The Record Has
a Heartbeat.

This week, something significant happened in our industry. The American Association of Electronic Reporters and Transcribers (AAERT) and the Society for the Technological Advancement of Reporting (STAR) announced a unanimous vote by both boards to merge and form CAPTUR—the Council for the Advancement of Professionals, Technology, and Unbiased Reporting.

For those of us who build tools to support the people who make the record, this is more than a headline. It is a statement. It is the profession speaking in one voice about something that the industry has debated too quietly, for too long.

I want to offer a perspective from where I sit—as Mona Datt, CEO of Loom Analytics, a company built precisely on the belief that technology and people are not rivals in this process. They are partners. And when one tries to operate without the other, the record suffers, and ultimately, justice suffers.

Every Method Is Legitimate. Every Reporter Is Essential.

One of the things I find most meaningful about the CAPTUR merger is what it says about the diversity of the profession. For years, there has been friction between those who capture the record by steno, by digital recording, by voice writing, or by pen and paper. Each method has advocates and detractors. Each has contexts where it excels.

But here is what every single one of these methods has in common: a trained, certified, accountable human being at the centre of the process. That person is not an optional add-on. They are not a redundancy. They are the integrity of the record.

This came through clearly in a session I hosted at Illoominate 2025—our annual conference on the impact of AI on court reporting and transcription operations. In Capturing the Record: Ensuring No Voice Is Left Behind in the Age of AI, I sat down with Kim Neeson (VP of Court Reporting at Array), Susan LaPooh (then Sr. Director of Testimony Capture at Remote Legal, now President of AAERT), and Lori Stocco (President of the BC Shorthand Reporters Association). What came through clearly from all of us was that the method of capture is secondary to the professional doing the capturing.

A court reporter or transcriptionist does not just press record or write down words. They make real-time decisions about accuracy. They flag ambiguities. They ensure that what is captured reflects what was actually said—not what an algorithm guessed was said, not what a model predicted based on context, but what was actually said, in a proceeding that may determine someone's freedom, their family, their livelihood, or their rights.

Technology Has a Seat at the Table - Not the Whole Table

At Loom Analytics, we spend every day thinking about how to make technology work better for court reporters and transcriptionists. We build workflow tools, we develop products that reduce friction, that improve turnaround, that help professionals manage complexity at scale. I believe deeply in what technology can do for this profession.

But I also believe—and this is the founding principle of what we do—that technology is a tool wielded by a person, not a replacement for the person wielding it.

The push toward AI-only solutions in legal proceedings is being driven, as AAERT and STAR have stated plainly, by "well-funded private interests" selling the promise of removing human accuracy, impartiality, and integrity from the process entirely—to budget-constrained buyers who are eager to believe the cost savings are real and the risks are minimal.

They are not. The risks are significant. And the people who will bear those risks are not the vendors pitching the technology. They are the litigants, the witnesses, the defendants, the families. They are the public.

The Public Interest Is Why This Matters

Court reporting and transcription are not administrative functions. They are acts of public service. The record exists so that justice can be reviewed, appealed, corrected, and trusted. Every transcript that goes out the door is a document that someone may one day rely upon to prove their innocence, to enforce a contract, to establish what the law actually said.

That record needs to be right. It needs to be complete. And it needs to have been produced by someone who understood the weight of that responsibility and was trained, certified, and accountable to uphold it.

That is not a romantic notion. It is a structural one. Remove the professional from the process and you do not have a cheaper, faster version of the same outcome. You have a fundamentally different—and fundamentally riskier—kind of record.

What CAPTUR Signals for Our Industry

The formation of CAPTUR brings together stenographers, digital reporters, voice writers, transcribers, videographers, scopists, editors, proofreaders, instructors, and agency owners under one professional association for the first time. That is not a small thing.

It says: we are stronger unified than we are fractured. It says: our differences in method do not divide us from our shared purpose. And it says: we are paying attention to what is happening in the market, and we are choosing to meet it together rather than separately.

From where I sit as CEO of Loom Analytics, this is exactly the right move at exactly the right time. The profession needs a single, credible, unified voice that can go to legislators, to courts, to buyers, and say: here is what a quality record requires, here is who produces it, and here is what you are giving up if you choose to cut us out.

Where Technology and People Meet

The name CAPTUR itself—the Council for the Advancement of Professionals, Technology, and Unbiased Reporting—gets it right. Professionals. Technology. In that order, and together.

This is the philosophy we build from every day. Our products exist to put better tools in the hands of better professionals. Not to remove the professional from the equation. Not to simulate their judgment with a model. But to give them leverage—to help them do more, faster, with less friction, without ever compromising the integrity of the work.

The record has a heartbeat because a human being is tending to it. Technology can amplify that—it can support it, accelerate it, make it more efficient. But it cannot replicate it. And it should not be asked to.

I am encouraged by the CAPTUR merger. I am encouraged by the clarity with which its founding statement identifies the threat and the response. And I am proud to be building products in service of the professionals who show up every day to make sure that what happens in our courts—the moments that shape people's lives—is captured, preserved, and accessible.

To every court reporter, transcriptionist, and legal record professional reading this: what you do is indispensable. The technology that supports you should know its place—and its place is behind you, not instead of you.

If the conversation above resonated with you, I'd encourage you to watch the full session replay from Illoominate 2025: Capturing the Record: Ensuring No Voice Is Left Behind in the Age of AI.

You can also read the full CAPTUR merger details at aaert.org/captur-merger-details.