S
Steno
Steno is a deposition and litigation support company. It pairs court reporting services with software for the firms that book them. Services include court reporting, videography, interpreters, remote and hybrid depositions, equipment rental and conference rooms. DelayPay lets a firm defer case costs until settlement. On the software side, Steno Connect for Zoom runs remote depositions inside Zoom, and the Firm Dashboard holds a firm's transcripts, notes and documents, with Clio and Litify integrations.
Transcript Genius is the AI layer. It answers plain English questions across one or many depositions, writes summaries, finds passages by exact wording or by meaning, and flags contradictions between witnesses. Every answer cites the transcript page and line, shown beside the source, and can open the synced video at that moment. It is free with no usage limit and must be switched on by the customer. It runs mainly on large language models from outside providers under contract, which do not train on the data or keep it after a session.
Steno holds a SOC 2 Type II report and a HIPAA addendum. Buyers are litigation teams at firms of all sizes, especially plaintiff firms.
Steno, head to head
Side by side on the same 15 capability axes and 12 legal signals: where the two part company, and what neither one publishes.
Alternatives to Steno
Vendors in the same categories as Steno whose graded profiles look most alike, with a line on what each product does.
Similar is not the same, so check that each one does the job you need. No vendor pays for placement.
- OOpenText eDiscoveryOpenText eDiscovery is an electronic discovery platform covering collection, processing, analysis, review and production, sold to corporate legal departments, law firms and investigating…
- CCaseMarkCaseMark turns a litigation record into the work product a matter needs, with each statement cited back to the page it came from.
- DDepositions by FilevineDepositions by Filevine is a remote deposition service and platform for attorneys, insurance carriers and court reporting firms, formerly sold as Parrot and now part of Filevine.
- NNextpointNextpoint is a cloud litigation platform for eDiscovery through trial, sold at a flat monthly price per user with no charge for data.
- PPrevailPrevail is a testimony management and court reporting platform from Prevail Legal, Inc. of San Diego, built for depositions, arbitration hearings, internal investigations and other proceedings.
- DDISCODISCO is a cloud ediscovery and litigation platform covering hold, ediscovery, review, timelines, deposition management and case building, sold to law firms, corporate legal teams and government.
Ordered by how closely the graded profiles match across the 15 capability axes, inside the same categories. See how each axis is graded in the methodology.
Capability grades
All 15 axes, graded from public sources on the date shown. Hover a grade to see what the letter means on that axis.
AI Centrality
How much of the product is actually AI. Whether the machine learning is the mechanism the buyer is paying for or a feature layered onto conventional software, and whether the vendor is specific about which is which.
Transcript Genius is included with no extra charge and no usage limit, and the home page markets it as free with all Steno depositions. Customers pay for the services underneath: court reporting, videography, interpreters, remote and hybrid depositions, equipment rental, conference rooms and DelayPay. Without the AI, all of those remain, along with Steno Connect for Zoom and the Firm Dashboard. The terms reserve the right to change Transcript Genius's price or limit a person's use of it at Steno's sole discretion. The deposition business runs without the AI.
Citation Accuracy and Hallucination Disclosure
Whether the vendor publishes measured accuracy on citations and assertions, grounds output to primary sources, and says plainly what its system does when it does not know. Legal has a documented public record of fabricated citations reaching filed briefs, so an untested claim of accuracy is not evidence.
Every Transcript Genius answer carries a clickable page and line citation into the transcript, shown side by side with the source, and Steno's FAQ says human verification is a simple click away. Summaries carry the same linked citations. Where a firm has ordered Text to Video Sync, a citation opens the deposition video at that moment, so a user can hear the tone of the testimony as well as read it. Lookups combine exact wording and meaning across the firm's transcripts.
No accuracy figure, test set, evaluation, error rate or comparison is published, despite a marketing claim of unparalleled accuracy. The agreement says AI is not perfect and may make mistakes, and disclaims any warranty of accuracy, completeness, truthfulness, timeliness or suitability for outputs. Checks against legal authority do not apply, since the tool reads deposition transcripts, not law.
Autonomy and Oversight Model
What the system decides on its own, what a lawyer must approve, and whether the vendor documents where the review point sits. A tool that drafts under review and a tool that files without one are different products and different risks.
The terms say Transcript Genius uses AI with no human oversight to question transcripts and other case documents. Its outputs are research aids, not legal advice, attorney work product, or a substitute for reviewing the record. No one at Steno checks an answer before it appears, and the user must check it against the record. The product supports that check with page and line citations on every answer, a side by side transcript view, and video sync to the cited moment.
