Three Words in Skribe’s Terms,
a Certificate and a Form

On April 1, 2025, a Texas county court struck the transcription of January 29, 2025 testimony “prepared by use of Skribe.ai.” We count four documents whose own text carries the words intelligible, accurate and trustworthy, each attaching them differently.

By William Douglas Baker

Founding Editor

April 1, 2025: a Texas county court at law struck the transcription of the January 29, 2025 testimony of Reddico Construction Co., Inc.’s corporate representative, given in Patrick Hughey’s suit against the company. Before swearing that witness, the notary stated on the record that “By entering this Skribe event, parties present have agreed to” Skribe’s Terms of Service.

Skribe’s Terms, as filed in the court record, have a sentence that begins “All parties agree.” The grammar is broken as printed, and the sentence says the recording is “an official record of the event, is intelligible, accurate and trustworthy and is a true record of the testimony given by the witness.” Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 199.1(c) makes the party requesting a non-stenographic recording responsible for “assuring that the recording will be intelligible, accurate, and trustworthy.” We count four documents carrying those words, each attaching them differently: the Rule, the Terms, a certificate made in a notary’s name, and a form notarized February 27, 2025. The Terms, the certificate and the form are in the Mandamus Record of In re Patrick Hughey, where Reddico’s motion quotes the Rule; the record also holds the order, signed by Judge Scharlene W. Valdez, that strikes the transcription.

The Rule and the Terms

In Skribe’s Terms the three words sit in section 4.a, which states that by attending any deposition “organized or facilitated through the Software,” all parties involved agree and consent to the preparation of a non-stenographic audio recording and accompanying transcript of the proceedings. The sentence that begins “All parties agree” carries the three words. The closing paragraph of section 4 states that Skribe “is not a law firm and makes no legal guarantee that Testimony recorded by attorneys and other legal professionals through the Software is admissible in a court of law or otherwise.” That disclaimer concerns admissibility.

The certificate and the form

The third is the transcript’s certificate, made in a notary’s name, which states that the recording made by the scheduling attorney is “intelligible, accurate and trustworthy and is a true record of the testimony given by the witness.” The next sentence states that all parties who attended agreed to Skribe, Inc.’s Terms and Conditions.

In the page images this edition viewed through October 16, 2026, the certificate’s three record pages (MR00200 to MR00202 inclusive) carry no signature, no seal and no signature line. The next page in the record, MR00203 (transcript page 99), is a separate declaration dated January 29, 2025 that the attached 102-page document is a true and correct copy of an electronic record printed by the notary or under her supervision, with a typed name, a signature image over a “NOTARY SIGNATURE” label, a seal and a commission number.

The fourth is the form of the witness, Reddico’s corporate representative, on transcript page 102. The form states that she has reviewed the non-stenographic record and affixes her signature that it is intelligible, accurate and trustworthy and a true record of her testimony of January 29, 2025, “EXCEPT AS NOTED ON THE PREVIOUS PAGE(S).” The form bears a handwritten signature and a notarial block, by a different notary, dated the 27th day of February 2025. A ten-entry correction sheet headed “Deposition Review Corrections” and dated 2/27/25 sits beside it in the record. Two of its entries are marked as recorded incorrectly: in the sheet’s Explanation column, the entry for page 62, line 17 reads “Name was recorded incorrectly,” and the entry for page 82, line 3 reads “Incorrectly recorded.” No sentence in the 18 text extracts of the record, briefs and other case documents this edition searched through October 16, 2026 says who or what produced either entry, and we draw no inference about either.

Two accounts of the clause

Skribe’s chief executive, Thomas J. Irby, says in a declaration that all participants in a Skribe-facilitated Zoom deposition are required to “affirmatively accept Skribe’s Terms of Service prior to entry,” and that Skribe “automatically records this consent with a timestamp.” The attached exhibit, titled “Skribe’s Terms of Service Consent History,” reproduces eight rows. The same declaration says the history confirms that all attendees consented to the Terms before the deposition began.

Reddico’s reply, served March 31, 2025, argues about the clause itself. Reddico says the Terms “even has those who use the software agree to something that will not even occur until after he or she clicked in,” and that no one could or would agree that a transcript and recording not yet made carries the three words’ qualities, or is a true record of the testimony of someone who has yet to testify. Reddico calls that premise “complete nonsense.” One account starts from the log of entry. The other starts from the sequence of events Reddico says the sentence assumes.

The order and the docket

The one-page order’s title names three motions of Reddico’s, among them a Motion to Preclude Use of Testimony Taken by Non Certified Shorthand Reporter. Its first paragraph says the court considered the three, collectively the “Motions,” and “finds that the relief requested in the Motions should be granted.” Its third ORDERED sentence reads “the transcription of the January 29, 2025 testimony prepared by use of Skribe.ai is struck and may not be used.” The judge signed it 4/1/2025 at 4:31:02 PM. Apart from finding that the relief requested in the Motions should be granted, the order, read in full through October 16, 2026, cites no statute, rule or case, makes no finding about the transcription’s accuracy or reliability, and states no finding about the use of Skribe.ai.

Neither the May 14, 2025 order denying Hughey’s motion to reconsider or clarify nor anything the judge said at the May 9 hearing states a ground for the April order, in the text layer of the record this edition read as of October 16, 2026. The Ninth Court of Appeals wrote that the trial court “struck the written transcription that was prepared by means other than by a certified court reporter” and did not exclude the video deposition; the appeals court denied the petition for a writ of mandamus on May 29, 2025.

Read in order, the objects are a recording (the Rule), a recording and “an official record of the event” (the Terms), a recording (the certificate), a record (the form) and a transcription (the order). This edition reports the nouns as printed and draws no legal conclusion from them; the reading in the next section is ours. As of 10:31 a.m. CT, October 16, 2026, the Supreme Court of Texas docket for No. 25-0463 lists an oral argument on October 6, 2026 and shows the case as “Submitted (Awaiting Opinion),” with no opinion, judgment or order after that argument.

What this asks of an attestation

On our reading, the file holds three kinds of proof: a log, a signature and a reporter. It puts two questions to anyone whose standing rests on an attestation, a court filing or a profile an answer engine reads: what object does the attestation name, and which proof will the judging institution count?

Where the argument stops

The tally counts words, not legal effect. Elsewhere in the record the three words appear where parties quote or argue about these documents, and our count is of documents, not occurrences. In the text layers of the 18 extracts of the record, briefs and other case documents this edition searched through October 16, 2026, “intelligible” does not appear in 11, including the amicus filings of three reporters’ associations; images and scanned pages were not searched.

The Zoom video, the audio and the oral-argument video were not watched. Nothing here says who should prevail, and a ruling after the docket read above is not reflected.

Disclosure: Declassified is researched and drafted with AI tools, including Anthropic’s Claude models, and an OpenAI model gave this edition’s evidence ledger an outside read. Agentics builds AI agents for its clients. We map the record, not any person or company, to Digital Derangement Syndrome™ (DDS™); on our reading, it is consistent with Trust Transfer Failure (expertise never translated into machine-readable trust), with Authority Misclassification beside it. That mapping is editorial, not any source’s finding.