If the court cannot give you a reporter, it now owes you a recording

For years the answer to "there is no court reporter available today" was a choice between two bad options: accept a continuance, or go forward and lose any ability to appeal. On August 10, 2026, in Family Violence Appellate Project v. Superior Court (S288176), the California Supreme Court ended that choice for the people it hurt most.

The disposition is four sentences long and worth reading in full:

The petition for writ of mandate is granted as follows: Let a writ of mandate issue directing the respondent superior courts to provide indigent litigants, upon request, with meaningful access in all cases to an official verbatim record of proceedings, including by means of electronic recording if an official reporter or official reporter pro tempore is unavailable. Each party shall bear its own costs.

What the court actually held

California's Government Code section 69957 lets courts use electronic recording to make an official record in limited civil, misdemeanor, and infraction cases, and forbids it everywhere else. That prohibition covered most of the proceedings where an ordinary person's life is decided: domestic violence and civil harassment restraining orders, child custody and support, marital dissolution, debt collection, employment and housing discrimination, probate conservatorship and guardianship.

Chief Justice Guerrero, writing for a unanimous court, did not strike the statute down. The court instead held that section 69957 is silent on indigent litigants who have no other way to obtain a record, and that courts can and must imply an exception where one is needed to preserve meaningful access to justice. That reasoning runs through the in forma pauperis doctrine and the court's own 2018 decision in Jameson v. Desta, which had already said indigent litigants are entitled to a verbatim record. What Jameson promised, the court acknowledged, "has proven illusory," because courts kept failing to staff the reporters that promise depended on.

The obligation is not discretionary. The opinion is explicit: "Courts have no discretion in this regard."

Who this covers is broader than "indigent" sounds

This is the part most summaries miss. In footnote 3 the court declined to set any absolute standard of indigency, and defined the covered group by a single practical test: can you afford to hire a private court reporter?

Because the costs involved in hiring a private court reporter can be significant, the population of litigants who cannot afford to hire a private court reporter, but who can afford to pay routine court fees and costs, may be large. Courts should be flexible in assessing a litigant's ability to pay.

The court also reaffirmed that no formal in forma pauperis application is required before relief can be granted. You do not need an approved fee waiver on file to be within the holding, and you can be well above the usual fee waiver thresholds and still qualify, because a private reporter for a multi-day matter is a genuinely expensive thing to buy.

What did not change

Three limits are worth stating plainly, because the ruling is narrower than some of the coverage suggests.

Reporters still come first. Electronic recording is the fallback, not the default. The opinion says that if a court can provide equal access to a record through a court reporter, section 69957 still forbids it from recording instead. The trigger is unavailability.

Criminal and juvenile proceedings are untouched. Those already require reporters by statute, and the general orders discussed in the opinion kept staffing them.

The writ binds four courts directly. Los Angeles, Santa Clara, Contra Costa, and San Diego were the named respondents. As a published California Supreme Court decision, though, the rule it states governs every superior court in the state, and the Los Angeles Times reported it the same way.

Also worth noting: three of those four courts had already started recording on their own, under general orders issued in 2024. The court held those orders insufficient, because they were limited to proceedings implicating fundamental rights or liberty interests and required judicial findings first. Jameson and the in forma pauperis doctrine, the opinion says, are not limited that way.

The scale of what was missing

The numbers in the record are the reason this case was heard as an original writ proceeding rather than working its way up.

• The California Access to Justice Commission found that for the year ending March 31, 2024, over one million hearings and trials took place in unlimited civil, family, and probate cases with no means to create an official transcript. It estimated litigants in over 70 percent of proceedings in those categories had no access to an official transcript.
• Los Angeles County Superior Court reported more than 332,000 hearings in 2023 alone with no verbatim record.
• Santa Clara County reported more than 56,000 in 2023, and 59,000 more in 2024 to date, roughly 290 hearings per day.

Every one of those is a proceeding where, if the judge got something wrong, there was no way to prove it.

The question the court deliberately left open

Court reporter organizations filed as amici arguing that electronic recording produces worse records than stenography: microphones that miss speakers, unintelligible stretches, clerks monitoring equipment while doing three other jobs. The court declined to referee that fight. Footnote 5:

It is sufficient to note that a verbatim record created by electronic recording is better than no record at all. ... We expect that concerns regarding accuracy can be mitigated with standardized procedures and safeguards.

That is a real holding and an honest one, but notice what it does. It moves the accuracy problem out of the courtroom and into whatever happens to the recording afterward. A hearing that used to produce a certified transcript from a trained professional in the room now produces an audio file, and somebody still has to turn that file into a document a court of appeal will accept.

Both amici were right, in a sense. A recording is better than nothing. A recording is also not yet a record anyone can cite, quote in a brief, or attach to an appellate filing.

If you are the litigant

None of this is legal advice, and the procedures for requesting a record and obtaining a transcript from one vary by county. Check your own court's rules and, where you can, ask a legal aid organization. The practical shape of it:

1. Ask, and ask on the record. The duty in the disposition is triggered "upon request." Make the request before the hearing where you can, and repeat it in the courtroom if no reporter appears.
2. Say you cannot afford a private reporter. That is the test the court set. A fee waiver helps but the opinion does not require one.
3. The court holds the official recording. This ruling is about the court's own electronic recording, made under the standards in California Rules of Court 2.952 and 2.954. It is not permission for a party to record proceedings themselves, which remains separately regulated.
4. Plan for the transcript, not just the recording. An audio file is the raw material. What an appellate court reads is a formatted, line-numbered, certified transcript.

Why we care about step 4

We build software that turns hearing audio, or a transcript you already have, into a filing-ready court transcript: correct margins, 25 numbered lines per page, the caption, the indexes, and a certification page prepared and waiting.

The system never certifies anything. It generates the certification page, and a human signs it. That rule mattered to us before this decision and it matters more now. This ruling is about to put audio recordings in the hands of a large number of people who could not previously afford a record at all, and the worst possible outcome would be replacing "no record" with "a record nobody checked."

The court said accuracy concerns can be mitigated with standardized procedures and safeguards. We think that is right, and we think the safeguards have to be visible: every uncertain word flagged rather than silently guessed, every speaker attribution something a human confirms, every correction logged. That is the accuracy work we publish numbers on, and it is why we show you where a transcript is unsure instead of handing back clean pages that hide it.

A million hearings a year just stopped disappearing. What they become next is the part still being decided.

Sources

• Family Violence Appellate Project v. Superior Court, S288176 (Aug. 10, 2026), the full published opinion
• Los Angeles Times, "After more than a million hearings without a transcript, California high court allows recording", reported by Sonja Sharp