Customers must switch AI features on in the Dashboard. Only final ordered transcripts can be questioned, not drafts. The tool shows no sign of uncertainty and offers no way to report a wrong answer.
Operational and Outcome Evidence
Named, dated evidence that the product works in production at real firms or legal departments. Case studies with figures and identified customers count. Unattributed testimonials and launch announcements do not.
Five quotes carry a name, title and firm. They come from a partner at Panish Shea Ravipudi, a director at Ivie Mcneill Wyatt Purcell & Diggs, a paralegal at Citron & Citron, an attorney at Gamliel Law and an attorney at Burneikis Law. The Burneikis Law attorney is also the subject of a Transcript Genius customer story, which describes time saved without saying how much. No quote has a number or date. Trade coverage of the beta reported an average saving of two to four hours per case, a figure Steno does not state itself.
Privilege and Confidentiality Posture
How client confidences are handled: attorney client privilege and work product treatment, segregation of one client matter from another, whether client data trains any model, and what the vendor commits to in writing rather than in marketing.
Content is not accessed or viewed except as the customer authorizes, as needed to perform, as the agreement and privacy policy provide, or as law requires. Steno commits to physical and technical safeguards consistent with SOC 2. The customer keeps copyright in its Content and grants only a revocable license to provide the Services, plus a carve out for aggregated, deidentified use to improve them. Data shared with Steno's model providers is not used as broader training data, and the product page adds that transcripts and conversations never train the AI and that AI partners keep nothing after a session.
Backups may cover entire proceedings, including parts considered off the record, which in a deposition can include exchanges counsel treat as privileged. A backup will not be shared without a valid subpoena that is not objected to, or a court order. Nothing describes a wall between matters, and the Dashboard is built to query all of a firm's depositions at once.
UPL and Professional Responsibility Posture
Whether the vendor is clear that it supplies a tool rather than legal advice, who its audience is, and how it addresses unauthorized practice of law, competence and supervision duties, and jurisdiction limits. ABA Formal Opinion 512 is the reference point. Where the advice line is not the duty a product raises, the axis is read through the nearest professional duty it does raise: judicial conduct rules and the reviewing duty for products sold only to courts, and the duty to bill for time actually spent for products that draft time entries.
The AI section of Steno's terms says AI tools are research aids and are not legal advice, attorney work product, or a substitute for reviewing the underlying record. The general disclaimer adds that content is informational only and is not advice of any kind; it does not replace professional advice, including legal advice, and users must get independent advice before acting. Users must be eighteen or older and represent they are competent.
No bar or ethics authority, including ABA Formal Opinion 512, is named on any product or policy page, and no jurisdiction limit is stated. Steno's blog has an item titled as covering ABA and state ethics guidance on AI.
AI Governance and Bias Disclosure
Published governance over model behavior: who owns it inside the vendor, what is tested before release, and what is disclosed about disparate output across matter types, parties, or populations.
The terms say Transcript Genius runs without human oversight and that its model providers do not train on the data. They also disclose internal AI use for drafting messages, support triage, software development and routine work, under agreements that bar those providers from training on the data. The trust center publishes bias disclosures for BrightHire and Criteria, two tools used in hiring, and notes AI features in Rippling recruiting; none of them covers Transcript Genius.
No responsible AI principles, accountable owner, testing regime or model documentation exists for the product, and the terms let Steno change the AI platform behind Transcript Genius at any time at its sole discretion. How the tool handles accents, dialects and interpreted testimony is not described, though it analyzes spoken testimony and Steno also books interpreters.
AI Safety and Data Stewardship
Retention, deletion, access control, and what happens to prompts and documents after they are processed. Whether the vendor states its subprocessors and its incident practice, or leaves the buyer to assume.
Retention is in the customer's hands: uploaded documents, recordings and other materials are kept until the customer tells Steno to delete them. On the model side, AI partners do not keep data after a Transcript Genius session. The conversation thread is kept only to give follow up questions context, is not shared, and can be deleted by the user. Steno commits not to access or view Content outside four named cases. It holds a SOC 2 Type II report and a HIPAA addendum, and publishes a data processing addendum (DPA) that applies where law requires.
The DPA commits Steno to notify the customer promptly once a security breach is confirmed, to keep a current subprocessor list available on request, and to give notice of new subprocessors where privacy law requires. The terms name Stripe and Bill.com for payments but not the model providers. Steno publishes its controls for encryption, access, background checks, penetration testing and disaster recovery testing.
