Courts are institutions of memory. They exist not only to decide disputes in the moment, but to create records that allow those decisions to be reviewed, enforced, challenged, and understood long after the courtroom has emptied. The legitimacy of the judiciary does not rest solely on outcomes. It rests on documentation. On the ability of higher courts, litigants, and the public to examine what occurred, how it occurred, and whether the process honored the law.

For judges and court administrators, the legal record is not an operational detail. It is the structural spine of the justice system.

Every appeal is built on it. Every writ depends on it. Every finding of error, abuse of discretion, or harmless mistake emerges from it. When courts discuss access to justice, modernization, or innovation, the conversation often focuses on speed, cost, and volume. Rarely does it begin where it should: with the evidentiary integrity of the record itself.

A court without a reliable record is not merely inefficient. It is unreviewable.

The court reporting profession evolved precisely because early legal systems recognized a fundamental truth: spoken proceedings vanish unless preserved by a trained, accountable, and methodologically transparent officer of the court. The stenographic reporter was not introduced as a convenience. The role was created as a safeguard. Over time, licensing regimes, certification standards, and ethical codes developed to formalize what courts already understood intuitively: whoever creates the official record holds extraordinary power over the legal system’s memory.

That power must be bounded by professional duty.

Certified stenographic reporters do not simply capture words. They manage the capture environment. They interrupt when testimony becomes unintelligible. They identify speakers. They mark exhibits. They annotate nonverbal events. They maintain redundant source records. They preserve custody. They authenticate the transcript. And they certify, under penalty of perjury, that the transcript is a true and correct record of proceedings.

That certification is not ceremonial. It is the mechanism by which the transcript becomes evidence.

When a reporter certifies a transcript, the court is not outsourcing transcription. It is commissioning an evidentiary artifact. The reporter becomes a potential witness to the record’s creation. If challenged, they can testify to equipment, procedures, interruptions, corrections, and anomalies. They can be examined. They can be sanctioned. They can be held professionally and legally accountable.

This is what distinguishes a legal record from a recording.

A recording is data. A record is evidence.

In recent years, courts across the country have begun experimenting with alternatives that blur or erase that distinction. Digital recording systems. Platform-managed capture. Remote vendor services. Automated transcription pipelines. These tools are often adopted under the banners of efficiency, budget relief, or access expansion. But embedded in these changes is a profound shift in how courts conceptualize the record itself.

The record is increasingly being treated as output rather than evidence.

That shift carries consequences that extend far beyond operations.

Systems that generate transcripts through opaque software processes cannot be cross-examined. Platforms that centralize capture and storage cannot be sworn. Algorithms cannot testify to why a word was substituted, a speaker misidentified, or an utterance lost. Vendors may provide customer support, but they do not provide evidentiary accountability.

When the court no longer has a human officer who can explain how the record was made, the court loses something essential: the ability to defend the provenance of its own memory.

This matters most when something goes wrong. Appeals rarely turn on perfect transcripts. They turn on disputed ones. On muffled audio. On overlapping speakers. On inaudible testimony. On missing sidebars. On objections that alter the standard of review. In those moments, the court depends on a professional who can explain the conditions under which the record was created and why it should—or should not—be relied upon.

Without that professional, the court is left defending a system.

Systems do not take oaths. They do not carry licenses. They do not hold ethical obligations to the judiciary. They are governed by service contracts, not codes of conduct. When courts transfer custody of the record from licensed officers to technical infrastructures, they exchange a judicial accountability model for a commercial one.

That exchange is not neutral.

Private platforms are not built to preserve constitutional processes. They are built to scale. Their incentives center on integration, data centralization, analytics, and recurring revenue. Once courts become dependent on proprietary ecosystems for record creation, storage, and retrieval, they quietly relinquish control over the architecture of judicial memory.

At that point, questions of format, access, pricing, retention, and interoperability are no longer judicial questions. They are product decisions.

The long-term implications are difficult to overstate. The legal record is not merely an internal court document. It is a public instrument. It underpins appellate review, post-conviction relief, administrative oversight, media scrutiny, and historical scholarship. It must remain methodologically transparent, independently verifiable, and structurally governed by the judiciary itself.

Court administrators understand better than anyone that legitimacy is cumulative. It is built through thousands of invisible acts of procedural reliability. The record is one of those acts. It is where public trust quietly lives or quietly erodes.

Protecting the court reporting profession is therefore not about resisting technology. Courts have always adopted tools. Stenography itself was once a technology. The question is not whether courts modernize. The question is whether modernization preserves or dissolves professional accountability at the point where evidence is created.

Technology should serve licensed officers of the court, not replace them.

Judicial leadership is uniquely positioned to draw that line. To insist that innovation occurs within a framework that preserves:

• professional certification
• human authentication
• evidentiary custody
• methodological transparency
• and direct accountability to the court

This framework is not an obstacle to progress. It is what allows progress to occur without destabilizing appellate rights, due process, and public confidence.

Every generation of judges inherits a legal system built by its predecessors. The decisions made now about the legal record will echo forward for decades. Courts will either remain the stewards of their own memory—or become dependent on infrastructures they do not fully control.

The record is the judiciary’s spine. If it weakens, the institution bends. And if it bends long enough, it does not straighten easily.

The most consequential modernization courts can pursue today is not faster capture. It is firmer guardianship.

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✅ 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.