Transcription, evidence review, document processing and workflow for courts and legal professionals — where the record must withstand scrutiny, and where sovereignty over that record is the question beneath the technology.
The first paper traced how the Australian court record passed into foreign ownership and what the failure of 2026 exposed. This paper sets out the answer: a complete design for the federal courts, from the microphone in the courtroom to the certified transcript on the court file — five layers sorted by rate of change, an open court-owned record format, assurance tiers for machine transcription, an accredited profession at regulated fees, and procurement in which no supplier spans more than one layer. Fully footnoted against the courts’ own statements and working models in four comparable jurisdictions.
The collapse of a transcription contractor in 2026 has been read as an isolated failure. It is better understood as the last stage of a quarter-century in which the whole apparatus of the Australian court record — the transcription services above the courtroom and the recording software beneath it — passed into foreign ownership, some of it Australian-built before it was sold abroad. This paper reconstructs that history, identifies the software layer the current debate has missed, and sets out what a genuinely sovereign arrangement would require.