In 2023, a California woman went to court to seek a restraining order against her husband, saying he had pulled her out of a car and shoved her into a concrete wall. She showed photos of bruises on her face and chest from the incident. The court, however, denied relief.

Some time afterward, she walked into the office of Family Violence Appellate Project, or FVAP, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit representing low-income survivors of gender-based violence, and told an attorney she wanted to appeal the court's decision.

To her dismay, however, the attorney told the woman, whose name is being withheld by FVAP to protect her privacy, that the organization could not help her with the case. Even though her story was credible, the attorney said, what was missing was evidence of any legal error that could be used in an appeal. That's because no court reporter was present to memorialize the proceedings.

"The judge might have said something like, 'I would have hit you, too,' which obviously would be a legal error and would be a reason to get that judge, not just reversed but thrown off the bench, right? But without any record, no one knows what was said," Jennafer Dorfman Wagner, FVAP's director of programs, told Law360.

In recent years, FVAP has had to turn down dozens of domestic violence survivors seeking to appeal trial court decisions on matters such as restraining orders or custody orders that could mean danger for them and their families, simply because no record existed, Dorfman Wagner said.

While the shortage of court reporters is a national issue, it has proved particularly difficult to overcome in California. Despite hiring the equivalent of nearly 382 full-time court reporters between January 2023 and March 2026, the state's trial courts recorded a net staffing gain of just 15.5 full-time-equivalent positions, as departures nearly matched new hires, according to data published by the California Judicial Council.

The shortage issue has been exacerbated by a state law that generally bars the use of a recording device to record hearings when it cannot supply a court reporter. More than 3 million family law, probate and unlimited civil hearings — roughly seven in 10 — took place without a verbatim record between April 2023 and March 2026, according to the council's data.

For thousands of low-income litigants who cannot afford to hire a private reporter, the absence of a record can doom an appeal before it even begins. In addition to limiting litigants' right to be heard, the issue has widened inequality, advocates say.

But a recent ruling by the California Supreme Court could help alleviate part of the problem. In a unanimous Aug. 10 opinion, the high court ordered trial courts to provide indigent litigants with access to an official verbatim record of their proceedings upon request, including through electronic recording when a court reporter is unavailable. The opinion creates an exception to the state law that banned the recording of many proceedings and strengthens the court's earlier attempt to address the issue with court reporters alone.

Even though the petition only named courts in Los Angeles, Santa Clara, Contra Costa and San Diego counties, it is binding on all superior courts in California.

"Wealthier litigants can be assured that an official verbatim record of their proceedings will be available, whereas indigent litigants cannot," Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero wrote for the court.

"The continued failure of the superior courts to provide indigent litigants with a means of obtaining an official verbatim record deprives them of 'meaningful access to the judicial process'," she said, quoting the court's precedent.

The ruling in the case, Family Violence Appellate Project et al. v. Superior Courts of California, came in a petition FVAP and Bay Area Legal Aid filed directly with the high court against four California superior courts, seeking a statewide solution to a problem that had repeatedly prevented FVAP from pursuing appeals on behalf of domestic violence survivors.

Sonya D. Winner, a Covington & Burling LLP attorney who represented FVAP pro bono in the case, said the issue had received relatively little public attention because it mostly affected "poor disadvantaged people who don't have a voice."

"This is actually a very important, an extremely important decision on an issue that is going to affect literally hundreds of thousands of people in their ability to get full access to the judicial system in California," Winner said.

Earlier this month, Community Legal Aid SoCal recognized Covington as "Pro Bono Partner of the Year" for its role in the litigation. Covington associates Ellen Choi and Bryanna Walker, as well as former associate Jacob Pagano, also worked on the case.

A State Law That Acts As Barrier

Many state courts and federal courts have for decades used electronic recording to create an official verbatim record of trial court proceedings.

California Government Code Section 69957 permits electronic recording in certain proceedings, including limited civil cases, misdemeanors and infractions, when an official reporter is unavailable. But the statute generally prohibits electronic recording in other proceedings, including unlimited civil cases, family law matters and probate cases.

As a result, litigants who cannot afford private court reporters may find themselves without any official verbatim record of what happened in court.

