” to lend legitimacy to digital systems, they blur the line between two fundamentally different functions. A transcriptionist, no matter how skilled, cannot certify what they cannot hear. They cannot swear to speaker identity when voices are indistinguishable. They cannot attest to the completeness of a proceeding they did not witness.
Some courts appear to recognize this, quietly shifting toward hybrid solutions: AI-generated drafts paired with human correction. The logic is efficiency. Let software produce a rough transcript, then have a human clean it up. But this approach introduces new risks. Artificial intelligence does not know when it is wrong. It hallucinates. It assigns words to the wrong speaker. It fills gaps with plausible, but false language. Correcting such errors requires listening to the entire proceeding anyway—often multiple times—at speeds far slower than live stenography.
For many experienced reporters, the math simply does not work. Transcribing a clean, well-miked recording is time-consuming. Transcribing a chaotic courtroom proceeding—without visual cues, speaker identification, or the ability to ask for clarification—is a punishing task. Compensation rarely reflects that reality. In some jurisdictions, courts have attempted to cap transcript rates at figures that might be appropriate for stenographic work, but are wholly inadequate for audio transcription. The result is predictable: refusals, backlogs, or transcripts produced under duress.
What is often overlooked in policy debates is the quiet economic coercion at play. Courts eliminate in-person reporting to save money on the front end, only to shift the burden downstream to reporters asked to “fix” recordings at reduced rates. The work is harder. The liability is higher. The pay is lower. It is not a sustainable model.
There is also a deeper institutional concern: ownership of the record itself. When courts control the recording equipment, the storage systems, and the dissemination of audio files, they become both the creator and custodian of the evidentiary record. That consolidation raises uncomfortable questions. What is recorded—and what is not? What happens when sidebars are inadvertently captured? When privileged conversations are left on the record? When critical testimony is missing?
Historically, the presence of an independent court reporter has served as a structural safeguard. The reporter is an officer of the court, but not an arm of the judiciary. Their record is neutral, portable, and certifiable. Digital systems collapse that separation. The court owns the record. The court controls access. The court decides whether the failure of its own system is material.
Judges who have lived with the consequences of digital recording are often the most resistant to it. In parts of Virginia, some judges have openly stated they will not approve recording systems for trials—particularly jury trials—because they have seen the transcripts that result. Others have quietly signaled that retirement is preferable to presiding over proceedings where the integrity of the record cannot be assured.
None of this suggests that stenographic reporters are immune from error, or that technology has no role in modern courts. But efficiency cannot come at the expense of accuracy. Flexibility cannot replace accountability. And a recording—no matter how high-definition—cannot substitute for a trained professional actively managing the record in real time.
The national movement toward digital recording is often framed as inevitable, driven by budget pressures and staffing shortages. But shortages do not occur in a vacuum. They are exacerbated when courts reduce pay, eliminate in-person work, and treat record preservation as an afterthought. Supply and demand apply here as they do everywhere else. When working conditions deteriorate, professionals leave. When professionals leave, systems degrade.
Georgia’s HB 179 is not an outlier. It is a symptom. Similar laws are advancing across the country, propelled by the promise of cost savings and technological ease. But the hidden costs—retrials, appeals, missing records, and diminished public trust—rarely appear on balance sheets.
The official court record is not a clerical convenience. It is the backbone of due process. Once it is compromised, everything built on it becomes unstable. The question is not whether courts can record proceedings digitally. Of course they can. The question is whether they can afford the consequences when the record fails—and whether anyone will be left willing to reconstruct what should never have been lost in the first place.
Disclaimer
This article is an opinion and analysis piece written for informational and educational purposes only. It reflects the author’s professional experience and publicly available information and does not constitute legal advice, regulatory guidance, or an allegation of misconduct by any court, judge, agency, or individual. Readers should consult applicable statutes, court rules, and qualified legal counsel for specific guidance.
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