Both of these sell the same hour of testimony, and neither is really competing on transcript quality. Steno is a court-reporting agency that books certified reporters nationwide and hands you an AI layer over the finished transcript. Depositions by Filevine — the product Filevine built out of Parrot, acquired in April 2025 — is a remote deposition platform that puts an AI second chair in the room while you question the witness. The choice is settled by two things that show up on the invoice rather than in the demo: when you pay, and what the meter counts. Steno bills per proceeding and will defer the bill until the case closes. Filevine, since 1 January 2026, requires an active subscription — you buy a block of deposition hours for the year and pay a flat monthly fee against it. For a contingency firm funding discovery off its own balance sheet, those are opposite cash-flow shapes, and that difference decides more evaluations than either AI does.
Where Steno wins
The bill can wait for the recovery. DelayPay defers payment until the case concludes, with no interest, no lien, and no credit check, on a recourse or non-recourse basis depending on state and case type. Filevine’s model runs the other direction: from 1 January 2026 a firm needs an active subscription to schedule a proceeding or upload a file at all, so deposition dollars leave the account months before any recovery arrives. A plaintiff shop noticing twelve depositions in a case that settles in three years is choosing between paying in year one and paying at settlement. That is not a feature question.
The AI reads transcripts you did not buy from Steno. Transcript Genius ingests third-party .txt and .pdf transcripts, so testimony taken by any other agency lands in the same search, summarization, and cross-deposition contradiction analysis. Steno states there is no additional charge and no usage limit for clients. That portability is what matters when you inherit a case carrying three years of depositions from four different agencies — the analysis layer does not care who took the record.
Certification is the default, not a question per job. Steno books certified reporters through a network of thousands of independent professionals covering most states. Where the venue requires a licensed reporter to certify the transcript, that is what shows up.
Where Depositions by Filevine wins
The AI is in the room, not after it. Depo CoPilot tracks the goals the attorney set for the deposition, surfaces inconsistencies in testimony as they occur, and suggests follow-up questions in real time. The value lands while you can still ask the next question. Transcript Genius, by design, reads only final ordered transcripts — Steno withholds analysis on drafts and un-ordered transcripts to protect reporters’ work, so its AI arrives after the witness has gone home.
Turnaround. A verbatim synced AI transcript arrives about 90 minutes after the proceeding ends, rough drafts reach both the firm and opposing counsel within 24 hours, and certified transcripts follow. On a conventional rate card, same-day or next-day delivery runs $7.50–10.50 per page against $4.00–7.00 for standard five-to-ten-day delivery. Filevine’s speed is included in the proceeding; Steno’s is an expedite line item.
Fewer line items to police. Filevine’s per-proceeding scope includes full audio, video, and a dedicated human resource, with no separate videographer fee, and certified transcripts synced to the audio and video at no extra charge. Steno’s rate card carries roughly 25 items — reporter appearance, per-page original-plus-one, exhibits per page, a litigation package priced separately for in-person and remote — plus conditional charges for medical and expert pages, certificates of non-appearance, bookings made after 12:00 PM local time the prior business day, and waiting time.
You do not have to run Filevine’s case system to buy it. Depositions is sold separately from Filevine case management, so this is not deposition AI locked behind a platform migration. If you are on Clio, Litify, or a homegrown system, the product still works; the lock-in objection belongs to the case-management purchase, not this one.
Pricing reality
The two meters count different things, and that is the comparison.
Steno meters output. A four-hour deposition yields 150–250 pages. At $4.00–7.00 per page for standard delivery, the transcript line alone spans roughly $600 to $1,750 for the identical four hours in the room — a near 3× swing driven by how much the witness talked and how the reporter formatted the page. Add an appearance fee of $200–650 for a half day or $400–1,100 for a full day, then video, realtime, rough drafts, and exhibits. A single standard proceeding lands around $500–1,500 all-in, rising to $1,000 and well past $5,000 once video and expert witnesses are involved. Steno sits above that midpoint — its G2 reviewers consistently report it costs more than the agencies they came from — and expect the DelayPay rate card to be a separate, higher schedule than the pay-now card. Deferral is priced in, not free.
Filevine meters input. You choose a set number of deposition hours for the year and pay a flat monthly fee based on that number. Unused hours roll into the following year, and hours can be added mid-term. Filevine publishes no dollar figures, so you cannot price it from the outside — but the structural consequence is knowable without them: hours in the room sit on your calendar and can be forecast a year out, page counts cannot. A firm that can predict its deposition calendar but not its page volume gets a budget line it can defend to a managing partner.
Run the arithmetic on your own last twelve months before either quote arrives: count proceedings, hours in the room, and total pages billed. If your pages-per-hour ran high, a page meter is charging you for witness verbosity you do not control.
