Court reporting decisions at most Am Law firms are made by case teams, priced on per-page rates, and evaluated on relationships. Security, data governance, and operational efficiency rarely enter the conversation, which is exactly how the real costs stay hidden.

Writing for the New Jersey Law Journal, Steno VP of Strategic Accounts Clare Foley makes the case that AmLaw firms are often evaluating court reporting vendors on the wrong criteria, and that the real costs of those decisions tend to surface somewhere the invoice never reaches.

Clare writes:

Court reporting sits at the intersection of a firm's most sensitive data and its least-scrutinized vendor relationships. A deposition transcript is not background documentation. It is the evidentiary record of the matter: the witness testimony, the marked exhibits, the moments that will define the case at trial or settlement. And in most traditional arrangements, that record sits on a third-party platform managed by the vendor, not the firm.

The piece covers three areas where the real cost accumulates:

• The security and data governance risks embedded in most agency relationships
• The efficiency drag that litigation support staff have normalized to the point of invisibility
• The downstream consequences of technology that attorneys and paralegals work around rather than with

The analogy to e-discovery's early days runs through the piece. The profession has been here before, chasing the wrong number while the actual exposure builds somewhere else. Clare points out that the firms asking harder questions now are better positioned than those waiting for a client audit or a data incident to make the conversation unavoidable.

Read the full piece in the New Jersey Law Journal.