Court reporting and the evolution of legal support
Ari Kaplan. (Photo by Tori Soper)
Ari Kaplan recently spoke with Greg Hong, the co-founder and CEO of Steno, a tech-enabled provider of legal support and court reporting services.
They discussed the industry trends driving the need for court reporting and litigation support, creating a competitive advantage in the current market, and the evolution of the legal support market.
Ari Kaplan: Tell us about your background and the genesis of Steno.
Greg Hong: I’ve participated in several two-sided marketplaces. Out of school, I traded stock for hedge funds and went pretty far down the finance path before realizing I’d rather be building businesses than valuing them. From there, I worked in ad tech and ran a restaurant technology company that directly competed with OpenTable. I ultimately sold that business to Resy and American Express. We had some litigation in that sale, and my co-founder at Steno, Dylan Ruga, represented us successfully. We won that case on summary judgment, but I had my deposition taken, so he and I became good friends. Afterward, he proposed starting a court reporting business with me and a third co-founder, Dan Anderson, now our chief technology officer, when we saw an opportunity to add unique technology to a legacy agency model and structure it more like a marketplace.
Ari Kaplan: What trends in the legal industry do you see driving the need for court reporting and litigation services?
Greg Hong is the co-founder and CEO of Steno, a tech-enabled provider of legal support and court reporting services.
Greg Hong: The volume of litigation continues to grow year over year, but the court reporting industry has become a commoditized service market, and our competitors use decades-old playbooks. We are focused on our customers’ needs and use their feedback to design technology and financial options that directly improve their experience and workflows. For law firms, this means that we do the basics very well. We reply to our customers with substantive responses in 10 minutes on average, while others respond in hours or days, and we hardly ever miss covering a job. We pair that with the benefits of unique technology, like Transcript Genius, our new AI offering, or Steno Connect for Zoom, our Zoom app, so we really make it easier for attorneys to take depositions or more thoughtfully consume the post-deposition content that gets delivered to them in their transcripts.
Ari Kaplan: What traditional court reporting and litigation services do you offer, and how do you tech-enable those activities to distinguish Steno’s approach?
Greg Hong: We offer court reporting, videography, interpreters and conference room sourcing. We are also starting to provide service-of-process and e-filing assistance. We want to become a one-stop shop for our clients. Today, court reporting is about staffing. Law firms are looking for a provider, and that is often the end of the transaction. In addition to services, we offer unique technology and a dashboard allowing our customers to search their entire repository of Steno transcripts. We also have unique integrations with case management providers, like Clio and Litify.
Ari Kaplan: How do you stay ahead of the market, given that even traditional court reporting firms are starting to offer broader services?
Greg Hong: We take the best-in-class technology from outside the legal world and bring it to bear within this industry. When we transitioned from in-person depositions being the de facto standard before the pandemic to remote depositions becoming the norm after mid-2020, we built remote deposition offerings to accommodate our clients. We continue quickly bringing new ideas to market because we maintain an in-house technology team. At the same time, our competitors often leverage third-party providers to build their technology solutions or use something off the shelf. We also package our tools, so that attorneys can easily consume them. My co-founder is a practicing attorney running a firm with 11 lawyers, so before we release anything, we pilot it in his office for feedback, rather than simply affixing a label and charging for it. That is not the way to build a long-term customer relationship.
Ari Kaplan: How much human stenography occurs in a typical matter, and how much technology is involved?
Greg Hong: We only offer human court reporters, the de facto gold standard. The technology is supplemental. When we talk about our AI offering, it is applied on a post-deposition basis. A firm expects a court reporting agency to deliver a transcript following a deposition, but we allow the reader to interact with that document more thoughtfully, using the power of a large language model to interrogate that record. For example, our technology can help a lawyer instantly summarize a deposition and highlight the areas that indicate liability, with citations to the supporting testimony. Or if a practitioner is taking a deposition on Zoom and needs to share documents, our proprietary app makes that process as seamless as sliding a file across a conference room table. We are trying to emulate the real-world deposition experience even when virtual.
Ari Kaplan: How do you leverage your success in court reporting into other areas of litigation services?
Greg Hong: We see NPS scores well into the ’80s, indicating that our customers like working with us. They often provide unsolicited positive feedback. Doing an excellent job is the easy starting point for expansion. Once you’ve built that relationship and rapport, customers will trust you with e-filing or service of process tasks. They give us that shot, and we exceed expectations. That is how we have been able to grow.
Ari Kaplan: How do you see the legal support market evolving?
Greg Hong: Over the next few years, there will be consolidation across all of these service offerings. Law firms engaging in litigation today use several different service providers, from medical records support and e-filing to service-of-process and depositions, which can be challenging to manage. Many attorneys would prefer to combine those services, especially when they offer thoughtful integrations into their case management platforms. If all their records could sit magically in a single application, it would offer a much more cohesive experience. Adding unique, best-in-class technologies also transforms legal support, allowing legal teams to more efficiently and thoughtfully litigate their cases.
Listen to the complete interview at Reinventing Professionals.
Ari Kaplan regularly interviews leaders in the legal industry and in the broader professional services community to share perspective, highlight transformative change and introduce new technology at his blog and on iTunes.
This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.
