What Courts Must Do Now – The Legal Record at a Crossroads

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

For the past week, this series has examined the legal record from multiple angles: its evidentiary nature, its ethical vulnerabilities, its growing entanglement with technology and private enterprise, and the quiet changes already unfolding inside courtrooms. Together, these forces point to a conclusion that is difficult but necessary. The American justice system is approaching a structural inflection point in how it preserves truth. The record, long assumed to be stable, is now one of the most dynamic and contested elements of modern legal infrastructure.

What makes this moment dangerous is not innovation itself. Courts have always adapted to new tools. What makes it dangerous is the absence of a coherent, judiciary-led examination of what the legal record is supposed to be in an era of automation, centralization, and artificial intelligence. Change is occurring without a unified theory of evidentiary integrity. Systems are being adopted before their implications are understood.

This is not how the legal record was built.

Historically, the record evolved through crisis. Appellate failures revealed missing transcripts. Wrongful convictions exposed gaps. Judicial misconduct cases demanded reconstruction. Each era of reform hardened the system around a central principle: that the record must be created by a neutral, accountable, trained human professional operating under court authority. That principle did not arise from nostalgia. It arose from jurisprudence.

Today, courts are being asked to loosen that architecture. They are being told that recording is equivalent to record. That software can replace sworn capture. That custody can be consolidated without consequence. That accountability can be diffused across platforms and vendors. That evidentiary responsibility can be abstracted into workflows.

None of these propositions has been tested at the scale now contemplated. And none of them has been examined in the comprehensive way that the legal system traditionally applies to changes affecting rights.

The record is not peripheral. It is determinative. Appellate courts do not retry cases. They read them. Due process does not survive in theory. It survives in transcripts. Judicial accountability does not exist in abstraction. It exists in preserved proceedings. When the record fails, law loses its memory.

Which is why the central question facing courts now is not whether they can modernize. It is whether modernization is being governed by legal reasoning or by technological momentum.

Courts must begin by formally acknowledging that the legal record has entered a new era. Automation, remote proceedings, AI-assisted transcription, centralized custody, and enterprise platforms have fundamentally altered how proceedings are captured and stored. Pretending that these changes are merely operational prevents the legal system from applying the scrutiny they require.

Once acknowledged, the next step is structural assessment.

Courts, bar associations, judicial councils, and evidence rule committees must treat the record as institutional infrastructure. That means subjecting new record-creation models to the same level of review applied to other evidentiary systems. It means asking who bears legal responsibility for accuracy. It means mapping custody chains. It means interrogating whether outputs can be authenticated in court. It means examining how disputes will be resolved when records are challenged. It means identifying where conflicts of interest are introduced.

Technology procurement is not evidence policy. Yet the two are now colliding.

Courts must also clarify what role human officers of the court are meant to retain. The profession of court reporting cannot be discussed solely in terms of staffing shortages or market adaptation. It must be discussed in terms of institutional function. Is the justice system committed to maintaining a living, accountable evidentiary safeguard at the point where speech becomes law. Or is it prepared to reassign that function to systems that cannot testify, cannot swear, and cannot be sanctioned.

That is not a rhetorical question. It is a constitutional one.

If courts determine that human officers of the court remain essential, then investment must follow. Reporter shortages cannot be solved by displacement alone. They must be addressed through education pipelines, modernization of training, professional integration, and structural support. A safeguard that is allowed to atrophy will eventually be declared obsolete.

If courts determine that new hybrid models will emerge, then those models must be governed by evidentiary standards before they are normalized. Standards of certification. Standards of auditability. Standards of custody. Standards of neutrality. Standards of accountability. The justice system cannot afford to let de facto practice harden into de jure doctrine without deliberation.

Courts must also confront the growing role of commercial intermediaries. Centralized platforms now sit between proceedings and preservation. Private equity now finances segments of the record ecosystem. Data systems now aggregate transcripts into analyzable corpuses. These developments raise questions that courts have not historically had to ask.

Who owns court memory.
Who controls access.
Who governs retention.
Who monetizes derivative use.
Who bears liability when records fail.

These are not merely contract questions. They are governance questions.

Judicial independence does not exist only in decisions. It exists in custody. A court that cannot fully account for how its own proceedings are preserved has surrendered a portion of its authority, even if unintentionally.

The final responsibility courts must accept is cultural.

The legal system has grown accustomed to treating the record as automatic. It is not. It is produced. It is preserved. It is defended. And it only remains reliable if its creation is understood as a legal act rather than a technical one.

Judges, in particular, occupy a pivotal position. The presence or absence of a certified court reporter is not a scheduling detail. It is a determination about how the proceeding will exist in law. When judges discourage reporters, default to recordings, or accept degraded capture environments, they are not merely moving dockets. They are shaping the evidentiary future of the case.

That future often extends far beyond the courtroom.

Attorneys also bear responsibility. Motions, appeals, and ethical challenges depend on records whose integrity is often assumed rather than examined. The bar must begin treating record creation as part of trial strategy, part of risk management, and part of professional duty. A compromised record cannot be rehabilitated by argument.

Policymakers, too, must engage with the record as infrastructure. Legislation affecting court reporting, recording technologies, and digital court systems must be drafted with evidentiary consequences in mind. Efficiency without defensibility is not reform. It is exposure.

This series has not argued that courts must reject technology. It has argued that courts must lead its integration. The justice system cannot allow its memory to be reengineered entirely by market forces, administrative convenience, or vendor capability. It must articulate what cannot be surrendered.

Neutrality.
Accountability.
Examinability.
Independence.
Custodial clarity.

Those are not nostalgic values. They are legal ones.

Court Reporting & Captioning Week is often framed as a celebration of a profession. This series has framed it as a moment of institutional reflection. The court reporter stands at the intersection of law, language, and legitimacy. As that role is transformed, the justice system must decide whether it is evolving a safeguard or dissolving one.

There is still time to choose.

The legal record has not yet collapsed. It has not yet fragmented beyond repair. It has not yet become irretrievably commercialized or fully automated. Courts still possess the authority to define how truth enters law.

But authority unused erodes.

If the justice system does not soon convene serious, interdisciplinary examination of the record’s future, the future will be defined for it. By procurement. By staffing shortages. By vendor offerings. By technical convenience. By drift.

And drift is the least accountable force of all.

What courts must do now is not panic. It is govern.

To acknowledge that the legal record is not merely changing, but being redesigned.
To recognize that its integrity is not self-sustaining.
To reaffirm that evidence systems exist to constrain power, not serve it.
And to act, deliberately, before the foundations of judicial memory are permanently restructured.

Because the justice system does not run only on rulings.

It runs on records.

And the future of those records is being decided right now.

✅ 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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