To the members of the judiciary,

Every court is, at its core, an institution of memory. Long after litigants leave, long after juries dissolve, long after rulings are issued, the record remains. It is the object future judges consult, higher courts scrutinize, agencies rely upon, and the public trusts when it seeks to understand what occurred inside your courtroom. The authority of the judiciary does not end with the gavel. It endures through the accuracy, reliability, and legitimacy of the record you leave behind.

For that reason, the creation of the legal record has never been a clerical function. It has always been an evidentiary one.

Certified stenographic court reporters were integrated into courtrooms because the law recognized something essential: spoken proceedings are fleeting, power is asymmetrical, and justice demands an independent, professionally accountable officer whose sole duty is to capture, preserve, and authenticate what is said under oath. Over generations, licensing regimes, certification standards, and ethical codes formalized that responsibility. The reporter became not a vendor, but a guardian of judicial memory.

Today, courts stand at a crossroads that is often described as technological. In truth, it is institutional.

Across jurisdictions, alternative capture systems are being introduced under the banners of efficiency, access, and modernization. Digital recording platforms, centralized vendor services, and automated transcription tools are increasingly framed as interchangeable substitutes for licensed court reporters. These changes are rarely debated in terms of evidentiary doctrine. They are discussed as operational improvements.

But the legal record is not an operational artifact. It is evidence.

Every appeal you review, every writ you issue, every reversal you consider, every harmless-error analysis you conduct is anchored in the assumption that the record before you is a faithful, intelligible, and authentically created account of what occurred below. When that assumption fails, judicial review does not merely become harder. It becomes unreliable.

A certified stenographic reporter does not simply transcribe speech. They control the capture environment. They monitor audio integrity. They interrupt proceedings when the record is unclear. They identify speakers. They mark exhibits. They annotate nonverbal events. They preserve source materials. They certify, under penalty of perjury, that the transcript is a true and correct record of proceedings.

That certification is not symbolic. It is the legal mechanism that transforms a transcript into evidence.

If a transcript is challenged, the reporter can testify. They can be examined. They can explain how the record was made, what equipment was used, what disruptions occurred, how ambiguities were resolved, and why the final product can be trusted. They are bound by ethical codes. They are subject to licensure. They are accountable to the court.

A system is not.

Platforms cannot take oaths. Algorithms cannot be cross-examined. Vendors cannot testify to the internal operations of proprietary software that substitutes one word for another, one speaker for another, or silence for sound. When the creation of the record is transferred from licensed officers of the court to opaque technical infrastructures, the court does not merely change tools. It relinquishes a category of accountability.

That loss is subtle until it is not.

It becomes visible when testimony is contested, when audio is incomplete, when transcripts are internally inconsistent, when speaker identification matters, when a pause changes the meaning of an answer, when a single word shifts the standard of review. In those moments, the court depends not on data, but on provenance. On the ability to ask: How was this record created? Under what conditions? By whom? Using what methods? Subject to what professional duties?

Without a responsible officer, the court is left defending a system rather than evaluating evidence.

This is not a speculative concern. Evidence law has long recognized that the reliability of an artifact depends on its chain of custody and the competence of the professional who handled it. We license forensic scientists. We certify evidence technicians. We regulate laboratory procedures. We do so because evidence without accountable stewardship is not evidence. It is output.

The legal record deserves no less protection.

When courts treat record creation as a service to be optimized rather than an evidentiary function to be safeguarded, they quietly reclassify the transcript. It ceases to be the court’s memory and becomes a product of a process. That reclassification shifts the judiciary’s relationship to its own documentation. It moves custody from officers of the court to infrastructures increasingly governed by commercial incentives rather than judicial ones.

This is not a question of resisting innovation. Courts have always adopted tools. Stenography itself was once new. The question is whether innovation preserves the professional accountability that gives the record its legal legitimacy.

Technology can and should assist court reporters. It should enhance capture, improve access, and strengthen preservation. But when technology displaces the licensed human being who can authenticate the record, the court does not gain modernization. It forfeits guardianship.

Judicial authority rests not only on decisional independence, but on documentary trust. The public accepts outcomes it disagrees with because it believes the process was real, reviewable, and faithfully recorded. The appellate system functions because it assumes the lower court’s memory is stable. When that stability erodes, the judiciary does not merely face logistical problems. It faces a crisis of epistemic confidence.

Judges are the ultimate custodians of the record. Not vendors. Not platforms. Not procurement departments. The choices made today about how the record is created will determine whether future courts inherit a body of law anchored in accountable human stewardship or dependent on technical systems they do not fully govern.

The court reporting profession is not asking to be preserved as tradition. It is asking the judiciary to reaffirm a principle: that the creation of the legal record is an evidentiary act requiring licensed, ethically bound, personally accountable officers of the court.

That principle has protected judicial legitimacy for over a century.

At a time when public trust is fragile and legal processes are under unprecedented scrutiny, the judiciary’s most important modernization may not be faster systems or cheaper capture. It may be the clearest possible statement that the court’s memory remains in human custody.

The record is the judiciary’s spine. Its integrity determines the strength of everything built upon it.

Respectfully,

A concerned officer of the legal system

---

✅ Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This open letter reflects professional opinion and policy analysis concerning the creation and stewardship of the legal record. It is not legal advice and does not represent the views of any court, judicial officer, or institution. It is intended to contribute to public discussion regarding evidentiary integrity, judicial administration, and the role of licensed court reporters in legal proceedings.