AI Liability and Recourse
What the vendor stands behind contractually when its output is wrong. Indemnities, caps, carve outs, insurance, and whether any of it is published or only reachable through a negotiated agreement.
Liability for any damages related to the agreement, for any cause, is capped at $100 under the terms, and more than one claim does not raise the limit. No exception to the cap is named. Indirect, consequential, exemplary, incidental, special and punitive damages are excluded, suppliers carry no liability, and the customer gives Steno a broad release with a California Civil Code 1542 waiver. Disputes go to mandatory individual arbitration before the AAA in Los Angeles, with a class action waiver and a thirty day opt out.
An AI disclaimer provides outputs as is and with all faults, with no warranty of accuracy, completeness, truthfulness, timeliness or suitability, and the customer bears all risk of using them. The only indemnity runs from the customer to Steno, and no insurance is mentioned.
Practice Systems Integration Depth
How deeply the product reaches into the systems legal work already lives in: document management such as iManage and NetDocuments, Word and Outlook, contract lifecycle management, matter management, e-billing, and court filing systems.
Clio and Litify integrations have their own pages, listed in the main navigation under Technology and Integrations. Steno Connect for Zoom runs the deposition inside Zoom, with exhibits uploaded, shared, numbered and annotated in the meeting. The terms add linking of Google and Microsoft accounts and a general provision on exporting information to connected third party services.
What the Clio and Litify integrations move, and what a firm must set up, is not described. No API or developer documentation is offered, and no document management, electronic billing or court filing system is named.
Deployment Model and Data Residency
Where the software runs and where the data sits. Multi tenant cloud, single tenant, private deployment, on premises, and whether region of residence is a published option or an enterprise conversation.
Where data is held is not stated. The product is a browser dashboard with a Zoom app, and the terms say materials are stored on Steno's systems under its security protocols. No cloud provider, region or tenancy model is named. Content does pass to outside model providers for Transcript Genius, and those providers do not keep it after a session.
The privacy policy, updated 9 October 2026, says Steno is headquartered in the United States, uses service providers in other countries, and may move personal information across borders. The DPA allows cross border processing of personal information only where privacy law is met and a lawful transfer mechanism is in place.
Security Certifications and Trust Center
Independent attestation a buyer can pull without a sales call: SOC 2, ISO 27001, penetration test summaries, a trust center with current reports and named scope rather than a badge image.
The trust center offers a SOC 2 Type II report for the control period 1 February 2025 to 31 January 2026 and a HIPAA addendum dated 31 January 2026, both through a request access form. According to the Transcript Genius page, SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA standards cover all data in the platform, and Steno's AI partners meet them too. The terms commit to safeguards in line with SOC 2 policies.
Controls across infrastructure, organizational and product security are shown, including encryption, background checks and penetration testing, along with a responsible disclosure policy. No auditor is named on the public pages.
Model Supply Chain Disclosure
Which models sit underneath, whose they are, where they run, and whether the vendor commits to telling customers when that changes. A legal buyer inherits every dependency it cannot see.
Transcript Genius is built mainly on large language models from outside providers that Steno has vetted and holds under contract, according to the terms of use effective 10 September 2026. Data shared with those providers is not used as broader training data. The trust center adds that customer data is not stored with the AI provider, and the beta terms describe zero data retention agreements with Steno's model vendors.
No provider or model is named, and the trust center's subprocessor page lists none. Steno may change the AI platform behind Transcript Genius at any time at its sole discretion, with no promise to notify. A separate paragraph says Steno's internal AI use runs under agreements that bar providers from training on data.
Commercial Transparency
Whether a buyer can learn what this costs without entering a sales process: published rates, the unit being charged, what sits behind an enterprise tier, and what implementation adds.
Transcript Genius has no extra charge and no usage limit, though Steno may change that at its sole discretion. Canceling a court reporter or videographer after 4pm on the business day before a job can cost up to $400. Interpreter cancellation runs from 48 hours to 30 days ahead depending on dialect, and the fee may be the interpreter's full charge. Invoices more than 30 days late accrue interest at the lesser of 1.5 percent a month or the legal maximum. DelayPay defers case costs until settlement.
Reporting and video rates come from a rate card sent on request, and a firm can negotiate them. Any quote is a nonbinding estimate, and the firm is liable if the invoice is higher. Rates for reporting work are not listed.
