Court Reporter
Court reporting sits in a genuinely uncomfortable spot in the automation-exposure data.
We have not ingested real-world usage data for this occupation yet. We show a band only where genuine data exists, rather than estimate one.
What a court reporter actually does
Court reporters and simultaneous captioners create the official, word-for-word transcript of legal proceedings, depositions, and other formal events, either using stenotype machines (traditional shorthand-style typing) or voice writing with a stenomask. Simultaneous captioners perform the same word-for-word transcription in real time for televised broadcasts, and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) providers do the same for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals in classrooms, meetings, and courtrooms.
A court reporter's transcript is the legal record: it gets cited on appeal, quoted in judicial opinions, and treated by courts as the definitive account of what was said, which makes near-total accuracy under real-time pressure the core of the job, not a nice-to-have. Reporters also administer oaths, mark exhibits, and manage the pace of a deposition or hearing, sitting at the center of the proceeding rather than off to the side.
Why it reads this way
Court reporting sits in a genuinely uncomfortable spot in the automation-exposure data. The occupation's own numbers show real, measurable decline already underway: the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' earlier projections put employment around 27,700 by 2022, but actual employment came in at roughly 21,300, and some state reporting associations report an 85% drop in new-reporter-program applicants over five years.
Much of that shortage has pushed courts toward digital audio recording as a lower-cost substitute, even though every serious account of digital recording -- including court administrators' own assessments -- still calls it inferior to a trained stenographic reporter for producing a reliable, appeal-ready record: staff can't fix malfunctioning vendor-maintained equipment mid-hearing, and there's no way to guarantee recording quality the way a present reporter can.
Separately, automatic speech recognition has become good enough to power live captioning and rough real-time transcripts in lower-stakes settings, encroaching on the captioning/CART side of this occupation even where the certified, appeal-ready stenographic record for actual court proceedings remains a human-produced product.
Our structural score (17/100) reflects that a meaningful share of this profession's underlying tasks -- transcription of clear, single-speaker, or slower-paced audio -- are objectively automatable today, even though the highest-stakes core of the job (real-time accuracy under oath, in an unpredictable courtroom, on a record that can decide an appeal) has proven more resistant than the raw shortage numbers alone might suggest.
Skills this role draws on
Range source: BLS OEWS wage data via O*NET OnLine (2025 release), SOC 27-3092.00 'Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners'
Average source: BLS OEWS wage data for Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners (27-3092.00) via O*NET OnLine, 2025 wage data (Annual Median Wage)
Safer, skill-adjacent careers
These aren't generic "consider retraining" suggestions. Each one shares real skill or task overlap with court reporter work, and each one scores meaningfully higher on our structural exposure scale, with the reasoning shown below.
Court interpreters work the same courtroom proceedings and share the same real-time, high-stakes accuracy demands as a court reporter, but federal/state interpreter certification and the constitutional due-process right to a competent interpreter give the role a legal wall a stenographic record doesn't have -- structuralScore 3, but reviewed as 'AI-resistant despite the paperwork' rather than 'At risk' because of that wall, versus court reporting's 17.
911 dispatchers rely on the same rapid listening, notation, and split-second accuracy under pressure as a court reporter, but the work is grounded in live emergency response requiring immediate human judgment -- automationRiskScore 87 versus 26.
Bailiffs work in the same courtroom environment and share the same requirement of a trained person physically present for every proceeding, but built around security and order rather than transcription -- automationRiskScore 88 versus 26.
Court Reporter scores 17/100 on structuralScore (Medium confidence), one of the lower readings in this dataset. The occupation is already shrinking in practice -- actual 2022 employment came in well below the BLS's own earlier projection, and some state reporting associations report an 85% drop in new-program applicants over five years -- driven by courts shifting toward digital audio recording and improving automatic speech recognition for lower-stakes captioning work. Digital recording is still widely regarded as inferior to a trained stenographic reporter for producing an appeal-ready record, which keeps the highest-stakes core of the job more resistant than the raw shortage numbers suggest, but as of 2026-08-11 that isn't enough to support a 'Safe' verdict for the occupation as a whole.
This is a researched judgment (checklist v1.2), not a statistical measurement — it sits alongside, not instead of, the structural exposure signal above. Next scheduled review: 2027-02-11.
Data sources & methodology
Salary data: BLS OEWS wage data via O*NET OnLine (2025 release), SOC 27-3092.00 'Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners'. Average figure sourced separately: BLS OEWS wage data for Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners (27-3092.00) via O*NET OnLine, 2025 wage data (Annual Median Wage).
Task descriptions: Based on O*NET occupational analysis (27-3092.00).
Real-world AI usage band: Microsoft's "Working with AI" study of Bing Copilot conversations mapped to O*NET tasks (arXiv 2507.07935), and corroborating data from the Anthropic Economic Index.
Growth projections: Little or no change (2024-2034) (O*NET OnLine / BLS Employment Projections), based on BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook.