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 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.