CS Disco Inc (LAW) 2025 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to CS Disco Inc fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 conference call.

(Operator Instructions)

I would now like to hand the conference call over to your first speaker today, head of investor relations, •Aleksey Lakchakov. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss the financial results for Disco's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025. With me on today's call are Eric Friedrichsen , Disco's Chief Executive Officer, Aaron Barfoot, Disco's Chief Financial Officer, and Richard Crum, Disco's Chief Product Technology and Strategy Officer.

Today's call will include forwarding statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1,995, including but not limited to statements regarding our financial outlook and future performance, our future capital expenditures, market opportunity, market position, product, and go to market strategies, and growth opportunities, and the benefits of our product offerings and developments in the legal technology industry.

In addition to our prepared remarks, our earnings press release, SEC filings, and a replay of today's call can be found on our investor relations website at Iir.cscisco.com. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements.

Forward-looking statements represent our management's beliefs and assumptions only as of the date made. Information on factors that could affect the company's financial results is included in its filings with the SEC from time to time, including the section titled Risk factors in the company's quarterly report on Form 10 for the quarter ended September 30, 2025, filed with the SEC on November 5, 2025, and the company's upcoming annual report on Form 10-K for the year end of December 31, 2025.

In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures are in addition to, and not a substitute for or superior to measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP, reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures, and a discussion of the limitations of using non-GAAP measures versus their closest GAAP equivalent is available on our earnings release.

And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Eric.

Thank you, Aleksey, and good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us. Right here at the start, I want to. Welcome aboard Aaron Barfoot as Disco's Chief Financial Officer. Many of you saw our announcement in December and we're thrilled to have Aaron on board.

His deep experience in enterprise software and AI-driven business transformation at several industry leading companies along with his inspiring leadership approach is a perfect match for Disco. Aaron has hit the ground running and has already become a great partner on Disco's journey to revolutionize the e-discovery industry.

Speaking of that journey, I can tell you that I have never been more confident of Disco's role as the disruptor in this industry and our ability to help our customers drive better outcomes for their clients and their litigation matters. Disco was built from the ground up on cloud-based AI native technology specifically designed for the rigors of high stakes complex litigation.

Unlike general purpose AI tools, Disco is built by lawyers for lawyers across massive volumes of complex and sensitive data with privilege controls, audit trails, and litigation specific workflows that lawyers can stand behind in court. In order to best to understand this, you really need to draw a mental picture of the 4 layers of our AI native stack.

At the foundation sits Disco's proprietary data layer, which is the result of a decade of innovation on data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. With inference engines that power the industry's fastest and most advanced e-discovery platform.

Built on top of that foundation is Disco's core e-discovery solution with its integrated workflows that are purpose built for litigation professionals and trusted across the most complex high stakes matters in the world.

Our third layer brings in generative AI with Cecilia. It answers complex questions in natural language and surfaces key evidence in seconds, connecting complex and nuanced concepts across different types of data to dramatically accelerate evidence finding and document review.

This is the layer where we recently announced agentic capabilities such as advanced research. Cecilia allows lawyers to speak to the data like never before possible. At the top of the stack, Disco's managed services layer is powered by auto review, bringing generative AI to the work traditionally carried out by large human review teams and thus delivering managed service expertise at software scale and economics.

The result is a coherent AI nativeack underpinned by the enterprise grade security compliance and auditability that litigators require. Our opportunity to disrupt the industry was a key driver in the strategy we built and began executing after I joined Disco in 2024.

Coming into 2025, Cisco set high goals for progress against our new strategy, and I am very proud of the team's results. In Q4, total revenue grew 11% year over year to $41.2 million and software revenue grew 14% year over year to $35.1 million.

This was the 3rd consecutive quarter of accelerating growth of both total and software revenue excluding the one-time contingent deal we recognized and called out specifically in the previous quarter. We are very pleased to beat the high end of the guidance range that we provided for both software and total revenue.

Adjusted EBITDA was $2.2 million in Q4 representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 5% compared to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 12% in Q4 of the prior year.

