$ cat ~/blog/court-reporting-tech-from-the-inside.md
What Happens When the Person Who Runs the Court Reporting Tech Also Builds the Tools
I run the technology at a 45-year-old court reporting firm and build the tools the field uses — on legal tech, AI for court reporters, and the gap in legacy court reporting software.
Most legal tech is built by people who have never sat in a deposition, never fought a proprietary audio format at 11pm before a transcript is due, never had to explain to a court reporter why the software changed again. I have. That’s the whole difference.
By day I’m the Director of Technology at Executive Reporting Service — a court reporting firm that’s been producing the legal record in Florida since 1981. By night I build software for the same industry as DepoStack. Running the technology and building the tools are usually two different jobs, held by two different people who rarely talk. Doing both means I can’t hide from either one. The thing I ship at night, I have to live with the next morning.
The gap nobody admits
The gap in legacy legal tech is bigger than anyone lets on. Court reporting technology runs on formats and workflows designed for a desktop in 2005. Recordings get locked inside proprietary containers — SGMCA, FTR, multi-channel BWF — that only one vendor’s software can open. Transcript delivery is email attachments and hope. And the newest entrants treat the field as a race to remove the human: feed the audio to a model, generate a transcript, ship it.
That sounds like progress until you remember what the record is for. A transcript isn’t content. It’s evidence. Somebody has to be accountable for every page and line, and “the AI said so” is not a person you can put under oath. So my rule is the opposite of the industry’s: the professional is the product, and AI is the multiplier. The court reporter’s judgment is the thing the whole system depends on. My job is to make them faster — not optional.
Why I started building instead of buying
That conviction is why I build instead of just buying. Off-the-shelf court reporting technology kept failing the same way: it solved a vendor’s problem, not the reporter’s. So I started shipping the tools I wished existed.
The first was DepoAudio. The pitch is unglamorous and exactly right: court recordings shouldn’t be held hostage by the software that made them. It converts those proprietary formats into standard audio you can actually use, entirely on your machine. No subscription, no cloud upload, no account. For a field that handles sensitive testimony, “on-device” isn’t a feature — it’s the requirement. It’s free and open source, because some plumbing should just be plumbing.
The second is CasePrompts, and it’s where the question of AI for court reporters gets interesting. The litigation world is drowning in generic AI prompts that hallucinate confidently and cite nothing. CasePrompts is the opposite discipline: copy-ready prompts for legal work, built on what we call the CITE method, where every output points to page:line — and if something isn’t in the record, the AI says so instead of inferring. It’s prompting like you’re assigning a task to a junior associate, not Googling. That distinction is the entire game in legal AI. Anti-hallucination isn’t a nice-to-have here; it’s the product.
Building from inside changes what you make
When you also run the technology, you can’t ship a demo. You feel the format that won’t open, the reporter who needs the tool to be obvious, the attorney who needs the cite to be exact. Court reporting technology built by someone with no stake in the record tends to optimize for the screenshot. Built by someone who has to answer for it Monday morning, it optimizes for trust. Those are very different products, and the field can tell the difference even when it can’t name it.
None of this is anti-AI. I build on these models every day. It’s anti-pretending — pretending the model is the professional, pretending proprietary lock-in is a moat instead of a liability, pretending court reporting is a transcription problem instead of an accountability one. The firms and reporters who come out ahead won’t be the ones who removed the human fastest. They’ll be the ones who got faster without giving up the thing that made them trustworthy in the first place.
That’s the bet I’m making, and I’m making it from inside the building.
DepoAudio and CasePrompts are the first two tools, not the last. I’m just getting started.
If you produce the record — or you’re a developer who finds this intersection as interesting as I do — DepoStack is opening early access. Come see what we’re building: depostack.com.