Court Reporters’ Open Letter – The Rule of Law Begins With the Legal Record

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

January 2026

We, licensed court reporters, write at a moment when the foundations of the American justice system are being quietly but fundamentally altered. Judges, lawyers, legislators, and public officials swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, an obligation that is not symbolic but structural. That oath presumes the existence of institutions capable of preserving truth, enforcing procedure, and restraining power. Central among those institutions is the legal record, which makes rights provable, proceedings reviewable, and authority accountable. Without a trustworthy record, the promise of due process becomes theoretical rather than real.

The legal record is not a convenience or a clerical byproduct of litigation. It is the mechanism through which testimony becomes evidence, proceedings become history, and decisions become subject to appeal. For more than a century, licensed stenographic court reporters have served as sworn officers of the court responsible for producing that record. They are trained, examined, regulated, and ethically bound to accuracy, neutrality, and preservation. Their role exists precisely because the legal system requires an accountable human professional at the point where law becomes fact. The reliability of the courts has always depended on this structure.

That structure is now being dismantled in the name of modernization. Across the country, courts are replacing licensed reporters with unmanaged digital recording systems, remote monitoring arrangements, and experimental transcription technologies. These systems are often operated by private vendors who are not officers of the court and are not governed by the same professional or ethical obligations. In many jurisdictions, licensure standards that once protected the record are being relaxed or abandoned altogether. What is being presented as efficiency is, in practice, the removal of legal responsibility from the very place where it matters most.

When the legal record is separated from professional accountability, courts do not become more innovative. They become less lawful. No software platform can take an oath, no algorithm can certify proceedings, and no unlicensed system can bear constitutional responsibility for the integrity of the record. Technology can assist the justice system, but it cannot replace the legal function of an officer of the court. When no identifiable licensed professional is responsible for the record, the record ceases to be a legal instrument and becomes a technical artifact.

This transformation has consequences that extend far beyond the court reporting profession. Appellate review depends on reliable records. Civil rights enforcement depends on provable proceedings. Public confidence depends on the knowledge that what happens in court can be independently verified. When records are incomplete, mediated by private platforms, or detached from accountable professionals, the legitimacy of the system itself is weakened. A court that cannot reliably prove what occurred within its own walls cannot credibly claim to administer justice.

We are not writing to defend a job category. We are writing to defend a constitutional function. The stenographic court reporter is not a legacy role, but a structural safeguard designed to ensure that the state’s most powerful processes are permanently accountable. Removing that safeguard does not eliminate cost or friction; it transfers risk from institutions to the public. It turns the legal record from protected civic infrastructure into a managed service.

The erosion of institutional safeguards rarely announces itself as a crisis. It proceeds through administrative decisions, pilot programs, and procurement contracts that quietly redefine responsibility. Over time, professional roles are reframed as technical options, and constitutional functions are reframed as market solutions. By the time consequences appear, the structures that once prevented them have already been dismantled. The replacement of licensed court reporters with unregulated recording regimes follows this pattern precisely.

We therefore call on judges, court administrators, lawmakers, and legal institutions to reaffirm licensure as a constitutional protection, rather than a bureaucratic formality. We urge courts to restore stenographic court reporters as the default creators and custodians of the legal record. We ask that any technological integration be subjected to the same evidentiary, ethical, and accountability standards that govern officers of the court. We call for an immediate halt to the expansion of unregulated systems that lack professional responsibility. We insist that the legal record be treated as protected public infrastructure, not as a commercial workflow.

The rule of law is not sustained by rhetoric. It is sustained by systems that make power answerable and rights enforceable. The legal record is one of those systems. Without it, courts lose not only accuracy but authority. Without it, justice becomes assertion rather than proof.

History will judge this period not only by what courts decided, but by whether the mechanisms that preserved those decisions remained worthy of trust. It will ask whether the legal profession defended the structures that made law meaningful. It will examine who spoke when foundational safeguards were being removed. Silence in such a moment is not neutrality but acquiescence.

We stand now because the legal record is too central to justice to be surrendered quietly. We speak as licensed professionals who have served courts, litigants, and the public across jurisdictions and generations. We speak across political and geographic lines because constitutional structure is not a partisan matter. We speak because once accountability is removed from the record, it cannot be restored by good intentions alone. The defense of the rule of law must begin where the law is written into permanent form.

Signed,
Coalition of Licensed Court Reporters

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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