All right. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Scott Berg. I lead the enterprise software and SaaS research efforts here at Needham. Today with us we have CS Disco, a company we've been covering since the IPO here in the legal tech space. With us from the company today, we have Eric Friedrichsen, the company's CEO, and Richard Crum. Richard, you have a lot of chiefs in front of your name. I think it's Chief Product, Technology and Strategy Officer, if I've got it all correct here.
That's right.
Welcome, gentlemen. Appreciate you joining us today.
Thanks, Scott. Glad to be here. Wish we could be in front of the fireplace, but this is good.
Exactly. Well, why don't we start off, Eric, for those that are less familiar, how about a brief overview of DISCO?
Sure, yeah, absolutely. DISCO is an AI native legal tech company. We're focused on transforming high stakes litigation through a decade of innovation around proprietary data with purposeful legal workflows and AI managed services. I'm sure many of you are familiar with legal tech companies. There's many legal tech companies now that are very much focused on general law or transactional law. DISCO is very much squarely focused on litigation, where the stakes are much, much higher. I guess just to rewind to kind of set a ground set, if any of you ever watched the Erin Brockovich movie with Julia Roberts, where you saw her digging through these boxes of papers to try to look for evidence in her case, that is this concept called discovery.
You know, over the last many years, obviously a lot of that data that used to be on paper is now electronic. Almost all of it is electronic, and it could be in emails, or it could be in text messages, video files, transcripts, you know, a variety of different places. That all has become electronic, and it's created this industry called eDiscovery. That's really where DISCO was originally founded around eDiscovery or essentially digging through the facts to get evidence. That data has really exploded. Fortunately, you know, DISCO is built by litigators for litigators. A lot of this work that was previously done by people now more and more is being done by tech.
While, while you could think of our TAM as money spent on software, it's really much bigger than that because it's more and more becoming taking these services that people have manually done or even through electronic databases and doing them much more online through AI. The other great thing about the origins of our business and the market that we're in is that companies are required to defend themselves, and so therefore, they have to spend money on eDiscovery, which means that we don't have to go out and try to find budget for this work. The budget is there. It's a matter of winning the business. Our, software really simplifies these legal workflows. We help litigation teams work through incredibly massive, complex cases at scale, really through every stage of the litigation life cycle.
I mentioned earlier that we are built on AI native since the history of the company, which is more than 10 years old. With the advent of Gen AI about three years ago, we released our Cecilia platform, which really gives unparalleled leverage to litigators when it comes to doing discovery and building out their case strategy. Unlike these general purpose AI tools that we talked about, they, you know, Cecilia is designed to provide defensible feedback and results with clear auditability and verifiable source citations so that lawyers can really stand on them behind in court, which is absolutely critical. We've got other Gen AI solutions like our Auto Review, which is really taking what was previously an extremely human intensive process and automating it through AI. That's a little bit about who we are.
Eric, when you got to DISCO about two years ago now, Richard was one of your first people I know that you brought with you. You kinda had your work cut out for you, and you've made some great progress during the, during those last two years. What did you walk into, and what have you done to drive what's really been a, a pretty solid growth acceleration story over the last year plus now?
Yeah. Thanks, Scott. It's been really fun. You know, I ran a company called Emburse last, which we had grown double the size of that company at $260 million in revenue and generated incredible profitability. When I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, I had a variety of different options, and I had really strict criteria about what I was looking for. I wanted incredibly good bones in the company that I was gonna go work with. I was looking for a company with top product that customers absolutely loved. I wanted a board that was aligned on the goals and the strategy for the company, and I wanted a set of problems that I thought I could fix. DISCO really met all of that criteria in spades.
From a product standpoint, absolute best in the market. Customers absolutely love the DISCO products. You know, large number of raving fans, all of the due diligence that I did leading up to joining DISCO two years ago, you know, made that abundantly clear. The board was very much aligned on the opportunity. It is a incredibly large market that is ripe for disruption with a lot of growth, certainly indexing on accelerating the growth for the business, but also getting to sustainable profitability. As far as the problems to solve, number one was growth. I mean, the business had slowed down significantly in terms of growth after the IPO. With all these great bones, it was a matter of how do we go really accelerate the growth.