Implementation effort
Both are close to zero, but they fail differently at the trial stage. Steno is a booking relationship — open an account, get the rate card, schedule the first proceeding; the Clio and Litify integrations put scheduling and transcript access inside the matter record. Filevine requires the subscription commitment before the first booking, which turns a vendor trial into a procurement decision. That inverts the usual pilot order: with Steno you test on one deposition, with Filevine you sign for the year and then test.
Verdict
Pick Steno when discovery costs sit on the firm’s balance sheet until settlement — plaintiff-side personal injury, employment, and mass tort — or when your venues require a certified reporter and you do not want that verified job by job, or when you need AI analysis across transcripts taken by agencies other than your own.
Pick Depositions by Filevine when the deposition calendar is predictable enough to buy hours a year ahead, when questioning support during the proceeding is worth more than analysis after it, or when first-draft speed drives the case — expedited motion practice, compressed discovery schedules, and insurance defense volume where the same questions repeat across files.
If you are choosing in a vacuum, pick Steno. Per-proceeding billing holds the cost of being wrong to a single deposition, and you can move to a Filevine subscription once you have twelve months of hour counts to size the block against. The reverse move strands a prepaid commitment you already funded.
Pick neither if you take fewer than a dozen depositions a year. Keep the local reporting relationship and run the transcripts through Harvey or CoCounsel — you pay separately for analysis, but you avoid both a premium rate card and an annual minimum. If national coverage depth outweighs cash flow and turnaround together, bid Veritext, the largest agency, which extended its 2024 Smart Summary with Smart Search and Smart Analysis in February 2026, and Lexitas when you also want process serving and record retrieval from one vendor. If the real question is which case system to run rather than who takes the record, read Filevine vs Clio.
Watch-outs
Certification is per venue, not per vendor. Depositions by Filevine pairs professional reporters with AI transcription, and its own positioning notes that certification requirements vary by jurisdiction and should be confirmed per venue. California is the sharp case: under Code of Civil Procedure § 2025.340(m) the transcript must be prepared by a Certified Shorthand Reporter to be admissible without further foundation, and a certificate signed by an unlicensed deposition officer does not carry that status. Guard: before the first booking, name your three highest-volume venues and get written confirmation of who certifies in each; in CSR-only states, require the reporter’s license number on the booking confirmation.
“Non-recourse” and “not contingent on outcome” are different promises. Steno describes DelayPay as available on a recourse or non-recourse basis depending on state and case type, while the ethics analysis it commissioned for New York rests on the arrangement not being contingent on case outcome. Those are separate tests and your jurisdiction applies its own. Guard: get the recourse language into the signed service agreement before you defer a six-figure book of costs, use the client disclosure and waiver Steno supplies, and re-run the conflict analysis under your own state’s rules rather than the New York opinion.
The subscription block is a forecast you have to defend. Hours roll over and can be topped up, but Filevine publishes no deposition overage rate and no dollar figures at all. A firm that oversizes the block has prepaid for hours it did not use; one that undersizes it renegotiates mid-year from a weak position. Guard: size the first-year block from last year’s actual hours in the room minus 15%, get the add-on hour rate and any rollover expiry in writing, and confirm what happens to already-scheduled proceedings if you do not renew.
Steno’s AI is gated behind the transcript purchase. Transcript Genius does not read drafts or un-ordered transcripts, so when impeachment prep is on a clock the analysis sits behind an expedite charge on top of the per-page rate. Guard: buy expedited delivery only on the depositions you will actually question against and leave the rest on standard turnaround, and confirm bulk export of transcripts, exhibits, and video at signing so a rate change cannot strand the matter file.
Both of these sell the same hour of testimony, and neither is really competing on transcript quality. Steno is a court-reporting agency that books certified reporters nationwide and hands you an AI layer over the finished transcript. Depositions by Filevine — the product Filevine built out of Parrot, acquired in April 2025 — is a remote deposition platform that puts an AI second chair in the room while you question the witness. The choice is settled by two things that show up on the invoice rather than in the demo: when you pay, and what the meter counts. Steno bills per proceeding and will defer the bill until the case closes. Filevine, since 1 January 2026, requires an active subscription — you buy a block of deposition hours for the year and pay a flat monthly fee against it. For a contingency firm funding discovery off its own balance sheet, those are opposite cash-flow shapes, and that difference decides more evaluations than either AI does.
Where Steno wins
The bill can wait for the recovery. DelayPay defers payment until the case concludes, with no interest, no lien, and no credit check, on a recourse or non-recourse basis depending on state and case type. Filevine’s model runs the other direction: from 1 January 2026 a firm needs an active subscription to schedule a proceeding or upload a file at all, so deposition dollars leave the account months before any recovery arrives. A plaintiff shop noticing twelve depositions in a case that settles in three years is choosing between paying in year one and paying at settlement. That is not a feature question.
The AI reads transcripts you did not buy from Steno. Transcript Genius ingests third-party
.txtand.pdftranscripts, so testimony taken by any other agency lands in the same search, summarization, and cross-deposition contradiction analysis. Steno states there is no additional charge and no usage limit for clients. That portability is what matters when you inherit a case carrying three years of depositions from four different agencies — the analysis layer does not care who took the record.Certification is the default, not a question per job. Steno books certified reporters through a network of thousands of independent professionals covering most states. Where the venue requires a licensed reporter to certify the transcript, that is what shows up.