Full year 2025 total revenue was $156.8 million up 8% year over year, while software revenue was $134 million up 12% year over year. Full year 2025 adjusted EBITDA was negative $10.2 million a margin of 7%. Compared to a margin of 13% in 2024. While I continue to be proud of the end results, I'm even prouder of how we got there as it continually reaffirms that our strategy is working as we drive to durable growth and sustainable profitability over time.

The main contributors to our performance included overall growth in usage on our platform. Increases in large matters. Growth with large customers and acceleration of adoption of our generative AI capabilities.

In Q4 we set record highs in total terabytes on our platform with accelerated year over year growth. We finished the year with double-digit growth in multi-terabyte matters and with revenue growing over 30% from those matters year over year in Q4.

We increased customers that generated more than $100,000 in total revenue during the last 12 months to 330,000. The revenue attributable to these customers totaled $119 million in 2025, representing 76% of total revenue. Additionally, we saw significant acceleration in the adoption of our generative AI capabilities, including Cecilia AI and Auto Review.

This resulted in Q4 year over year growth of over 600%. Attributable to these features. And it's important to point out that when customers choose to use our gen AI capabilities they're also choosing to use our integrated AI native e-discovery offering, so the impact is even greater.

One year ago we introduced our new customer value proposition with you in every case. This approach prioritizes successful outcomes for our customers across the most important cases by leveraging the power of our platform, AI capabilities, and expert services teams. We are bringing AI to lawyers and to the e-discovery industry that has for decades relied on inefficient human-powered document review.

Which is often outsourced to armies of contract attorneys and paralegals. Our core disco platform with Cecilia AI, including our newly announced agenda capabilities and auto review, put the power of industry leading technology back in the hands of the clients and their law firm partners.

Think of a Jessic Cecilia as a senior investigator that lives inside your data. It reasons. It performs multi-step operations. It links nuanced concepts between different documents and topics to paint a story complete with sources, not just give simple answers.

It moves you from the what of the case to the why, connecting dots between disparate information points to identify patterns and facts that a human might miss. And it does this across even the largest data sets. Auto review our Gen AI document review brings that concept to the next level by taking that legal intelligence and applying it across incredibly large data sets.

It reviews millions of documents with precision and recall that consistently outperforms human teams in a fraction of the time. I think it's always best to bring things into perspective when you hear how our customers are specifically benefiting from such a partnership with Disco. One example Is of a long-term Large law firm customer who recently chose Disco for a highly complex case for a large construction conglomerate under an urgent timeline.

It chose Disco eDiscovery, Cecilia AI, and Auto Review. The data set is multiple terabytes and after using Cecilia AI in concert with her other capabilities narrowed the review population to about 550,000 documents.

After the initial prompt set up, our AI powered auto review completed the review in just 2 days, delivering 98% precision and 97% recall results that are not only superior to industry accepted human review standards but provide the statistical defensibility our clients require for court mandated productions.

To get a sense of the size of impact, in order to hit the same deadline with human reviewers, this would have taken a team of 70 people 4 weeks to complete. Instead, the client had the information they needed in record time with exceptional quality.

This is a powerful example of how our gen AI capabilities augment our core litigation platform and are transforming outcomes for our customers and why they decide to choose Disco time and time again for the most important matters. The second example that I want to mention is from one of the preeminent law firms, Osborne Clark.

While they were already a fantastic customer when I joined Disco 22 months ago, they were using us primarily for smaller cases. They were very pleased with the disco platform but were unaware of the service that we provide to help on a larger and more complex cases.

Over the course of this past year, Disco has continued to build on the partnership with Osborne Clark by providing strong client service, exceptional results, and value for the money. We made sure that our enterprise grade software, leading AI technology, and comprehensive services came through clearly in every interaction.

So over the course of 2025 they more than doubled their matters with us. Began using Cecilia AI. Tapped into auto review for the first time and expanded their total spend with us by over four times their 2024 total.

