Insights Articles

Court reporting is changing.

Not because the need for an accurate record has diminished: it hasn’t. If anything, the increasing complexity and speed of litigation make the integrity of the record more important than ever.

What is changing is how that record is being created, managed and delivered.

Digital reporting is becoming a more significant part of the court reporting landscape. Artificial intelligence and speech recognition technologies continue to improve. Lawyers increasingly expect faster access to testimony, sophisticated hybrid capabilities and technology that allows them to interact with the record while a proceeding is underway.

Those changes create opportunity. But they also create risk if we begin to confuse recording a proceeding with creating a reliable evidentiary record.

For litigation leaders thinking about where the profession is going, there are several things worth preparing for now.

Digital reporting will become increasingly important

The reality is that digital reporting will play a larger role in the future of court reporting.

That shouldn’t be controversial.

There simply are not enough stenographic reporters entering the profession to meet every future requirement, particularly as demand fluctuates and litigation becomes increasingly national, international and hybrid.

But “digital” can mean very different things.

At its most basic, digital reporting can look like someone pressing a record button and sending the audio away for transcription later.

That is not, in my view, where this profession should be heading.

A modern digital reporter should be actively engaged in protecting the record: monitoring audio quality, identifying speakers, creating annotations, flagging terminology, interacting with the record in the moment, marking exhibits and addressing problems while they can still be corrected.

Because once everyone has left the room, it may be too late.

If two people speak at once, a microphone fails, an acronym is misunderstood or a participant quietly answers from the far end of the room, technology cannot necessarily reconstruct what was never captured properly in the first place.

A recording is a tool. The record still requires a guardian.

Technology should strengthen the reporter, not eliminate the human role

There is enormous potential in speech recognition, AI and other emerging technologies.

Used well, they can make the record faster, more accessible and considerably more useful.

Lawyers can increasingly search testimony as it happens, identify key issues, locate earlier answers, flag inconsistencies and obtain working drafts far more quickly than was traditionally possible. That can fundamentally change how counsel prepare and respond during a proceeding.

But the value comes from combining technology with expertise.

Artificial intelligence does not understand the importance of a seemingly insignificant answer. It does not know that counsel has just misstated an exhibit number. It may not recognize that three people speaking simultaneously have rendered a portion of the record unusable.

The strongest model is therefore not human versus technology. It is human expertise enhanced by technology. That distinction matters.

Litigation teams will expect access to the record much sooner

For many years, the traditional workflow was relatively straightforward: conduct the examination, wait for the transcript and review it later. Increasingly, that timeline no longer reflects how litigation operates.

Lawyers are working with large teams, enormous document collections and compressed schedules. Examinations may influence strategy immediately. Counsel may need testimony for the next witness, an upcoming motion, an expert meeting or a negotiation taking place days, or sometimes hours, later.

Court reporting providers will increasingly be judged not simply on whether they can eventually produce a transcript, but on whether they can provide the right form of the record at the right time.

That might mean realtime. It might mean a rough draft. It might mean searchable near-realtime text generated through a digital workflow. And sometimes it will mean a traditional certified transcript.

The important question will increasingly be:

What does the litigation team need from the record, and when do they need it?

Service will become more important, not less

Ironically, as technology becomes more sophisticated, I believe service will become an even greater differentiator.

Litigation rarely happens exactly as planned.

• A witness becomes available unexpectedly.
• An examination moves from in-person to hybrid.
• Counsel needs another breakout room.
  
• Someone cannot connect remotely.
• An additional lawyer joins.
• A proceeding runs late.
• A transcript is suddenly needed sooner than anticipated.

The best technology in the world means very little if no one answers the phone when something goes wrong.

Litigation leaders should therefore be evaluating providers on more than technology or price:

• Who is managing the proceeding?
• Who is monitoring the technology?
• Who solves the problem when something changes?
  
• Who understands the file?

And perhaps most importantly:

• Can you get what you need when you need it?

Those questions will matter more as proceedings become technologically complex.

Facilities need to be designed for modern litigation

There is another part of the litigation experience that is often overlooked: the physical environment.

When lawyers, witnesses, clients and reporters are sitting in a room for eight or ten hours, small things stop being small:

• The chair matters.
• The temperature matters.
• The lighting matters.
  
• The ability to see a screen clearly matters.
• Reliable Wi-Fi matters.
• Accessible power matters.
• Good microphones matter.
• Coffee, water and food matter.
• Privacy for confidential conversations matters.

None of these things are particularly glamorous, but anyone who has spent an entire day in an examination knows how dramatically they affect concentration and performance.

Court reporting facilities should therefore no longer simply be rooms containing a table and a few chairs.

They should be purpose-built litigation environments.

That means integrated screens and videoconferencing, strong acoustics, appropriate microphones, secure connectivity, flexible room configurations, breakout space and onsite technical support.

It also means basic human comfort. Because asking - and answering - questions all day is demanding work.

The future will require more choice, not less

There is sometimes a tendency to frame the future of court reporting as though one method must replace another. I don't believe that is where we are headed.

There will continue to be proceedings where a highly skilled stenographic realtime reporter is unquestionably the right solution.

There will be others where a professionally managed digital reporting solution makes considerably more sense.

Some matters require immediate realtime text.

Others require an accurate certified transcript several days later.

Some proceedings are entirely in person.

Others may involve participants joining from three cities and two countries.

The future is therefore not about forcing every proceeding into the same model.

It is about having enough expertise, and enough technological capability, to recommend the right reporting solution for the proceeding in front of you.

The fundamentals haven't changed

Court reporting may be in transition, but the core responsibility has not changed.

The record must be accurate. It must be complete. It must be secure. It must be available when counsel needs it. And there must be someone who understands that the record is more than an audio file or a stream of text. It is evidence.

Technology will undoubtedly continue to transform how we capture and use that evidence.

But the organizations that succeed in the next generation of court reporting will be the ones that combine innovation with something much older: expertise, accountability and service.

Because however sophisticated the technology becomes, litigation still needs a guardian of the record.