Firm and Practice Coverage
Who the product is actually built for. AmLaw, midlaw, small firm and solo, in house departments, government and courts, and which practice areas are supported rather than merely claimed.
The buyer is litigation teams at law firms, with deferred payment aimed at contingency and plaintiff practices, and the terms expect firm administrators to manage users such as legal assistants and paralegals. Transcript Genius accepts third party transcripts in text and PDF as well as Steno's own, so a firm can analyze depositions taken by opposing counsel. Steno claims to handle anything from single depositions to complex matters with many parties.
No list of states or jurisdictions where Steno can staff a proceeding is published on the product pages or in the terms. The only geographic signs are a navigation entry for California litigation support and a Nevada firm registration in the footer. No practice area is named as served or excluded.
5 public documents
The public pages on file for Steno, with the recorded signals each one supports and the date it was last read. Open any of them and check the reading against the record.
-
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation, Billing and Fee Posture, Court Disclosure Support
Read Oct 12, 2026
-
steno.com/terms3 signals
Client Data in Training, Prompt and Output Retention, Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
Read Oct 12, 2026
-
Bar Guidance Alignment
Read Oct 12, 2026
-
steno.com/dpa1 signal
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Read Oct 12, 2026
-
Fabricated Citation Record
Read Oct 12, 2026
No published figure
- The AI tool, Transcript Genius, is free. Steno gives it to firms that book depositions and does not charge extra or cap how much you use it.
- What costs money is the deposition itself: the court reporter, the videographer, the interpreter, the room.
- Those prices are not on the website. You have to ask for a rate card, and the price can be negotiated.
- The cost of things going wrong is listed: cancel a court reporter late and it can cost up to $400, and unpaid bills add 1.5% interest a month.
- There is also a payment plan called DelayPay that lets a firm wait until the case settles before paying.
Steno charges for reporting, video and interpreter work at rates quoted per firm, and gives its AI away. Transcript Genius is included with no extra charge and no usage limit, but Steno may change its price or limit a person's or entity's use at its sole discretion. Court reporters and videographers can generally be canceled by 4pm in the deposition's time zone on the prior business day to avoid a late fee. Cancellation fees for a reporter or videographer may be up to $400 per job.
Interpreter cancellation windows run from 48 hours to 30 days ahead depending on language and dialect, and the fee may be the interpreter's full charge. Unpaid invoices accrue interest after 30 days at the lesser of 1.5 percent a month or the legal maximum. DelayPay defers case costs until settlement, is described as interest free and not tied to the size of the recovery, and is open to all parties on a case but not all case types.
Under the terms of use effective 10 September 2026, the core rates sit on a rate card provided on request and may be negotiated. Any quote is a nonbinding estimate, and the firm stays liable if the final invoice is higher. Payments run through Stripe and Bill.com.
Note: No entry price is shown because no recurring rate for the core service is published. The AI is included at no charge but is not sold on its own, so a zero would misstate it. Steno publishes figures for cancellation fees, interpreter terms and late interest, but not for the core service.
Legal Signals
What each signal meansA signal records what public sources say on the date shown. It is not a grade and it is not a recommendation. Where a signal reads Not addressed, it means the index did not locate the material in public sources on that date, which is a statement about disclosure rather than about the product.
Client Data in Training
Can material a lawyer puts into this product be used to train a model?
The published terms prohibit training on customer content. Not a policy page, the agreement.
The AI section of the terms of use, effective 10 September 2026, says data shared with outside model providers through Steno is not used as broader training data. A separate paragraph on internal AI use says Steno's agreements with model providers ensure they do not train on data given to them. The product page says transcripts and conversations are never used to train the AI, and the privacy policy, updated 9 October 2026, says Steno does not use information to train AI models. The Content license also lets Steno use customer Content on an aggregated, deidentified basis to improve the Services.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
The customer controls the retention window, by product configuration or by contractual instruction, but zero retention is not stated as available.
Retention sits with the customer. Materials uploaded through the Dashboard, Steno Connect for Zoom or a third party integration are stored until the customer asks for deletion. On the model side, AI partners keep no data after a Transcript Genius session. A conversation is saved in a thread so follow up questions have context; the thread is not shared, and the user can delete it. No period is set for threads the user keeps.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
No located public material addresses walls or matter level segregation.