Osborne Clark is an innovation focused law firm, and they're leveraging their partnership with Disco to help enable them to deliver better outcomes for their clients. The story of 2025 was one of executing on our strategy, investing in systems, processes, and teams critical for our future. Innovating on our core platform Cecilia AI and Auto Review. And accelerating growth and improving profitability.

We've started to see the benefits of our new strategy in action. That said, there's much more upside to come and to assure that our focus will be very much the same in 2026.

With that I turn it over to Richard Crum, our chief product technology and strategy officer, for some exciting updates.

Thanks Eric. In our daily conversations with customers, including at our recent customer advisory board meeting, it's clear that AI is a powerful catalyst for the legal industry.

The real excitement, however, lies in how we apply it. While general purpose AI tools offer interesting solutions for transactional work, our customers highlighted that they are not sufficient for high stakes litigation. Let me outline a few key reasons why purpose-built technology for AI for managing complex litigation is so important to our customers. Accountability remains with lawyers, not AI.

Our platform is designed to leverage AI in a secure, compliant, and defensible way. We provide a robust platform built on proprietary data architecture and strict privilege controls that manages data accessibility and establishes audit trails that law firms require to avoid malpractice risk. When you are dealing with the most sensitive data, corporate trade secrets, internal executive communications, financial records, there's no room for error.

Every insight generated by Cecilia AI is anchored by a source. Our auto review results exceed long standing industry precision and recall benchmarks established for defensibility of a technology assisted review in a court of law. Our customers know that disco software will provide them with the high-quality output they can trust their careers with.

Next, we are solving for scale. Many of the recently announced AI point solutions are great at helping lawyers with discrete legal work such as drafting a memo or reviewing an agreement. This is useful to a legal professional, but it is not the same as supporting the legally mandated document review processes we support.

Gismo is used to manage multi-step litigation-specific workflows across millions of documents. Litigators are connecting the dots between years of private data including email, Slack messages, PDFs, audio, video, and financial records to find the evidence and build their case.

This is not a simple search problem. It is a massive multi-format data engineering problem that requires an industrial grade backbone to ingest, secure, and act on terabytes of data. Further, litigation is a complex team-oriented workflow. Document review is a process involving many stakeholders, law firm partners, corporate attorneys, associates, paralegal, and service providers are all participants in a litigation.

We provide the collaborative infrastructure that standalone AI tools are not built to handle. And finally, our AI just works with our newly announced agentic reasoning Cecilia Q&A capabilities, which we will be rolling out over the coming quarters, we have moved into the next level of legal insight.

Cecilia is now an AI assistant that can find the deep connections across all types of evidence to answer why something is happening. The deep research mode for Cecilia can understand a question, create a plan, execute a multi-stage research flow, verify sources, and deliver sighted answers.

Again, it works across millions of documents. We're not offering AI wrappers that summarize text and flag risks. We have built agents that are deeply embedded in our litigation platform and help lawyers accelerate multi-step litigation workflows. We are bringing our customers the capabilities they have been asking for like analyzing evidence for inconsistencies, building out detailed issue specific timelines, or figuring out the all important who knew what when questions.

We continue to push the boundaries of what our platform can do both with the core technology that our lawyers require and the AI that makes them better at their craft. It is why our customers trust Disco to lead the way in bringing innovation to legal tech. Now I want to transition to a new topic. Well, we have been making so much progress in innovating our products. We have also been evolving our pricing models to unlock more value for customers.

For example, we see positive reactions and repeat usage from customers once they tyr Cecilia AI and we want to make sure we reduce barriers to Cecilia adoption as much as possible. Therefore, we are excited to announce that going forward we are combining all of our powerful disco e-discovery and Cecilia AI capabilities into a single offering along with updates to our pricing and contracting approach.

Let me dive a little bit deeper into these 3 exciting changes that we are making to how we bring our products to market. First, and I think most excitingly with our new pricing model all of Cecilia AI will be included on every matter.

This means that incredibly powerful and industry leaning tools like Cecilia Q&A, auto timelines, document summaries, definitions, and all the new skills we'll be adding to the Cecilia AI solution will be included on every matter under this new sales model. In addition, all of the capabilities of our case builder products will also be included. This brings our witness prep, deposition management, and case story building tools together with our e-discovery and Cecilia AI capabilities in one solution.

