Jayne Williams is 33 and three years into training for a job that a lot of smart people assumed would be gone by now. She is learning to be a court reporter, the person who sits in a courtroom and types out every word that is said. Automated transcription keeps getting better and cheaper, and more courtrooms now run live speech-to-text on a screen. On paper, this looks like one of the first jobs software should erase.
Williams is not worried. And the strange thing is that the numbers are on her side. The work she is training for now pays a solid salary, and across the country there are far more openings than there are people to fill them.
This is one of those stories that does not fit the headline everyone expected.
What a court reporter actually does
A court reporter does more than capture words. In a real courtroom there are coughs, slamming doors, people talking over each other, and witnesses giving painful testimony in a shaky voice. The reporter works through all of it. They note physical gestures that a microphone never hears. They gently ask a witness to repeat an answer that got lost. The transcript they sign and certify becomes part of the official legal record, and it matters most during appeals, when a single sentence can change the outcome of a case.
Williams hopes to work in Iowa's courts, where the base salary is $63,000 plus state benefits. On top of that, reporters earn per-page fees for selling copies of transcripts and for taking down depositions, and nationwide many of them clear more than $100,000 a year. The skill is real and hard-won. Texas, for example, requires a reporter to hit 95 percent accuracy while typing 225 words a minute for five minutes straight. A score of 94.8 percent does not pass.
So why the shortage
The threat to this profession was never that a machine does the job better. It is that too few people are stepping in to do it at all. Stenographers are retiring, and not enough newcomers finish the demanding training to replace them. In California, nearly half of the active court-reporter licenses were issued at least 30 years ago. Over the past decade the estimated number of US court reporters dropped 21 percent, to fewer than 23,000.
That gap opened a door for technology. More courts now let "digital" reporters run the recording equipment and certify the transcript, a path that takes weeks of certification instead of the years of training a traditional reporter needs. The cost difference is steep. In North Dakota, which moved to recording all of its proceedings this year, a transcript taken down by a stenographer can run hundreds of dollars, while an electronic recording costs around $10. Because of the shortage in California, about 72 percent of certain civil cases between April 2023 and June 2025 had no word-for-word record at all.
The recordings are not flawless. During the 2023 Alex Murdaugh murder trial, the digital system used as a backup produced a transcript the defense said was too flawed to be useful. The people who do this for a living put it plainly. As the head of the national reporters association said, nobody can take over the integrity that a trained reporter brings to the record.
The picture has more than one side. The technology keeps improving, and many in the field see the future as legal professionals using these tools to meet demand the human workforce can no longer cover on its own. Some reporters are already adapting. A growing number work as "voice writers," who quietly repeat testimony into a sound-dampening mask using a kind of vocal shorthand that software then captures and cleans up. One of them, Emma Guillot, trained for ten months in an online program rather than the years a stenography machine demands.
There is an old idea from economics called the Jevons Paradox. When coal-burning engines got more efficient in the 1800s, people expected the country to use less coal. The opposite happened. Because coal power got cheaper and easier to use, people found far more uses for it and ended up burning much more. When something becomes cheap and easy, we tend to want a lot more of it, not less.
AI is making many kinds of work cheap and easy in exactly this way, and court reporting is a small preview of what that can do. Cheaper transcription does not make the need for an accurate, trustworthy legal record disappear. It can raise it, because more cases get recorded and more records get challenged. The parts that stay valuable are the human ones: the judgment to know when an answer got lost, the accuracy to certify what was actually said, and the willingness to put your name on the record and stand behind it.
So it is worth being careful before writing off any job. Confident predictions that a particular kind of work is finished have a long history of being wrong, and this one already looks shaky three years in. The honest read is more hopeful and more interesting. The machines are getting good at the easy 90 percent, and in a courtroom, the last 10 percent is the whole job. For now, the people who can do that part are in short supply and getting paid for it.