The Supreme Court of Texas will hear argument Oct. 6 on a question with a Frisco lawyer in the middle of it: when does a deposition have to be written down by a certified human court reporter, and when can the parties use technology instead?
Michelle May O'Neil, who runs Concierra Legal from an office at The Star, filed a brief in the case Sept. 22 on behalf of the Institute for Constitutional AI Law, an organization she started. She described the problem she set it up to work on in an interview with frisco.city published Sept. 6. The court's docket shows the filing, and O'Neil provided the brief to frisco.city along with written answers to our questions.
The case is In re Patrick Hughey. Hughey, a former employee of Reddico Construction Co., sued the company in Montgomery County in 2024, alleging workers' compensation retaliation.
The dispute centers on a deposition that was completed. In January 2025, Hughey's side deposed Reddico's corporate representative, Melissa Redd, using an AI-assisted service called Skribe.ai, with no certified shorthand reporter. At the start, the deposition officer confirmed that both sides had agreed to Skribe's terms, according to Reddico's own brief.
When Hughey scheduled three more depositions on the same platform that March, Reddico asked the court to stop them and to keep the first transcript out. On April 1, 2025, the trial court did both: it quashed the new depositions and ruled that the Skribe transcript of Redd's deposition could not be used at trial. It denied Hughey's request to reconsider in May. After the Ninth Court of Appeals in Beaumont denied his petition, he asked the Supreme Court of Texas to order the ruling undone.
The argument for the technology
O'Neil's brief rests on the Texas Constitution's open courts provision, which says courts "shall be open" and promises a remedy by due course of law, and on two rules of civil procedure.
One rule lets any party record a deposition "by other than stenographic means." The other says such a recording, or a written transcription of it, "may be used to the same extent as a deposition taken by stenographic means," and lets a judge require a certified transcript "for good cause shown."
According to the brief, the trial court did not follow that structure. It treated the absence of a certified court reporter as dispositive and, the brief says, excluded the transcript without anyone identifying an error in it.
The brief also argues the objection cannot be to artificial intelligence itself, because court reporters use it too. It cites training offered by the National Court Reporters Association on using transcript software called Case CATalyst for AI-assisted work, and the manufacturer's own statement that the software "uses predictive analytics [and] artificial intelligence."
The brief states it directly: "That is not a distinction between human judgment and artificial intelligence. It is gatekeeping based on who is permitted to use the technology."
In her email, O'Neil put it more plainly. "It can't be about the transcript's reliability or accuracy because exactly no one in this case has complained about errors or inaccuracies," she wrote. She said the law already provides a way to object to an inaccurate transcript, and that it was not used here.
She framed the stakes as bigger than one deposition. "When you boil it down it's about the democratization of transcription services in the age of AI technology," she wrote, "or whether CSR are going to have some exclusive lock on that going forward."
What the other side argues
Reddico, the company on the other side of the case, told the court in its own brief that the trial judge got it right, and that this is not the kind of ruling the Supreme Court should reach into at all.
Mandamus is "an extraordinary remedy" to be used "sparingly and deliberately," its brief says, and "saving litigation costs is not an adequate justification" for it.
On the merits, Reddico argues state law is narrower than O'Neil's brief allows. Chapter 154 of the Government Code, it says, permits only a certified shorthand reporter, a party, a party's attorney or a full-time employee of either to produce a written transcript of an oral deposition. Broadening who may record a deposition, it argues, "does nothing to change the categories of persons permitted to create a written transcript."
Reddico also disputes what its agreement meant. Its brief says Skribe's terms of service described a "non-stenographic" audio and video recording but never disclosed that the transcript would be produced with AI, or by someone other than a certified shorthand reporter.
The company also says the relator's reading "impermissibly shifts the burden of ensuring the transcript's accuracy to the presenting party," and would undermine "the policy interest in uniformity of transcript preparations." One of its headings states flatly that "voice recognition software cannot certify a deposition."
Its last argument is about who should decide. The use of AI to produce transcripts "may have its benefits, but that topic is best left to the Legislature," the brief says, noting that lawmakers are already studying voice recognition in the courts. "This Court should not invade the province of the Legislature."