Hiring a private court reporter in California costs an average of $3,300 per day for a trial, according to the state's Judicial Council. Court reporters usually don't work for less than a half-day's pay, Dorfman Wagner said.

That absence can have serious consequences. Appellate courts generally presume that trial court judgments are correct, and the party appealing must demonstrate an error based on the record. Without a record, it may be impossible to establish that a judge made a mistake warranting reversal.

In 2018, the California Supreme Court held in Jameson v. Desta that courts must provide litigants who cannot afford a private reporter with access to an official verbatim record at no cost to them. But as the shortage worsened, trial courts struggled to meet that obligation.

Electronic recording offered another way to preserve what happened in court, yet Section 69957 generally barred its use in the very proceedings where the need for an alternative had become most critical.

In response to the worsening court reporter shortage and their inability to fulfill the obligation established by Jameson, some courts across California acknowledged the challenges.

In September 2024, the superior court in Los Angeles issued an order authorizing electronic recording in specified proceedings when a reporter was unavailable. Its order acknowledged that the court could no longer reliably staff courtrooms with reporters and that its efforts to provide them to eligible litigants had proved inadequate. The order imposed six conditions before a judge could authorize recording, including findings about the significance of the issues and whether the proceeding should be delayed.

Issuing a similar order two months later, the court in Santa Clara reported that more than 56,000 hearings in 2023 had gone without a verbatim record unless a party hired a private reporter. The court in Contra Costa issued its own order authorizing electronic recording in December 2024, the month FVAP and Bay Area Legal Aid filed their petition.

Those measures offered only limited relief. They left access to electronic recording dependent on the nature of the proceeding and a judge's assessment of whether a record was necessary, rather than guaranteeing one to every litigant who could not afford a private reporter.

"While Jameson guaranteed that indigent litigants would have access to an official verbatim record of trial court proceedings, notwithstanding their inability to afford a private court reporter, this guarantee has proven illusory," Justice Guerrero wrote in Family Violence Appellate Project.

What the Ruling Means for Survivors

For survivors of domestic violence, an official record can serve a purpose beyond helping them appeal an unfavorable decision. It can also establish precisely what a judge said or ordered during a hearing, potentially preventing dangerous misunderstandings.

Dorfman Wagner recalled a woman who sought FVAP's help after believing a judge had ordered her to disclose her address to her former spouse, against whom she had a restraining order. The woman was enrolled in California's Safe at Home address confidentiality program and feared that complying with the order would put her in danger.

FVAP obtained a record of the hearing and discovered that the woman had misunderstood the judge. She had been instructed to provide the court with an address where she could receive legal papers, not to disclose her residential address to her former spouse.

"Luckily there was a record for us to point to to show her that she had misunderstood," Dorfman Wagner said. "But if you don't have that, you're at a loss to figure out what happened at your hearing, and especially in domestic violence and family law cases, that really comes back to bite you a year or two later when you're trying to renew a restraining order."

The Aug. 10 decision does not resolve California's court reporter shortage, nor does it guarantee that every electronic recording will be converted into a written transcript. But it establishes that a litigant who cannot afford a private reporter must have meaningful access to an official record upon request, including through electronic recording when a reporter is unavailable, finally setting aside the legal barrier.

Winner said the restriction on electronic recording grew out of a long-standing dispute over whether courts should be permitted to use the technology instead of hiring court reporters. As the shortage worsened, litigants who could not afford to hire their own reporters were left without either option.

"The poor people got squeezed in the middle of all that," she said.

For FVAP, the next challenge is ensuring that the ruling changes what happens in courtrooms across California. Dorfman Wagner said the organization plans to work with courts, legal aid groups and other stakeholders to identify obstacles that could prevent eligible litigants from obtaining records. It will also monitor implementation beyond the four superior courts named in the petition.

"We're going to be watching what's happening, speaking with the folks representing people at trial courts, seeing how the decision gets implemented, not just in the four courts that were respondents to our writ, but every court," she said. "Because this decision made it clear this is a duty for every court."

-- Editing by Orlando Lorenzo and Alex Hubbard.

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