Some of that was related to the next problem, which was operational maturity. The business had grown so fast and had been founder-led that we needed some new people who had been there and done it and new processes and technology to really set the company up for success in the future. There were some cultural improvements that we needed to go drive. The last two years has just been incredible. The first thing I did was bring in some new talent. Richard's a great example. Richard and I worked together at Emburse. We also brought in a new Chief Financial Officer, a new Head of Operations, a new General Counsel, people that have really helped companies scale that I had a lot of confidence and trust in.
We built a great foundation of excellent leaders. The next step really was to get our strategic focus. Because the company had been founder-led, and it was such a big market and a big opportunity, I think, you know, DISCO was really trying to be everything to everyone and trying to solve too many problems all at the same time. It was a matter of getting back and saying, "What is our ideal customer profile? What's our ideal matter profile? What are the types of cases or matters that we should be working on, where we really excel and where we generate a lot of revenue for DISCO?" That's what we did.
We went out of our way to really define our ideal customer profile as large law firms, the Am Law 100, and the Magic Circle in the U.K., and highly litigious corporations. Then we narrowed in on our ideal matter profile, the types of matters that we're really good at, and that would generate a lot of revenue. Then we sort of focused our R&D roadmap much more on, how do we get larger matters into DISCO? How do we serve our biggest and best customers? And we really focused there on our core eDiscovery capabilities with our generative AI capabilities on top of it. So we've been executing on that strategy for about six quarters, and it's been great. We've now had three quarters in a row with re-accelerated growth. We had 14% growth last quarter.
We are getting close to being EBITDA positive, which we said we will be EBITDA positive in Q4, we're on track to do that this year. We've been very much focused on expanding our wallet share within our biggest and best customers. DISCO was originated on this strategy of kinda land and expand, but was really good at landing, but not expanding. Over the last several quarters, we've really been focused on these large customers and expanding our wallet share, it's been going great. It's been a really nice couple of years.
Yeah. It's the results have certainly spoken from the sales the last several quarters, we would concur with that. I did fail to mention earlier, for anyone in the audience that would like to ask a question, there is a Q&A button on there. Feel free to insert that question. It'll pop up on my moderator screen, questions can also be submitted to me directly at sberg@needhamco.com as well. Let's move to product and roadmap here. Richard, how does Cecilia AI and Cecilia Advanced Research complement the discovery platform?
Yeah. Thanks, Scott. Maybe I'll change your words a little bit. I think it's, Cecilia is incredible, but it isn't just a complement. It's really important that the way we've built Cecilia is not that it's like sprinkled on top. I think there's a lot of companies who took a product and said, "Let's add some AI. Let's bolt some AI onto it." Right? AI Cecilia, which is the name we give to the AI capabilities, the set of skills, it's literally woven into the layers of a complete AI stack, and it is available to our customers throughout the life cycle of the work that they do, right? If you think of a stack of how DISCO works, at its foundation, it's a data layer, right?
We bring information into DISCO, and it's important that it's not just storing data, that that data has to be processed, and it has to be organized in a way that can meet the defensibility standards that are required for litigation. On top of that data layer sits what we call our eDiscovery platform. This is what our customers use every day to review that data to meet production obligations required in how they handle that data. To really to get a deep understanding of what that data is. What happens is, on top of that and within that, AI is true throughout it. It's, it's literally built into the processing at the beginning, the way the customers work on the platform, and the way it generates context.
In the world of AI, context is so powerful, right? Cecilia is a set of skills, right? It, as I said, it functions throughout the ecosystem. I'll give you examples of things you can do. The most notable when we launched this was it gives you the ability in natural language to find facts, to test legal theories, to truly understand the shapes and nuances, what's going on within a legal matter, right? It helps you really find those hot documents, things that are gonna make your case. Another skill is the ability for you to understand. Many times, lawsuits and companies and the things, the matters we deal with are highly technical. There's all kinds of terms and jargon.
We built AI that allows you to define terms as you're reading through documents, but not by googling them or guessing or hallucinating what it is. It literally uses the documents themselves to create definitions that are grounded in the evidence. A third skill that our customers really love is the ability to do something lawyers do all the time, which is stitch facts together in a chronology or a timeline. AI can now take in documents and automatically create a timeline of what happened when and who did what when and use that to build up your understanding and link the facts and evidence together in a logical way. That's Cecilia. That's we launched three years ago. What we're launching right now, still bears the brand Cecilia, but it's something much bigger.
