Every new wave of technology arrives with a list of jobs it is supposed to wipe out. For more than ten years, court reporting has sat near the top of that list. The argument always sounds convincing. Speech recognition keeps getting better. The cost of automated transcription keeps dropping. And the person sitting quietly at the edge of the deposition room starts to look, to people who do not know the work, like an expense waiting to be cut.
I have spent my career watching that prediction fail. In June 2026, the press finally caught up to what those of us inside the profession have known for years. The Wall Street Journal ran a feature with a headline that says it plainly: this is the job artificial intelligence was supposed to kill, and it now needs more humans than ever. Yahoo Finance and other outlets carried the same story to a wider audience. When the financial press starts reporting that the legal system is desperate for more stenographers, the story has not just shifted. It has flipped.
What follows is worth the attention of every attorney, litigation manager, and firm that depends on a reliable record, because the stakes here are not abstract. The shortage is real and growing. The technology has come a long way, yet it still cannot carry the weight of a certified legal record on its own. And the providers who invested in skilled people, real training, and true accountability are the ones still delivering when a case is on the line.
A Shortage Decades in the Making
The numbers are hard to argue with. The Wall Street Journal reports that the number of working court reporters in the United States has dropped by about 21 percent over the past decade. It now sits below 23,000. That is not what a profession looks like when it is being automated out of existence. It is what a profession looks like when it cannot replace its departing talent fast enough.
The pressures are built into the field. A generation of highly experienced reporters is nearing retirement at exactly the moment too few newcomers are entering to take their place. As the recent coverage noted, stenography is rarely on the radar of younger workers, and many who do try it find the training demanding enough to quit. That difficulty is not a side effect. It is the point. Earning certification usually takes 18 to 24 months of dedicated study. It requires sustained accuracy of about 95 percent on dictation testing, a command of legal and medical terminology, and in many states a license on top of it all.
The result is a textbook gap between supply and demand. The work has not slowed down. Litigation continues. Depositions continue. And the need for fast, dependable transcripts has only grown stronger. What has thinned is the pool of professionals qualified to produce that work to the standard the law requires. So it is no accident that The Wall Street Journal reported the role can pay well into six figures, reaching beyond $100,000 a year once transcript work and related services are included. Markets do not bid prices up for skills they consider obsolete.
The Human Cost of an Empty Chair
This is the moment the conversation stops being a labor-market curiosity and becomes a question of access to justice.
California offers the clearest example. The state has dealt with a court reporter shortage for years, and it has now reached a true breaking point. According to recent reporting, more than one million hearings and trials in California went forward without a verbatim transcript in the year ending March 2025. Behind that single number sits a quieter injustice. When no transcript exists, there is often no path to appeal, because the record is the foundation appellate review is built on. No record, no review.
The litigants who absorb this loss are seldom the well-resourced parties who can simply hire their own coverage. They are the families in custody disputes, the people navigating probate, and the ordinary civil litigants who cannot afford to supply their own reporter. They are left with silence where the record should be. Advocates for these litigants have brought the matter before the California Supreme Court. They describe the absence of an adequate record as a crisis that falls hardest on those least able to withstand it. That is the true cost of treating the court reporter as overhead rather than as infrastructure. The reporter is the thing that makes a proceeding trustworthy enough to be challenged, reviewed, and relied upon.
Why the Technology Keeps Coming Up Short
None of this is an argument against technology. Used well, automated tools have a real and valuable place in modern litigation support. The error lies in mistaking a useful aid for a full substitute. The reasons the substitution fails are practical, not nostalgic.
Start with accuracy under real conditions. Vendors like to cite recognition rates in the mid-90 percent range, and on clean, single-speaker audio, those numbers may hold. Legal proceedings do not take place on clean audio. They unfold amid overlapping speakers, interruptions, coughs and background noise, regional accents, voices that sound alike, and dense technical vocabulary. A skilled reporter manages all of it in real time. Just as important, the reporter can stop and ask for clarification the instant something is unintelligible. As the National Court Reporters Association has long emphasized, only a human charged with the care of the record can pause a proceeding to resolve an ambiguity on the spot. Software does not pause. It guesses. And a confident error buried in a transcript is far more dangerous than an obvious gap, because no one knows to look for it.
