Court reporting has largely run on the same playbook for decades. Steno CEO Prabhdeep Singh joined Gordon Crenshaw, Partner at The LegalTech Fund, on their In Studio podcast to talk about how Steno is changing that, and what it takes to scale a technology-first business in an industry that wasn't built with technology in mind.

The conversation covers Steno's origin story, the barbell structure of the court reporting market, what "T-shaped leadership" means in practice, and why Prabh thinks the legal industry will transform on a longer horizon than most people expect.

On Why the Industry Was Ready to Be Disrupted

Steno was founded out of a specific frustration. Co-founder Dylan Ruga, a plaintiff attorney who had opened his own firm, found that court reporting costs were eating through his P&L. When he asked agencies for payment flexibility, the answer was uniformly no.

That lack of payment options became the seed of DelayPay, and eventually Steno. As Prabh explains, co-founders Greg Hong and Dan Anderson came from the tech world and quickly saw that deferred payments were only part of the opportunity.

"Both Dan and Greg, who both came from the tech space, said, look, deferring payments is a really interesting idea,” Prabh says. “But as we look at this space, there's just no technology anywhere, really. This industry has really been strung together with duct tape and Excel sheets."

On What Technology-First Actually Means in Court Reporting

Prabh describes court reporting as a barbell industry. Local mom-and-pop shops are on one end, a handful of private equity-backed national players on the other, and neither was built with a technology mindset. Steno entered from a different starting point.

In practice, that means three things:

• A consumer-grade client experience for booking depositions and accessing documents
• A modern marketplace for court reporters who were previously being booked through email blasts and spreadsheets kept on someone's desk
• AI tools built on top of the transcript data Steno already has access to through its services business

"We have all this awesome data through transcripts and other documents that we're getting for our clients," Prabh says. "Let's build AI tools on top of that, that we can deliver right back to our clients."

On Scaling Culture Without Losing It

Prabh outlined what he needs to do as CEO. Steno’s vision, he says, hasn't changed. He's been building toward it alongside the founders since joining the company in 2024. The challenge is executing it at a larger scale.

His framework for the Steno leadership team is T-shaped. This means it’s broad enough to operate across functions and deep enough for each member to understand the unit economics of their own domain without delegating that judgment to someone else.

"Delegating out decisions is what makes companies slow and clunky," he says. "As the senior most person, you need to be able to make decisions fast. And if you don't know actually how things work, you're just going to be trusting someone else ultimately to make a decision."

He also draws a distinction between missionary and mercenary mindsets. The long-horizon bet at Steno is on building a team that believes in what it's doing, and a culture that can hold that as the company scales.

On Setting Realistic Expectations for Industry Change

In looking at the future of the legal industry, Prabh draws a parallel to healthcare. Billions of dollars went into health tech over the past decade and a half, and the industry is still handing out paper clipboards in doctor's offices. Legal, he argues, will follow a similar pattern—not because the technology isn't capable, but because regulated industries change on their own timeline.

"We might want the industry to change at a hundred X speed, but it's going to change at ten X speed,” he says. “You have to think about how do you meet people where they are versus trying to jump ahead to the future and operate in the future space."

Where does AI fit into that? Prabh believes it will be table stakes before long, but it won't be the differentiator. When every company can access the same tools, the advantage goes back to fundamentals like service, brand, and the ability to keep executing.

Listen to the full episode on In Studio.