If you want to know the future of courtroom technology, look at today’s smartphones. They started with audio and have increasingly incorporated all sorts of other digital technologies, including voice recognition, photography, and even high-definition video. Courts have started to integrate technologies, but convergence isn’t happening as smoothly as it has on an iPhone. In fact, far from it. Bound by tradition, historically uncomfortable with technology, and by definition slow and deliberative, U.S. courts are adopting technology in fits and starts. It’s a painful process as courts try to bend digital recording technology to fit their processes and procedures while realizing that, by its very nature, technology can transform those same processes and procedures.
The impact of digital recording technology — both audio and video — is already changing how at least two key players approach their jobs: court reporters and trial attorneys. When technology is fully capable of recording a trial, will court reporters become extinct? Some trial lawyers say that the emergence of digital audio and video is revolutionizing litigation, and those who can use the technology most effectively may have the upper hand. As technologies mature and become less expensive, these changes will likely accelerate. (Consider how advances in high definition streaming have changed how you watch videos on your mobile devices.)
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