Then there is bias, which gets less scrutiny than it deserves. As the Daily Journal has reported, automated speech recognition does not perform equally well across all groups of speakers. The piece cites research findings that error rates for Black speakers run roughly double those for white speakers, a gap rooted in the data these systems were trained on. A tool that captures some voices more faithfully than others is not a neutral instrument, and a legal record is the last place such unevenness belongs.
Accountability may be the most important factor of all. A legal transcript is not simply a block of text. It is a sworn, certified instrument. A licensed reporter signs a certification page attesting to the accuracy and completeness of the record. If that record is ever challenged, the reporter can be called to testify to its authenticity. As both the Daily Journal and the National Court Reporters Association have noted, software can do none of this. It cannot certify. It cannot be questioned about its judgment calls. And transcripts produced by someone who was never in the room raise chain-of-custody questions that a single accountable reporter does not. The NCRA has pointed to depositions excluded from proceedings precisely because they were not transcribed by the person present to capture and monitor them.
Privacy completes the picture, and it should concern any firm handling sensitive matters. Automated and outsourced transcription workflows often route confidential audio through cloud systems, and that audio is sometimes processed beyond the reach of United States law. The Daily Journal has highlighted the exposure created when privileged testimony is sent overseas to jurisdictions that do not honor the protections, such as those under HIPAA, that we take for granted here. An in-room reporter introduces no such vulnerability.
A Patchwork of Rules and a Profession in Motion
The legal landscape itself shows how unsettled these questions remain. The rules vary dramatically from one jurisdiction to the next. California restricts electronic recording in many civil matters. North Dakota has moved the other direction, recording proceedings broadly and phasing out stenographers. The Texas Supreme Court has heard arguments on whether AI-assisted transcription tools may lawfully replace certified court reporters in depositions, a question whose answer will be watched well beyond that state's borders.
What is actually taking shape is not replacement but a layered model. The strongest litigation-support operations are combining remote and hybrid coverage, certified reporting where it is required, and automated tools used inside supervised workflows where a qualified professional still owns and certifies the final product. Done this way, the technology becomes a force multiplier. It lets a scarce group of experts do more, and do it faster, without lowering the standard of the record. That is a completely different proposition from surrendering the official record to an algorithm and hoping it holds.
"The future of court reporting has never been more stable. The firms that will thrive over the next decade are not choosing between people and technology. They are investing in both. Innovation creates efficiency, while experienced professionals provide the judgment and accountability that the legal system requires,” says Mark R. Williams, CEO of Magna Legal Services, one of the world's largest providers of court reporting and litigation support services.
What This Means for the Firms We Serve
Let me be direct about why all of this should matter to our clients. When you are taking a deposition that may determine the outcome of a case, or building a trial record that an appellate court will examine line by line, the least expensive option is rarely the one that costs the least. A defective transcript can cost you an argument, a witness's precise words, or the very ability to appeal. Whatever was saved at the front end vanishes the moment the record fails.
"I have watched this profession written off every few years, and every time the opposite has proven true. The technology improves, the demand for certified human reporters grows, and the firms that invested in people rather than shortcuts are the ones still standing when it counts. A transcript is not words on a page. It is a sworn record that a real person has to stand behind, and that is something no algorithm can do for you," says Marsha J. Naegeli, Founder and CEO of NAEGELI Deposition & Trial.
That conviction is the foundation of how we built this firm. We are not opposed to technology, and we adopt the tools that make our reporters faster and our turnaround quicker whenever they genuinely improve the work. But the certified, accountable, human-captured record remains at the center of everything we do, because that is what the law requires and what our clients deserve.
In the end, the headlines had the story backward. Artificial intelligence did not render court reporters obsolete. It made the finest among them more valuable than they have been in a generation. The shortage is real, the stakes are high, and the firms that understand the difference between fast text and a record worthy of trust are the ones that will keep delivering when everything depends on it.
When your matter demands a record you can rely on, certified by a professional prepared to stand behind every word, that is precisely what we are here to provide.
NAEGELI Deposition & Trial provides certified court reporting and litigation support services nationwide. To schedule coverage, contact our team at 800-528-3335 or email schedule@naegeliusa.com.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal, "The Job That AI Was Supposed to Kill Needs More Humans Than Ever" (June 2026); Yahoo Finance and Moneywise; the Daily Journal, "AI vs. human court reporters in the future of legal transcription"; and the National Court Reporters Association and its Journal of Court Reporting.