About

IECRA accepts all technologies and corresponding practitioners that are capable of meeting the verbatim standard necessary for work within a legal environment – courtrooms, depositions, and other applications where precision and accuracy are paramount.

While IECRA was founded to serve the specific needs of digital reporting – and  firms and schools that rely upon it – the organization likewise recognizes that it will take a hybrid approach that engages digital reporting alongside stenography, voice reporting, and, ultimately, automated speech recognition to replenish the quickly diminishing number of court reporters.

Most critically, over the past nine years, Illinois has lost 28 percent of its stenographers to retirement. Over the next 11 years, the number of stenographers will drop another 42 percent! This will leave a gap of more than 1,300 court reporters, which will significantly jeopardize the state’s legal processes – until and unless we embark upon a holistic initiative to recruit, train, and deploy a workforce of digital reporters and voice reporters to supplement stenographers and protect Illinois’s legal and judicial processes.

That’s the purpose of IECRA.