It's an agentic platform that we call Cecilia Advanced Research. Cecilia Advanced Research, it's almost like you have an autonomous investigator at your disposal, right? It can reason through the instructions, the questions, the theories that you give it. It can extract context. It can execute multi-step reasonings throughout the database, right? It can return answers in a variety of formats and help you truly understand and navigate and build your case, right? As I said, all of this happens natively inside of DISCO.
That's important 'cause today there's many point solutions that are like, "Oh, take your data, and you'll bring it over here and bring it over here." Not only do case teams and general counsels not really want critical case evidence, stuff that is incredibly sensitive, moved around between different tools. When AI operates inside the context of what DISCO does in these different layers that I talked about, it operates better. It operates better than any third-party tool could ever do it. Cecilia is a suite. Cecilia is a set of capabilities that our customers have really come to love. In fact, customers who use Cecilia tell us over and over they wanna use it on every matter going forward.
Richard, can you speak to primary law and what it means for DISCO's next stage of innovation?
Yeah. Primary law is the term that we give to the corpus of U.S., everything a lawyer would need to understand the legal environment in the United States. It's court decisions, it's case law, it's statutes, it's regulations, it's court rules. Why it matters is when lawyers work, they really have two things they care about. They care about the facts. I just talked a lot about how we help organize and make useful those facts and build AI into it, but you also need to have the law. You need to understand, how am I gonna argue this case? What precedent can I use? What is required to meet the claim elements regarding the litigation itself? Lawyers are constantly doing that. It's facts and law. It's facts and law.
DISCO stands in a unique place as having both, right? We have the facts that the customers bring into their eDiscovery database. We have access to all of that law, right? That's where DISCO can really change the game. Rather than having, like litigation teams, like the lawyers going from an eDiscovery platform, going from DISCO, and then going to a legal research tool, and then trying to stitch those things together, they can live within DISCO, right? As we integrate that corpus, into the platform, right? I, and I wanna, I wanna emphasize, like integrate. This isn't, "Hey, we're hooking up an external API," or, "There's some MCP connector, and we're pulling something in," or we're again, moving data back and forth. We're building a unified, like really semantic understanding of facts and law, right?
Things that can bring those together in a secure environment, but a powerful upgrade. Because combining facts and law, it's not just two things. It's the combination of the two that help lawyers build better case theories, help them build out the strategies that are gonna help them win, and that's what we believe is true, right? When the best litigation teams have the best technology, their clients win, and that's what our customers expect from DISCO, and that's what their clients get when they use it.
I just wanna add into that, Scott. I mean, I think that that is such an important distinction that litigators need to win. A lot of legal tech companies that focus on transactional or contract law, it's not about winning. You know, litigators, it can't be wrong. They can't make mistakes. It has to be right, and I think that's one of the interesting things about primary law. You may have heard of law being cited that was incorrect. That can happen with these legal tech companies that are going out, and they're scraping and trying to go look on, in public places for the law. We actually have the corpus of the law, so it's going to be correct. It's not going to be a mistake, and litigators cannot make mistakes.
It's a very unique asset that is really hard to find, and we've got it, which is another excellent thing for our customers in the future.
Well, as we're talking about some of the innovation in the, we'll say, broader legal tech space, you know, I get a lot of questions on how DISCO competes with vendors like Harvey and Lagora. You know, even Anthropic has received some attention lately based on a, we'll say, a contract widget they released. How does DISCO differ from those platforms, and how do you compete? Do you find that you have any real overlap with, you know, with any of those platforms today?
Yeah. Well, first thing I would say, in short, is that we do not compete with them at all. Like we, you know, we work with litigators. We speak with them on a regular basis. We are not competing against Harvey or Lagora or Anthropic. I will say, though, the progress that they've made has been actually pretty incredible. You know, they always talk about how the tides raise all boats and lift all boats and it has been really good to see what Harvey and Lagora and Anthropic have all done for transactional law, M&A law, getting lawyers more comfortable with using technology, leveraging AI. All of that helps to also get our litigator customers, which are much more conservative, much more open to leveraging the technology.
We're solving fundamentally different problems, but, you know, we're actually. It's helpful. The momentum that they're providing is really helpful for us.