Where Depositions by Filevine wins
The AI is in the room, not after it. Depo CoPilot tracks the goals the attorney set for the deposition, surfaces inconsistencies in testimony as they occur, and suggests follow-up questions in real time. The value lands while you can still ask the next question. Transcript Genius, by design, reads only final ordered transcripts — Steno withholds analysis on drafts and un-ordered transcripts to protect reporters’ work, so its AI arrives after the witness has gone home.
Turnaround. A verbatim synced AI transcript arrives about 90 minutes after the proceeding ends, rough drafts reach both the firm and opposing counsel within 24 hours, and certified transcripts follow. On a conventional rate card, same-day or next-day delivery runs $7.50–10.50 per page against $4.00–7.00 for standard five-to-ten-day delivery. Filevine’s speed is included in the proceeding; Steno’s is an expedite line item.
Fewer line items to police. Filevine’s per-proceeding scope includes full audio, video, and a dedicated human resource, with no separate videographer fee, and certified transcripts synced to the audio and video at no extra charge. Steno’s rate card carries roughly 25 items — reporter appearance, per-page original-plus-one, exhibits per page, a litigation package priced separately for in-person and remote — plus conditional charges for medical and expert pages, certificates of non-appearance, bookings made after 12:00 PM local time the prior business day, and waiting time.
You do not have to run Filevine’s case system to buy it. Depositions is sold separately from Filevine case management, so this is not deposition AI locked behind a platform migration. If you are on Clio, Litify, or a homegrown system, the product still works; the lock-in objection belongs to the case-management purchase, not this one.
Pricing reality
The two meters count different things, and that is the comparison.
Steno meters output. A four-hour deposition yields 150–250 pages. At $4.00–7.00 per page for standard delivery, the transcript line alone spans roughly $600 to $1,750 for the identical four hours in the room — a near 3× swing driven by how much the witness talked and how the reporter formatted the page. Add an appearance fee of $200–650 for a half day or $400–1,100 for a full day, then video, realtime, rough drafts, and exhibits. A single standard proceeding lands around $500–1,500 all-in, rising to $1,000 and well past $5,000 once video and expert witnesses are involved. Steno sits above that midpoint — its G2 reviewers consistently report it costs more than the agencies they came from — and expect the DelayPay rate card to be a separate, higher schedule than the pay-now card. Deferral is priced in, not free.
Filevine meters input. You choose a set number of deposition hours for the year and pay a flat monthly fee based on that number. Unused hours roll into the following year, and hours can be added mid-term. Filevine publishes no dollar figures, so you cannot price it from the outside — but the structural consequence is knowable without them: hours in the room sit on your calendar and can be forecast a year out, page counts cannot. A firm that can predict its deposition calendar but not its page volume gets a budget line it can defend to a managing partner.
Run the arithmetic on your own last twelve months before either quote arrives: count proceedings, hours in the room, and total pages billed. If your pages-per-hour ran high, a page meter is charging you for witness verbosity you do not control.
Implementation effort
Both are close to zero, but they fail differently at the trial stage. Steno is a booking relationship — open an account, get the rate card, schedule the first proceeding; the Clio and Litify integrations put scheduling and transcript access inside the matter record. Filevine requires the subscription commitment before the first booking, which turns a vendor trial into a procurement decision. That inverts the usual pilot order: with Steno you test on one deposition, with Filevine you sign for the year and then test.
Verdict
Pick Steno when discovery costs sit on the firm’s balance sheet until settlement — plaintiff-side personal injury, employment, and mass tort — or when your venues require a certified reporter and you do not want that verified job by job, or when you need AI analysis across transcripts taken by agencies other than your own.
Pick Depositions by Filevine when the deposition calendar is predictable enough to buy hours a year ahead, when questioning support during the proceeding is worth more than analysis after it, or when first-draft speed drives the case — expedited motion practice, compressed discovery schedules, and insurance defense volume where the same questions repeat across files.
If you are choosing in a vacuum, pick Steno. Per-proceeding billing holds the cost of being wrong to a single deposition, and you can move to a Filevine subscription once you have twelve months of hour counts to size the block against. The reverse move strands a prepaid commitment you already funded.
Pick neither if you take fewer than a dozen depositions a year. Keep the local reporting relationship and run the transcripts through Harvey or CoCounsel — you pay separately for analysis, but you avoid both a premium rate card and an annual minimum. If national coverage depth outweighs cash flow and turnaround together, bid Veritext, the largest agency, which extended its 2024 Smart Summary with Smart Search and Smart Analysis in February 2026, and Lexitas when you also want process serving and record retrieval from one vendor. If the real question is which case system to run rather than who takes the record, read Filevine vs Clio.
Watch-outs