Transcript Genius is marketed on questioning all the depositions in a firm's Dashboard at once. Filters by case, attorney or witness narrow the results but do not restrict who can see what. Access control works at firm level. A designated Administrator keeps the list of End Users and removes people who should no longer have access, and Steno disclaims liability if that list is wrong. Matter level permissions, and whether the AI would respect them, are not described.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
Published terms or policy address disclosure to authorities or in response to legal process, and no commitment or reservation regarding customer notice is located anywhere. The vendor has told the customer that data can leave and has said nothing about whether the customer hears of it.
In certain jurisdictions the terms let Steno record remote depositions for backup, including portions considered off the record. Such a recording is not shared without a valid subpoena to which no party objects, or a valid court order. Nothing commits Steno to telling the customer that a demand has arrived or to resisting it. For Content generally, the terms allow access as required by law, with no notice attached. No transparency report is offered.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
No located public material identifies the corpus behind the product’s answers.
Transcript Genius works on the deposition transcripts of the customer's own matters, whether made by Steno's reporters or uploaded by the firm. No body of law or licensed content sits behind it. The customer keeps copyright and other rights in the Content it submits, and Steno takes only a revocable license to provide the Services. Only final, ordered transcripts can be questioned, not drafts or unordered ones; Steno says this protects the court reporters' work, and it means the text analyzed is a certified record.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
No located public material addresses whether authority is checked for subsequent history.
Transcript Genius reads deposition testimony, not legal authority, so there is no point of law to check for later history, and no citator is claimed. The check that does apply is whether an answer or summary matches the transcript, which Steno handles through design, with every answer cited to a page and line and shown beside the source. No measure of how often answers are correct is published.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
No located public material addresses what the product does when it cannot ground an answer.
Nothing on the Transcript Genius page, the home page or in the terms of use describes what the tool does when the transcript does not support the question. No way of declining to answer, confidence indicator, threshold, or behavior for ambiguous testimony or a contradiction that does not exist is published. The terms admit the risk in general. They say AI is not perfect and may make mistakes, give outputs no warranty of accuracy or completeness, and state that the tool runs with no human oversight.
Every answer is cited to a page and line with the transcript alongside, so a user can check any claim, but is not told which claims the system was least sure of.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product?
No court order, opinion or disciplinary record addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations produced by this product has been located as of the date shown. This is a statement about the public record on that one subject, not a finding about the product, and this signal is not a litigation history.
The AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin, which records court decisions worldwide that address hallucinated AI content and the tool involved where known, has no entry naming Steno or Transcript Genius. Transcript Genius answers questions about deposition testimony with page and line citations into transcripts the customer already holds, not citations to legal authority.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
Public materials engage with at least one named ethics opinion.
Brief, Steno's blog, carries a post dated 1 April 2025 titled Legal AI: ABA & State Legal Ethics Guidance on Artificial Intelligence. It discusses ABA Formal Opinion 512, Texas State Bar Opinion No. 705 of February 2025 and Kentucky Bar Association opinion KBA E-457, and lists the guidance state by state. The Transcript Genius page, the home page and the terms of use cite no professional conduct authority. The terms take a professional position without citing a source: AI outputs are research aids, not legal advice, attorney work product, or a substitute for reviewing the record.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
Public materials claim time savings without addressing billing or disclosure, and the product sits inside a fee relationship between a lawyer and a client where those savings would change the bill.
Time savings run through the product pages: hours of transcript review reduced to minutes, summaries generated in minutes instead of hours, and hours saved on every case. No per matter record of AI assisted work for fee purposes is offered, and no guidance covers how a firm should treat or disclose AI assisted analysis when billing a client. Transcript Genius carries no additional charge, so there is no separate technology cost to pass through. DelayPay defers court reporting costs until settlement.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
The material exists behind a sales conversation or an executed agreement.
The data processing addendum, effective 3 March 2025, commits Steno to keep an up to date list of subprocessors available on request and to give notice of new ones where privacy law requires. The trust center's subprocessor page lists none. The terms of use name Stripe and Bill.com as payment processors and describe the model providers behind Transcript Genius only as vetted third parties under contract. The SOC 2 Type II report and HIPAA addendum come through the trust center's request access form, while the DPA, the privacy policy and the terms are public.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
Some elements of the record are available, short of a document level export.
Every Transcript Genius answer cites a transcript page and line, is shown beside the source, and can open the synced video at the cited moment. Nothing says questions, answers or the acceptance of an answer are logged for export. No export exists for an AI use disclosure or a certification of verification, and no template or guidance is published for a court's standing order. The terms do not name the models behind Transcript Genius and let Steno change the AI platform at any time, so the model behind an earlier answer may not be knowable later.