In-house legal teams are facing faster turnarounds, fewer resources, and business stakeholders who measure value in response time, not risk methodology. The promise of legal technology is that it closes that gap, the wrong tools and the wrong partners can widen it. In a new piece for Corporate Counsel, Steno General Counsel and former litigator Carly Savar explains why choosing the right legal tech partner is a strategic decision, and that most evaluation frameworks aren't built to surface the criteria that actually matter.

The piece opens with a scene that will feel familiar to anyone who has worked in-house:

The request comes in on a Tuesday afternoon. A business unit leader needs a vendor agreement reviewed and turned around before the end of the week, ideally sooner. For the in-house legal team on the receiving end, the calculus is familiar: triage the risk, check the timeline, and figure out how to deliver without dropping anything else. The business stakeholder does not want to understand the complexity. They want an answer, and they want it fast.

From there, Carly builds the case for what genuine reliability actually looks like in a legal tech partner, and why a polished demo is rarely where that question gets answered:

Reliability is not just uptime or processing speed. It is consistency of output, accuracy under real-world conditions, and the confidence that what a tool produces can actually be acted on without a second round of verification. The tools that earn lasting trust in legal environments are the ones that prove themselves in production, over time, across the full range of situations a legal team encounters. A polished demo is not a substitute for that track record.

The stakes are real. With AI tools multiplying faster than legal teams can evaluate them, the criteria that matter most—reliability, fit, and genuine service—rarely show up in a feature matrix. Carly's piece breaks down what those qualities actually look like in practice, why the vendor relationship matters as much as the product itself, and how in-house teams can be more deliberate about the partners they bring into their tech stack.

Read the full piece in Corporate Counsel. (Registration required.)