The disco platform gives customers everything they need to manage and win the matters for one competitive price. We are also evolving the way we price the disco platform. In addition to now offering all of the great technology I just spoke about for one simple per gigabyte rate, we're also adopting the industry standard approach of pricing.

The formula will be based on the size of the customer data as it grows over time rather than basing our pricing on the initial data load size which has often required us to discount our rates to meet competitor pricing levels reducing both revenue and margin from full potential.

The unique approach we have historically used offered clients a level of cost certainty but often also led to some customers wrongly viewing disco as more expensive compared to other similar solutions and caused us to lose out on sales opportunities.

Finally, we are updating our contracting options to better match the way our customers want to buy disco. We know there are good reasons why law firms and corporations desire to buy either matter by matter or by selecting a solution to standardize on. We also recognize that often the decision making process can be influenced by different drivers.

To meet the market, we will now offer simple contracting alternatives that make it easier than ever to select and do business with disco. We have been testing this approach with select customers for the last 6 months and have received great feedback.

Starting today, it is now generally available to everyone, and we are looking forward to discussing this new platform and pricing model with customers at Legal Week in New York in a few weeks. All these changes and new product solutions are driven by a deep understanding of how our customers' businesses are evolving along with the powerful technology we offer.

The long-term value derived from these changes will come in 3 ways. One, this new model will provide Dco costs with all the tools they need to do their jobs better than ever before and elevate their legal craft and capabilities. We believe that when more customers see the full power and potential of the disco platform, there will be a natural acceleration in usage of both our core capabilities and AI.

Second, by meeting the market with a more simplified and industry standard pricing, we expect to see an increase in win rates with less discounting pressure. At full implementation, we expect that this will provide a revenue and gross margin list for disco over the long-term.

Third, by presenting customers with smart buying options, we make it easier to buy from Disco and reward our most loyal customers who make spend commitments with our best rates on technology and services. Over time this will grow our percentage of committed revenue, making our long-term revenue performance more predictable.

We're excited to bring this change to market and are confident it will reinforce disco as an industry leader driving the future of legal technology by giving customers everything they need for a competitive price in a smart commercial model.

These pricing model changes coupled with our leap forward in product capabilities are part of our core strategy to grow wallet share with our largest customers and attract the largest and most strategic matters to our platform and with that, let me turn things over to Earn.

Thank you, Richard First and foremost, I'm very excited to be here with the team at Disco as we revolutionize e-discovery, litigation, and accelerate disco's momentum.

In this first month I've been diving deep into the company operations and vision. So far, everything I've seen reaffirms my thesis for joining disco, which is that the company has industry leading technology and has the capacity to transform a historically services oriented space into an AI enabled software workflow.

Capabilities such as Cecilia and Avi are central to that thesis. Eric has built a strong leadership team that balances domain-specific expertise with technical know-how. I believe that with the right operational execution and financial discipline, Disco has the potential to accelerate growth, produce robust free cash flow, and generate attractive returns to our shareholders.

With that, I would like to discuss our results. In Q4 of 2025, total revenue was $41.2 million, up 11% year over year. Software revenue was 435.1 million, up 14% year over year. This was the third consecutive quarter of accelerating revenue growth, excluding the impact of one-time contingent software revenue recognized in Q3. Services revenue was $6 million down 3% year over year driven by a reduction in traditional review.

Full year 2025 total revenue was $157 million up 8% year over year. Software revenue was $134 million up 12% year over year. Services revenue was $22.8 million down 8% year over year. The decline was attributed to a decline in our traditional review business. However, we are excited as auto review had strong growth in the 1st year of sales and partially offset the decline.

We're pleased to see auto review shown adoption this year. What's even more positive is we're seeing repeat usage. The auto review process involves the customer and our AI team developing a review prompt for Auto Review to execute across millions of documents.