I don't know, Richard, if you have anything to add to that.
I would just maybe just double down to emphasize this concept we talked a lot about general. Think of law as horizontal. Like Eric named a handful of disciplines. There are dozens and dozens of types of law, but litigation is special, and litigators need something different. I think of them in the medical community. Like these are the, these are the heart surgeons. These are the ones that, like you trust on multi-million dollar lawsuits where sometimes the company's reputation or future is at stake. This is high-stakes stuff. What litigators aren't looking for is, right, can I write a draft faster? Can I become more efficient at the way a motion gets. You wanna be able to write a motion that compels. They wanna be able to build a strategy that wins.
DISCO's specialization in the litigation vertical and for litigation teams, right, is what our customers are looking for, and it's why DISCO shines for litigation teams that are looking for facts and law and systems that are engineered to serve their needs from beginning to end.
Yeah. I think the beginning to end thing is really important, too. You know, I think I meet with customers all the time, every week. one of the A customer I met with a few weeks ago at Legalweek, Very innovative, Am Law 50 customer head of litigation, who was actually not a customer. He was a small customer of DISCO, but used our competitor primarily, and had come to meet with us to say that he was trying to he wasn't happy with the AI capabilities from our competitor, and he was trying to think about taking data, the facts, the evidence from that particular eDiscovery database and moving it into one of these general AI tools, into Harvey specifically. He was very nervous about it. It scared him, this idea of moving the data.
It was also very scary because he would lose all the context that goes within the database when you just pull that evidence out. We showed him our agentic capabilities with Cecilia Advanced Research, and his jaw just dropped. He said, "What you are delivering is far better than what those general AI tools can deliver." You can do it all within one environment, so why in the world would I ever wanna go take the risk of moving that data? It just doesn't make sense. I think we're in a good spot.
Let's move to pricing and packaging because there's kind of a lot going on at DISCO in this area. Let's just start off with, you know, kind of the historical nature of the platform and helping investors understand the growth around data in this space. It's been an area that we've kind of focused on, and something I don't think investors understand well is, you know, historically, the DISCO P latform has been, the pricing has been based on consumption. The natural data growth in the space is kind of interesting, whether it's the different types of sources or just the amount of data that's there. I mean, historically, I think investors would think about email and text messages as your typical data sources, but now there's all sorts of things. It could be Slack.
It could be WhatsApp messages. You know, it could be, you know, other, office applications there. How do you all think about the growth in the space, and how many different sources does the platform, you know, often pull from for your customers?
Yeah. I'll start that off. You're right. Eric told a story about Erin Brockovich, and I think sometimes people can picture the eDiscovery platform as this. Everything is some, like, likely, like, 8.5 by 11 piece of paper, right? It's a memo. It's a PowerPoint presentation or even an email, which they can imagine printing. It's so much more. You gave good examples, Scott, right? It's all these different collaborative tools like Slack and Teams, but it's also the video files that come out of their Zoom meetings or audio files that they've recorded or CAD designs or source code or log files or It goes on and on. Every matter is different in terms of the number of different sources that end up being brought in as evidence, but we can handle it all.
What it speaks to is that discovery today is not just a simple doc review, like turning pages. It requires DISCO to go through a process to make it reviewable. This is a data engineering and presentation challenge because what we do is that data comes into DISCO. It runs through a multi-step process for us to normalize it, to organize it, to optimize it, to make it ready so that then those legal teams can have access to it, can review it, and it's context rich, and it's structured, and it's organized. That's how we build out the dataset that makes up what we call the eDiscovery database within the DISCO Platform.
As you've switched pricing, from, you know, volume-based kind of ingestion volume to more hosting volume, does the new pricing impact your perceived value for customers? Help us understand maybe the genesis for the change.
I'll go first, Richard.
Yeah.
Then chime in.
Oh, sure.
You know, look, I think we recently introduced a new pricing and platform approach called the DISCO Platform right here at the beginning of the year. It was something that we've been wanting to do for a while for a few reasons. First of all, our customers, as Richard mentioned earlier, when they use our Cecilia AI capabilities, they wanna keep using Cecilia, which means they have to keep using DISCO, which creates, you know, a lot of stickiness for us. That was a main driver for us. Also, frankly, our pricing was a little bit confusing. The pricing that was originally developed on DISCO was assuming that we wouldn't increase the amount of the amount that we charge as the amount of data expanded.
