Most legal departments can produce an itemized invoice from outside counsel. Fewer of them can tell you what happened between the deposition and the motion. The transcript goes in, a summary comes out. In the hours in between, what the reviewing lawyer prioritized, what they missed, and how consistent their process was against the next associate's disappear into the bill.

In a new piece for the Association of Corporate Counsel, Steno Director of Legal Solutions Joe Stephens, JD, and Kelsey Berteaux, Legal Operations Manager at DigiCert, explain why that invisibility is a governance problem, not just an inefficiency, and what has to be true before AI is trusted to fix it.

Joe and Kelsey open by naming the real cost of an opaque review process:

The client is not simply purchasing the hours required to read a transcript or prepare a summary. The client is accepting an unmeasured risk that a material admission, inconsistency, or factual connection will not be identified.

That risk doesn’t show up as a line item, and it often doesn’t surface until a case team discovers the gap after strategy has already formed around an incomplete record.

The piece draws a careful line between speed and trust. AI can process a transcript faster than any associate, but Joe and Kelsey argue that speed is beside the point if the output cannot be checked:

AI only adds value when the lawyer can verify what the system found and why it matters. Its value should also be measured by whether it can be trusted inside a professional workflow. In litigation, trust has a specific meaning. It means the output can be traced back to the record. If a transcript tool says a witness contradicted herself, the lawyer should be able to see exactly where that contradiction came from.

From there, the authors lay out a framework for legal operations teams evaluating AI in litigation, built around three requirements:

• The work has to be traceable back to page-and-line citations
• Accountable to a named reviewing lawyer
• Measurable against a defined baseline, not folded quietly into a general outside counsel budget

Joe and Kelsey end with a reminder that deposition review has been a black box for as long as it has been billable. A workflow built on citations and human checkpoints leaves a trail. It shows how testimony was analyzed, how long it took, and what a person actually verified. Without that trail, faster review is just faster guessing.

Read the full piece on the Association of Corporate Counsel.