This motion results in services revenue in addition to the software revenue. As customers begin to move to the prompt process without disco support, more of this revenue will be purely software. Our traditional review product is still all in services. We exceeded the top end of the guidance provided for the quarter across both software and total revenue.

Looking back to the initial full year guidance we provided in February of 2025, we beat the high end of software revenue and came in near the high end of total revenue in that initial 2025 guide. We accelerated the growth of our software business for the third year in a row from 3% in 2023 to 7% in 2024 and now 12% in 2025.

We are exiting the year with momentum in usage growth and AI adoption. I firmly believe there's a lot more opportunity ahead. I want to touch more on the usage dynamics that drove our growth in 2025. We saw accelerating growth in the transactional gigabytes and revenue on our platform, especially the gigabytes of complex multi-terabyte matters.

These require an enterprise caliber approach to the sale. Providing value to the customer through software, navigating complex objections, and leveraging our services team to ensure success for the customer.

These factors combine to increase our software dollar-based net retention to over 103%.Total dollar-based net retention finished the year at 98%. We finished the year with 20 customers contributing more than $1 million in revenue while our multi-product attached rate was 19% at year end, including our AI capabilities, leaving a large opportunity to expand within our existing customer base.

In discussing the remainder of the income statement, please note that unless otherwise specified, our references to gross margin, operating expenses, and net loss are on a non-GAAP basis. Adjusted EBITDA is also a non-GAAP financial measure.

Our gross margin in Q4 was 77%. Gross margin for the fiscal year 2025 was 76% compared to 75% in fiscal year 2024. As we mentioned before, our gross margins fluctuate from period to period based on the nature of our customers' usage, for example, the amount and types of data ingested and managed on our platform.

Sales and marketing expense for Q4 was $413.9 million or 34% of revenue compared to 37% of revenue in Q4 of the prior year. For fiscal year 2025, sales and marketing expense was 454.4 million or 35% of revenue compared to 39% of revenue for fiscal year 2024, a decrease of over 42.3 million year on year.

The decline was primarily driven by a decrease in personnel costs and a reduction in marketing spend. Research and development expense for Q4 was $413.0 million or 31% of revenue compared to 32% of revenue in Q4 of the prior year. For fiscal year 2025, research and development expenses were $48.4 million or 31% of revenue compared to 30% of revenue in fiscal year 2024, an increase of over $4.5 million year on year.

This increase was primarily driven by an increase in research and development personnel spend as we continue to invest and innovate in our product capabilities. General and administrative expenses in Q4 were $7.9 million or 19% of revenue, compared to 20% of revenue in Q4 of the prior year.

For fiscal year 2025, general and administrative expenses for $31.3 million or 20% of revenue compared to 22% of revenue in fiscal year 2024. Adjusted EBITDA was $2.2 million in Q4, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 5% compared to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 12% in Q4 of the prior year.

Adjusted EBITDA in fiscal year 2025 was $10.2 million. A margin of 7% compared to a margin of 13% in 2024. Net loss in Q4 was $2.5 million or 6% of revenue compared to a net loss of $4.3 million or 12% of revenue in Q4 the prior year.

Net loss in fiscal year 2025 was $10.7 million or 7% of revenue compared to a net loss of $17.2 million or 12% of revenue in 2024. Net loss per share for fiscal year 2025 was $0.17 per share compared to $0.29 per share for fiscal year 2024.

Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statement, we ended Q4 with $114.6 million in cash equivalent and short-term investments, and no debt. Operating cash flow in fiscal year 2025 was $14.9 million compared to $8.7 million in fiscal year 2024.

Now turning to the outlook.

For Q1 2026, we are providing total revenue guidance in the range of $39.0 million to $41.5 million. And software revenue guidance in the range of $33.75 million to $35.25 million. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $6 million to $4 million.

The decrease in Q1 2026 adjusted EBITDA relative to Q4 is primarily driven by increased employee costs, one-time expenses related to sales kickoff, marketing campaigns, and professional services. We believe we will be on track to achieve adjusted EBITDA break even by Q4 of 2026 as our revenue grows and as one-time costs in the first half do not reoccur.

