Business Intelligence Group has announced the winners of the 2026 Herizon Awards, which honor women transforming individuals, teams, companies, industries, and the globe. This year’s class includes 57 winners and 8 finalists across four countries. Steno’s Carly Savar and Sierra Van Allen both made the list.
Carly, Steno’s General Counsel, won her category: Executive Influencer, Transformed an Industry. Sierra, Steno’s Legal Solutions Manager, was named a finalist as an Emerging Leader. Every Herizon nomination is scored by reviewers against published criteria, so this is recognition earned on the merits.
Carly Savar: Building the Governance Behind Legal AI
Before adopting AI, enterprise law firms have to answer a question that goes beyond whether the tool works: can attorneys use it without exposing their clients, their firms, or themselves to regulatory, evidentiary, or confidentiality risk?
Carly built Steno’s answer. She designed the governance framework around Transcript Genius, including SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance, a zero-data retention agreement with Anthropic so client data is never used to train AI models, and contract structures that let firms move from evaluation to deployment without months of extended risk review.
She has made the case in public, too. Her article in Corporate Counsel, “Reliable by Design,” gave in-house teams a way to judge legal tech partners on reliability, fit, and service instead of feature matrices. She also took part in a Women’s Bar Association of the District of Columbia CLE, a Society of Women Trial Lawyers webinar, and the Adventures in Legal Tech podcast.
Diego Mangabeira, one of the judges of the awards, described what set her work apart, writing, “Carly Savar identified the question that was quietly blocking every serious enterprise law firm from adopting AI litigation tools. Not whether the AI worked. Whether using it would expose their clients, their firms, or themselves to regulatory, evidentiary, or confidentiality risk. She answered it by building the governance architecture herself. SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, a zero-data retention agreement with Anthropic so client files never train the model...That is what a GC who operates at the industry level looks like.”
Russ Fordyce, Chief Recognition Officer at Business Intelligence Group, said, “Carly supports AI-powered litigation tools and publicly champions responsible AI in the legal profession. She is helping set the standard for confidence in legal technology.”
Sierra Van Allen: Closing the Gap Between Access and Adoption
Attorneys under deadline pressure tend to rely on the workflows they know, so a new tool has to earn its place. Sierra, a licensed Florida attorney who practiced construction litigation before joining Steno, helps Transcript Genius do exactly that. She sits down with attorneys and turns Steno’s transcript analysis tool into workflows built for active litigation, starting with one narrow use case and making early wins visible to the skeptics.
Her writing carries the same practitioner’s eye. “AI Change Management for Law Firms” argues that legal AI rollouts fail because of how adoption is designed, not because attorneys resist technology. Her Paper Trail series follows a civil lawsuit from the morning of the incident through every phase of litigation. Her ABA Journal article, “How Law Firms and Gen Z Can Meet in the Middle,” took her work to a national audience of law students and early-career attorneys.
Same Standard, Different Seats
Carly sets the conditions that let firms trust legal AI. Sierra helps the attorneys using it get real value from it. Both start from the same premise: the technology only matters when the people on the other side of it can rely on it.
Congratulations to Carly and Sierra, and to every 2026 Herizon honoree. Read the full list of winners at herizonawards.com.
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