Legal tech software has already gone through a period of consolidation. Litigation support is entering the same cycle now, one disconnected platform at a time.

In a new piece for The Recorder, Steno President and Chief Legal Officer Dylan Ruga traces the consolidation cycle that reorganized legal tech software between 2016 and 2023 and argues litigation support is entering the same sequence, driven by the same three forces: client scrutiny of outside counsel invoices, tightening data security requirements, and staff friction from managing a dozen disconnected vendor portals.

Dylan opens with the scenario every litigator recognizes:

The deposition transcript arrives from the court reporting agency. The video may come from the same agency or a separate one. The AI tool the team uses for transcript review cannot ingest the files without a conversion step that adds a day to the workflow. The invoice for the remote deposition technology surcharge is in dispute with a third party. The paralegal who coordinated last quarter's depositions has left the firm and nobody is certain who still has active credentials on which platform. The motion deadline does not wait.

None of that is a vendor failure, he argues. It's a structural problem caused by too many separate relationships, each optimized for its own service line, none accountable for what happens at the intersections.

That structural gap is also reshaping what firms ask for when they procure litigation support. Dylan writes:

The criteria that matters is not price per page but workflow accountability: who owns the coordination if a handoff fails? Firms are now asking vendors to demonstrate data governance that spans the full lifecycle of the matter, billing transparency that does not require manual reconciliation, and a single point of operational accountability.

The piece closes with a look at timing. Dylan explains that the firms asking those questions now will be positioned to act when the market delivers answers. The firms waiting will absorb the coordination cost for years longer, then face a forced transition anyway.

Read the full piece in The Recorder.