For fiscal year 2026, we anticipate total revenue guidance in the range of $167 million to $177 million. And software revenue guidance in the range of $145.5 million to $152.5 million we expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $8.5 million to $4.5 million.

The story of the coming year will be continued growth acceleration driving us to adjustda(inaudible) break even by Q4 of 2026. Now I'd like to turn the call over to the operator to open up the line for Q&A operator.

(Operator Instructions)

Your first question comes from Scott Berg with Needham and Company.

Hi everyone, thanks, quarter. Two questions for me. Eric wanted to start off with the, pricing and packaging changes. I guess, why now? You've been there 20, obviously 22 months. Why not maybe a year ago? With what you've seen, and then how does that impact maybe existing customers and their current contracts, and, I just expect it to, I assume possibly impact deal cycles going forward, but, any thoughts on, deals that are processed is there any, opportunity to disrupt or maybe accelerate those deals? Thanks.

For sure, Scott, thanks for the props on the quarter too. It, it's, it was a great quarter and I'm super proud of the team. I'm going to let Richard here expound in a second, but, in terms of the packaging and our pricing approach, look, we just saw an opportunity, driven really by the demand from our customers, and so I'll let Richard talk a little bit more about how we work through that process.

Yeah, thanks, Eric, and you're right, the impetus for the pricing model changes that we talked about and that we're bringing to market start with listening to our customers who tell us that they want to use Disco more and they want to use it on larger matters, but that they face or faced some friction in selling it into some of the partner teams or in corporate teams because of the uniqueness of the way in which we had previously priced. And so we took that feedback and you couple it with the vision that we have for Disco, and that's what landed us on this new approach.

As I said in my prepared remarks, we've been out testing this, right? So we've been, running this through with customers and signing deals based on this new model, and the feedback has been great. They're really excited about the inclusion of all of our tools and all of our AI into the core offering, and we're excited that it's going to reduce the friction to getting our customers access to that great technology, right? Making it easier to buy means they're going to have the best tools on more matters, and it's great for Disco, right?

We do expect it will improve our win rates. Help us win those larger matters that we've been growing with many of our customers, which ultimately leads to an improved sales efficiency and a higher lifetime value of matters because as we've talked about in in previous calls, those larger matters, last on the platform a lot longer so we're real optimistic about the impact this new model is going to have on Disco's performance.

Understood, thank you. And then from a follow-up question. Eric, you mentioned that there 22 months now, the company has accelerated its revenue growth rate for 2 straight years, very, I, I'd say very positive on, especially on the software revenue line item, but as you've seen the business evolve with what you're looking at whether. It's product changes or the pricing packaging changes.

How do you think about the intermediate term growth rate of the company now? What does that look like to you? Is it at a rate higher than where you are today? Is it lower? Just help us understand maybe some of the industry dynamics and, how you triangulate to what's the right kind of stable growth rate, as you pursueed forward. Thanks.

Yeah, I appreciate it, Scott. Look, I have been really proud of the team and the fact that we went from, 3% growth to 7% growth to 12% software growth over the last 3 years, and I've said before that I believe the disco can be a 20% plus grower, and I'm actually more optimistic than ever. I I think you know we we have 20% in our sites, not calling out a specific quarter or or a time frame that we're going to hit that, but we clearly have 20% in our our sites, and I believe we can grow much faster than that.

So just getting to 20% plus growth, if you just look at the strategy that we're driving towards with our larger customers with larger matters and with more adoption of our generative AI capabilities, those things alone. Can help us get to 20% plus growth. As I mentioned in the past, if you look at many of our largest customers, they're spending more than $100,000 with us and in some cases more than a million dollars with us.

In many of those cases we might only have 15% or 20% of their wallet share. So doubling down in that particular strategy and driving forward is, I believe, a path to easily get us to 20% plus growth. However, I think there's actually a lot. More upside from there, Scott, if you think about the adoption of generative AI, if you think about this space, particularly when it comes to the review piece of our space and the fact that, it's a multi-billion dollar market that is being done by armies of human resources today, contract attorneys, we've got the ability to leverage our auto review capabilities on top of our core platform.

