Five years ago, when Covid-19 shuttered businesses, schools and many government offices, institutions recognized how technology could bridge some of the gaps of in-person work. As many operations shifted, Brandon Greenblatt saw an opportunity to leverage that technology in the legal profession. We recently sat down with the Founder and CEO of RemoteLegal to ask him about the role of technology in the legal system.

Brandon Gilbert

Q: You went to law school and after joining a big firm, decided not to practice. Why?

A: I really liked law school which was of course very academic and theoretical, but as soon as I started working, I kept seeing how inefficient the practice of law can be. I became focused on how much I wanted to improve the practice of law rather than practicing it myself.

I started by looking at businesses that serve the legal profession and came to understand how fragmented the court reporting business was. I found one for sale because the owner was ready to retire and had no obvious heir to take over. That’s how I got my start, through acquiring an existing business. First one, then more.

Q: Traditionally, one learns by working their way up. You started as the owner. How did that work?

A: The people I worked with were amazing. They taught me so much. I wanted to understand  why things were done a certain way and suggested new ideas. The more I learned, the more inefficiencies I found. Some in the companies thought my ideas were crazy and that I didn’t know what I was talking about, but the back and forth led us to building something. The timing worked out because this was happening during the Covid pandemic.

Q: How did the pandemic impact your business?

A: There are differences across the country, but one thing that is universal is that people just want to get their depositions covered. They’re really not concerned with methodology. Lawyers needed to take depositions and they needed a way to do it remotely. So we looked at the different platforms out there and none of them had everything the profession needs, so we made our own. We keep modifying and improving it but it gives lawyers a way to capture video, audio, documents that are shared and testified to, while producing a rough voice to text technology generated transcript.

“Human intervention will always make the difference.”

Q: Does your approach replace the court reporter? Is this the way of the future?

A: No, and that’s a common misconception. Court reporting will always require human intervention, regardless of the method used. For one, there are laws saying as such. Second, the judiciary will always want a neutral third party to certify the record; testimony is too critical to leave that to chance. The real issue behind the court reporter shortage isn’t technology—it’s that court reporting is a demanding profession that requires a high level of skill and focus.

No matter whether a proceeding is captured via stenography, voice writing, or digital reporting, it takes a trained professional to ensure accuracy, manage proceedings, and produce an official record. One of the biggest challenges in recruiting new court reporters today is that the job requires extraordinary attention and endurance—you might have to sit for eight hours without looking at your phone, maintaining full concentration. That’s not easy, especially in an era where the average attention span is shrinking.

The reality is, technology isn’t replacing court reporters—it’s augmenting them. The profession is evolving to incorporate new tools, from AI-assisted transcription to digital capture technology, helping to ensure no part of the record is lost. The talent pipeline needs to grow to meet demand, and that means embracing multiple methods of reporting to fill the gap left by retiring stenographers.

At the end of the day, the legal industry isn’t concerned with methodology—they just need reliable, verbatim transcripts. Our job isn’t to determine what’s true or false. Our job is to capture exactly what was said, preserving the record with precision and integrity.

Q: One of the big conversations in the industry is how AI will figure into legal services, and specifically, court records. What’s your perspective and expectation given your experience harnessing emerging technologies?

A: AI is already working its way into reporting. Voice to text is a form of AI. But it’s 2020 AI, not 2025 AI. 2020 AI can transcribe the spoken word to a shockingly high quality. The 2025 version of AI demands the technology to capture it, read it, compare it, analyze it. It’s not all the way there yet, but it is coming fast. Ultimately, it applies more to what lawyers do than court reporters.

There are going to be mistakes. People in the industry will say the mistakes should prohibit the use of artificial intelligence. But AI is like the first-year associate at a big law firm. Someone with more experience still has to review everything.

Human intervention is what will always make the difference. We have to have people involved in every stage of our business from booking a case to capturing the record in a deposition. People are involved in every detail and I don’t see that going away. We are in a digital revolution no different than the industrial revolution. People aren’t going anywhere, the function they serve will evolve.