A court reporter
starts a business.
J & K Bradley Reporting Pty Ltd was established in Brisbane in 2004 as a stenographic court reporting practice. From the outset, the focus was on quality over volume — working with Queensland courts, tribunals and legal firms who needed a reporter they could rely on absolutely.
Stenographic reporting offers something no other method can: a highly mobile, self-contained service that can be deployed anywhere — a courtroom, a boardroom, a remote tribunal, an interstate deposition — with no dependence on venue infrastructure, recording equipment or third-party technology. The reporter is the system.
The legal transcript business grew steadily through referrals. Solicitors and barristers across South-East Queensland came to trust Bradley Reporting for verbatim accuracy, professional conduct and rapid turnaround on urgent matters.
From the chamber floor
to the world's parliaments.
An invitation to assist with Federal Hansard transcription in Australia marked the beginning of a relationship with parliamentary work that would define a new direction. Over the following years, that expertise expanded across the Asia-Pacific region, and in 2018 The Hansard Consultancy was formally established to serve legislative bodies across the Commonwealth and beyond.
Remote delivery capabilities, developed and refined over more than three decades of parliamentary work, proved to be a significant advantage.
Today the offering extends beyond transcription services. Parliaments and legislative bodies can commission custom speech-to-text software built to their exact requirements or deploy Shearwater Transcriber as an off-the-shelf solution purpose-built for the demands of the parliamentary record. The tools are built by people who have spent over 30 years working inside the industry. That difference shows.
The same skill.
A different room.
For years, the stenographic skills that built Bradley Reporting's reputation in courtrooms had a second life that was only just beginning to be understood. Real-time captioning — delivering spoken language as live text to deaf and hard of hearing participants — is stenography's most immediate and human application. Not a record for later. A voice, right now, for someone who needs it.
Captify.live was established to formalise this work. In 2015, Bradley Reporting was selected to provide live captioning at the World Federation of the Deaf Congress in Istanbul, Turkey — one of the most significant international events in the deaf and hard of hearing community. The engagement brought international recognition and confirmed that the standard of the work could hold anywhere in the world.
Two service lines emerged from this period: legal services for courts, tribunals and litigation support; and accessibility services for NDIS participants, conferences, events and education providers. The delivery context differs — a courtroom, a conference hall, a live event. The standard does not. Today those two worlds often overlap: Bradley Reporting provides live captioning for deaf and hard of hearing participants in court hearings, where legal precision and accessibility are not separate requirements but one.
Building tools
the market would not.
After years of evaluating every available transcription tool and finding all of them inadequate for professional legal work, the decision was made to build one. CalGen.AI was established as the technology division of Bradley Reporting, with a single initial mission: create a desktop transcription tool that a court reporter would actually use.
Shearwater Transcriber was the result — an Electron/React desktop application running local Whisper AI, with professional multi-channel audio mixer, court recording format compatibility, waveform display and SmartExport to Word. Built by a practitioner. For practitioners.
Shearwater v1.3.2
ships to the world.
Shearwater Transcriber v1.3.2 represents the culmination of intensive development — a professional-grade AI transcription tool for legal professionals that runs entirely locally, with no cloud dependency, no privacy risk and no compromise on the accuracy standards that legal work demands.
Bradley Reporting today is four divisions, one legal entity, and the same commitment that started in a Brisbane courtroom in 2004. Bradley Reporting is practitioners first. Everything else — the software, the technology, the global reach — is built on that foundation.
2026 also marks a significant milestone in the company's own story. Bradley Reporting has become a second-generation enterprise. Founder Jason Bradley has stepped back from the Chief Executive role to become Innovation Leader and Staff Mentor — continuing to drive the technology vision and product development that has defined CalGen.AI. Sam Bradley has assumed the role of Chief Executive Officer, bringing fresh leadership to a business built on three decades of practitioner knowledge.