Most of our competitors charge in a very different way. Oftentimes, we would be in competitive situations, even with existing clients where we had great traction, where it was a large matter that was coming in and the customers would get confused and think that we were twice as expensive as our competitors, where in reality, we were very similarly priced. We had a number of situations where they would elect to go with a competitor, even though they really preferred DISCO. Now we have made our pricing much simpler, easier to understand, more industry standard, such that we seem comparable. We're similar before we're different.
Once we seem relatively similar from a pricing perspective, we're in a much better spot because clearly our products and our services are much, much better than our competitors, which helps us with our win rates, helps us with, you know, the getting larger matters onto the platform, helps us preserve our pricing and ultimately puts us in a position where, you know, we believe over time our margins have an opportunity to get even better.
Yeah. Eric talked about the pricing element 100%. Our objective was to eliminate any procurement friction, make it easy to buy from DISCO, and we've definitely gotten good feedback, and we're seeing the results as a result of that. The other side of this was that we brought together a set of solutions that were previously sold separately, sold independently.
Everything about our DISCO Core platform, everything about our Cecilia suite, everything about what we do with the timelines capability I talked about, everything in what we used to call DISCO Case Builder, a package that helped with deposition and witness management and transcript management, all is now bundled together into the DISCO Platform. I think the combination of clearer, simpler pricing, right, at a competitive rate with higher value because you get all the great technology from DISCO on every single matter without having to go and maybe ask for specific approval to add AI or to add a feature to the case. It's that combo that has led to the great success we're already seeing as we brought this new approach to this go-to-market approach to the market earlier this year.
Yeah. I guess, you know, we've seen historically when companies make changes to pricing strategies, sometimes they can create a headwind, in either, you know, new sales as the sales teams, you know, start to better understand it, or even as customers migrate from the old plan to the new plan. Are you expecting any sort of headwinds, or have you seen anything so far in your, you know, limited use with the new strategy?
Yeah. I mean, we've been incredibly pleased with how the DISCO Platform has taken off. We just introduced it a quarter ago, we far exceeded our expectations for the uptake of the DISCO Platform. You know, it was really clear that there was a pent-up demand both from our customers and our sales team for this new platform approach. Again, a lot of it was led by, you know, their wanting to get our Cecilia AI capabilities on every matter. No, we haven't seen any headwinds at this point. You know, we're really encouraged by the fact that we've been able to get larger matters onto the platform. We're seeing really great close rates. You know, we're happy with what we're seeing from a margin standpoint.
So far it's been a great tailwind for us.
Now let's take one from the from the go-to-market side of the house. You know, Eric, I know since you joined the company a couple of years ago, you know, I've seen the company focus its go-to-market strategy maybe a little bit to focus more on legal firms and maybe a little bit less on corporate customers. Seems that's where a lot of this budget really truly resides at the end of the day. How has the shift impacted your sales efficiencies and productivity?
Yeah. You know what? I'm really happy with the sales productivity improvements that we've made over the last couple of years. We're not just focusing on law firms, but I think the way to think about the law firm is it's essentially a channel for us because the law firms serve our corporate customers. As we work a lot with law firms, they bring us to corporate customers, you can think of that as a channel. We also serve highly litigious corporations directly. We really do both, we get more and more efficiency as we're leveraging this very large channel. I think one of the important things to point out here is that, before, again, DISCO was really good acquiring customers, not necessarily growing those customers. We've really doubled down on our biggest and best customers.
As a great example, you know, we announced last quarter that the number of customers that spend more than $100,000 a year with us, you know, went up pretty significantly. I think it was a 13% increase there in the revenue that we generate from those customers. It's now 77% of our revenue. These are customers oftentimes where we might only have 15% or 20% of their wallet. It's much more efficient for us to go back to them and get them to leverage us with their with our ideal matter profile for their larger and more strategic customer matters, which then helps us be much more efficient at revenue acquisition. It's been a really beneficial approach for us so far.
