Between Bench and Record – What Is Already Happening Inside America’s Courtrooms

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

In courthouses across the United States, the transformation of the legal record is no longer theoretical. It is not arriving through sweeping legislation or headline-grabbing reforms. It is appearing instead in ordinary courtrooms, through routine decisions that quietly reshape how proceedings are preserved. These moments rarely attract attention, yet they are redefining the evidentiary environment in which justice operates. The record is changing in practice long before it changes in law.

In some courtrooms, certified reporters are present but discouraged. Judges, facing crushing dockets and administrative pressure, increasingly ask whether a reporter is “necessary” rather than assuming one is essential. Attorneys are sometimes told that a recording will suffice, even when a stenographic reporter is available. Proceedings move forward without a verbatim human record, often with no discussion of the evidentiary consequences. The absence of a reporter is framed as efficiency, not as a structural shift.

In other courtrooms, proceedings unfold at speeds that no human record can reliably capture. Judicial calendars are congested, and hearings are compressed into narrow windows that encourage rapid colloquy and overlapping speech. Lawyers speak over one another, objections are rushed, and rulings are delivered without pause. When speech collapses into noise, the record does not fail loudly; it thins quietly. The resulting transcripts, whether produced from audio or human notes, inevitably lose precision.

There are also courtrooms where technology now occupies the space once reserved for professional judgment. Digital recording systems sit in corners, often unattended, sometimes malfunctioning, and occasionally misunderstood by those responsible for them. Microphones fail, batteries die, channels drop, and proceedings continue regardless. The assumption that something is being captured replaces confirmation that something has been preserved. The courtroom moves on even when the record may not.

Court reporters working today increasingly describe their role as reactive, rather than integral. They are called in after the fact to transcribe recordings they did not control. They are asked to certify records they did not create. They are placed at the end of custody chains, rather than at the beginning. The professional function shifts from evidentiary guardian to production technician.

The consequences of these shifts do not surface immediately. They appear months or years later, when appellate counsel requests clarification and none exists. They emerge when trial judges attempt to reconstruct hearings that were never cleanly captured. They materialize when transcripts contain indeterminate speakers, missing exchanges, or procedural gaps. At that point, no technological upgrade can restore what was not preserved.

Judges are not driving these changes out of disregard. Many are navigating acute reporter shortages, limited budgets, and institutional mandates to move cases. They are being offered technological substitutes as solutions, rather than stopgaps. In an environment of constant triage, structural questions are often postponed. Yet postponement is itself a decision.

What is rarely acknowledged is that these courtroom adjustments are cumulative. One hearing without a reporter becomes two. One department experimenting with recordings becomes a courthouse norm. What begins as exception slowly becomes practice. Practice, over time, becomes precedent.

Inside these courtrooms, the legal record is no longer a fixed institutional feature. It is becoming a variable. Its presence depends on staffing, scheduling, equipment, and administrative discretion. Its quality depends on acoustics, technology, and post-production processes far removed from the courtroom itself.

The justice system has always depended on the idea that the record stands apart from the proceeding. It is the stable mirror against which decisions are reviewed. When that mirror fractures, even subtly, the system loses a portion of its self-correction. Error becomes harder to identify, and authority becomes harder to challenge.

Court Reporting & Captioning Week often highlights the skill and dedication of those who produce records. That recognition matters. But the deeper issue now unfolding is environmental, rather than personal. The courtroom itself is being reorganized around a diminished conception of the record.

This is not a future problem. It is not speculative. It is already happening in municipal courts, in superior courts, in administrative hearings, and in remote proceedings across the country. The record is being reshaped not by decree, but by drift.

The danger of drift is that it feels natural. It does not announce itself as change. It arrives as accommodation. It embeds itself through repetition. By the time its consequences become visible, its architecture has already hardened.

This series exists to make those invisible shifts visible. Because the record does not disappear all at once. It erodes. And erosion, in a system built on memory, is one of the most consequential forms of change there is.

✅ Disclaimer

This article reflects the author’s professional analysis and opinion, informed by courtroom experience, industry research, and publicly available sources. It is published for educational and discussion purposes only and does not constitute legal advice, regulatory guidance, or the position of any court, agency, or professional association.

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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