1.8 million California court hearings had no verbatim record, making appeals functionally impossible

Of the 2.49 million family law, probate, and unlimited civil hearings in California between April 2023 and March 2025, an estimated 1.78 million — 71.7% — had no verbatim record because no court reporter was present. The California Supreme Court itself ruled in Jameson v. Desta that the absence of a verbatim record will be 'frequently be fatal' to a litigant's ability to have claims of trial court error resolved on the merits on appeal. In practice, this means that for nearly three-quarters of civil hearings in the largest state court system in the country, the right to appeal is effectively dead on arrival. The 'so what' chain here runs deep. A parent loses a custody hearing because the judge misapplied the law. Without a transcript, the appellate court has no way to know what happened at trial — what evidence was presented, what the judge said, what objections were raised. The appeal gets denied not because the parent was wrong, but because there is literally no record to review. That parent loses custody of their child not on the merits, but because of a staffing shortage. Multiply this by 1.78 million hearings and you have a systemic denial of due process at industrial scale. The California Constitution guarantees due process and equal protection, but these guarantees are hollow when the infrastructure to enforce them does not exist. The stenographer workforce has declined 21% over the last decade, with only about 23,000 remaining nationally. The profession requires 2-4 years of specialized training with a high attrition rate — some programs report graduation rates below 15%. Courts cannot simply hire their way out of this shortage because the pipeline of new reporters is a trickle. Meanwhile, electronic recording — used routinely in 33 out of 35 states surveyed — faces resistance from the court reporter lobby, which has fought legislative efforts to allow digital alternatives. California dedicated $6.8 million to a five-year pilot program to hire more reporters, but this is a rounding error against the scale of the shortage. The structural problem is that courts built their entire appellate system around a profession that is disappearing, and the political and institutional inertia preventing a switch to digital recording means millions of litigants lose their appeal rights while stakeholders debate.