Regardless of industry, companies prioritize the metrics closest to what they sell, which usually means looking through one of two lenses: product or service. Product companies watch usage, acquisition, and retention. Service companies watch quality, turnaround, and SLA adherence. Steno is the rare company that straddles the line between products and services, so we look through both lenses at once. That vantage point is clearest when I look at where the rest of the legal tech industry is putting its energy.
The legal industry is ripe for improvement, and I watch new competitors come into this space constantly. Almost all of them are building a sharp product, a good demo, a real pitch for what’s broken, and a case for why they’re the ones to fix it. What they’re missing is service infrastructure and the industry’s trust, the kind that only comes from actually running inside litigation workflows day after day.
The legacy players have the opposite problem. They have deep service experience, real relationships, and decades of trust built with attorneys and court reporters. What they’re missing is a technology layer that turns that experience into usable data. You can accumulate experience for twenty years and still have no infrastructure to learn from it systematically, much less improve it.
I see both gaps from the inside, every day. And neither camp is actually solving the industry’s problem. They’re each solving half of it, and that’s not a small thing to leave unaddressed. It’s the same pattern that’s driven vendor and cost creep in industries like healthcare or e-commerce, where solving half a problem means a client ends up stitching together multiple tools and services just to cover what one provider should have handled in the first place.
Here’s what I find most interesting about my job: by marrying service-related data with technology-related data, we’re able to paint a much more comprehensive picture of what the industry actually needs, as opposed to what a lot of startups are saying the industry needs.
A technology-only company can tell you how its product gets used. A service-only company can tell you what its people are doing. Neither one can tell you how those two things affect each other, because neither one has both data sets sitting in the same place. We do. And it’s not two separate pools of information I’m checking independently. The two data sets sharpen each other. That’s where the actual insight lives, in the connections between them, not in either one alone.
That combination covers both ends of the spectrum at once. Usage data tells us how our technology is actually being used. Service-level feedback tells us how our people are performing in the moments that matter to a case. When I look at those together, I can see service-level improvements that come from making a technology-level adjustment, something that’s only visible if you’re already holding both halves of the picture. A company with only one half isn’t missing an insight. It’s missing the ability to even ask the question.
I don’t think a company can fix this gap in the span of a few months. A technology-only firm would have to build out service infrastructure and earn the industry’s trust from scratch, and both of those take years. A service-only company would have to build a technology layer and the data discipline to actually use it, which means changing how the whole organization operates, not just adding a tool.
I watch the startups coming into this space, and they have the technology. What they don’t have is the service, the buy-in, or the backing of the industry. We didn’t bolt one of these onto the other after the fact. Both sides grew up together, inside the same company, at the same time. That’s the difference between a real moat and a feature checklist. One of those gets copied. The other doesn’t.
For me, data and service were never two separate investments here. They were always the same one. That’s the structural case. The operational one, what this actually looks like day to day, inside the systems I build and the problems I get pulled into, is where things get specific. In my next post, I’ll go behind the scenes: the kind of work my team does that never shows up as a line item on an invoice, but makes a real difference for the people on the other end of it.