Okay. Probably two or three more from me, then I am happy to take questions from the audience, as I mentioned. Feel free to enter any of those questions into the Q&A box on the webcast here. Kind of along the sales lines, Eric, net revenue retention in 2025 reached 98% and software NRR was 103%. I know those are all metrics that you are looking to improve, how do you think about customer expansions over time? I know you guys haven't given any guidance about a particular target, if you were gonna grow, I don't know, 10% a year or 20% a year, how much of your growth do you ultimately think should come from, you know, your existing customers versus something net new?
Understanding it will ebb and flow from period to period.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, look, we're still acquiring customers every quarter and having really good success there. As I mentioned before, you know, many times we'll have these very large customers, $100,000 with us, $500,000 with us, $1 million with us over the last year, and we only have 15% or 20% of their revenue. It's much more efficient for us to go back to those customers to make sure that they understand how we can help them. You know, we changed our customer value proposition about 18 months ago to what we call With You in Every Case. The whole intent is whether customers want to do self-serve from an eDiscovery standpoint, or they wanna work with DISCO in our managed services. We have an AI-powered managed services, which oftentimes for very large strategic cases, they want some help.
They want some help, we're here to help them. We also took more of an approach that was more focused on practice areas. As a great example, you know, a typical, let's say, you know, employee litigation is typically very small. We're really good at it. Doesn't generate a lot of revenue for us. There's not a lot of data associated with those many times. You talk about an SEC investigation or intellectual property litigation or construction defect litigation, those are very large, we're really good at them. We've gotten much better at marketing to those practice areas, talking to them about why DISCO is different, why we are better, how we can help them, it's made a tremendous difference. We're gonna continue to focus on that path.
In the last quarter Professional services grew a lot faster than I think folks were expecting. I think it was up about 25% on a year-over-year basis after, you know, some moderation in that line item the last couple of years. Is there a shift going on to services? How does services help software part of your business? Obviously, Auto Review is a big component of that, but, you know, I hear from a lot of investors, obviously, they wanna focus on the software side. How does that services component really augment the overall DISCO offering that's really more of a benefit for your customers that investors should really better understand?
You know, I would just think of it, like I just mentioned, With You in Every Case. I mean, there are times where customers wanna do everything themselves. There's other times where they want help. For larger and more strategic matters that, by the way, generate more revenue for DISCO, sometimes they want some help. Our AI-managed services can help them with that. We also have a product called Auto Review, which we just briefly mentioned. There is a legal required process called review that has to happen when a case goes to trial. That's oftentimes 50% of the cost of litigation. We now can really help our customers with this product called Auto Review, which is a Gen AI-based product that really helps our customers go through that process.
As we started to market Auto Review, over the last few quarters, it's grown really nicely, but we have seen some cases where a law firm maybe just isn't AI ready yet and ends up choosing DISCO, but chooses our human-based services for a particular matter. We saw some great traction with that in Q1. Some of those customers have already used Auto Review in addition to our managed review services, we're really optimistic about how that can look in the future. I mean, we are primarily a software company, but we're with our customers in every case.
Last question for me. Last quarter, the company reported, you know, overall revenue growth of 14.3%. I know the company's talked about, you know, trying to get back to the 20+% level. What does that path look like? You know, what do you need to see happen, you know, to achieve that goal?
You know, we set our strategy to go focus on our largest customers with their largest and most strategic matters and gaining wallet share based on that and our generative AI capabilities really helping permeate through all of our customers. That approach alone, particularly with our new DISCO Platform pricing and pricing approach, I think can get us to 20% plus growth over time. We're absolutely on that trajectory just simply by executing on the strategy that we put into place a few quarters ago. That said, I actually think the opportunity is much, much bigger than 20%, Scott. If you think about taking primary law, integrating that with the facts and our generative AI capabilities over the top, we really have the opportunity to help our customers drive their case strategy.
This is far beyond, this is far beyond thinking about product or software. This is really legal services. There's an incredible amount of legal services opportunity for us to go disrupt and create a lot of value for our customers, create a lot of value for our employees and for our shareholders. I think the opportunity is actually much bigger than that.
Well, with that is all the time that we have. Eric and Richard, I wanted to thank you so much for joining us today. For those that have any follow-up questions, feel free to reach out to myself. Obviously, Aleksey Lakchakov at the company runs their IR efforts, and I'm happy to connect who we need to. Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of everyone's day.
Thanks, Scott. Great to see you. Thanks, everyone.