To turn much of that into AI driven software revenue instead of services revenue, and that is a, an incredible win for Disco obviously, but also for our the end customers for the corporate clients who now will have the opportunity to, bring the e-discovery or the review process with an e-discovery much sooner in the litigation life cycle which can help them improve outcomes.

It can help them. Accomplish that part of the task for, much more cost effectively. It'll help our law firm customers increase their revenue streams to what's been traditionally done by these again armies of contract attorneys, and it'll help this go along the way. So I'm I'm actually optimistic beyond even the 20% plus growth profile.

Understood, thanks for taking my questions.

Thanks, Scott.

Our next question comes from DJ Hynes Canaccord.

Hey, good morning guys. Nice quarter. Nice to see the software acceleration continue and I appreciate all the commentary on the call. Eric, maybe we could tackle kind of the elephant in the room. I mean, you did a good, job talking about kind of the modes that Cisco has, kind of less directly hit on competition from the foundational model companies.

Obviously there's lots of noise in the market around those folks targeting legal tech is an attractive area for automation. Are you seeing those LLMs show up in your customers at all? Are they exploring with that technology? Can you talk about which areas of the tech stack are most at risk of disruption, which aren't, and kind of how you think that impacts Cisco over the next 2 or 3 years?

Sure, DJ, I happened to have noticed them to have noticed. Go ahead. Sorry, I heard some feedback. So, yeah, I did notice there was some, disruption in the stock market recently for sure, no question about it, but look, I've had the good fortune of spending time with our customers on a regular basis, 2 weeks ago I was in London, in the in the UK and London in Manchester, 3 weeks ago I was in Austin with our customer advisory board, members, and I haven't heard of a single customer utilizing general AI or these frontier models for the e-discovery process.

And frankly, I would have been shocked had I heard about it, look, it's a very different space, and I think it goes back to, I look at it this way. You have to look at the industry that we're in specifically. You have to look at the competitive advantages that we have, and then you have to look at the way we're innovating.

The industry that we're in is squarely focused on litigation and e-discovery, and it's just a very different space than areas like contracts or M&A or transactional areas where these general AI and frontier AI companies are really focused. And when it comes to litigation, you either you win or you lose, and e-discovery is at the heart of all of that.

It's a complex. It's court mandated. It's a legal process where the adversaries in a matter have to agree upon the methodology that they're using for e-discovery, so they're dealing with extremely sensitive data that gets highly processed before it even comes into our platform or as part of coming into our platform, and it's really not valuable outside the context of the integrated workflows, so.

And then on top of that, ultimately, lawyers can't make mistakes when it comes to litigation. It could cause a malpractice lawsuit or even worse yet, it could cause a crushing outcome for their firm's clients. So we're just in a very different segment of legal. Think of us as AI for litigators. That would be the first thing. And then the first competitive advantage is, look, we're disco, as I mentioned before, has been AI native since our inception, long before these frontier models came out.

We were the first to embrace Gen AI in e-discovery when we put Cecilia out 3 years ago, and we've ultimately built a very powerful, scalable, integrated platform as I detailed earlier, that just deals with the largest and most complex matters and with processed volumes of data that are well beyond what other solutions can handle, so.

I guess the way to think about it that way is that when it comes to technology for e-discovery, that's really where Disco is the answer. And then I think you also have to think about the innovation, and Disco's never sitting still. We've always been about innovation.

Our entire history has been about improving the way litigation works. And as I mentioned earlier, if you think back to that story about one of our customers that in 2 days did what 70 contractors could do. In 4 weeks, that's just a game changing opportunity that can create a win win win for the corporate end client for the law firm and for disco along the way. So I think we're in a better position than we've ever been, DJ.

Very helpful. Aaron, maybe a follow-up for you. You, you're obviously pretty fresh in the seat, but you're also a fresh set of eyes on the model and only the second CFO since the IPO. I'm curious of your impressions of the visibility that the usage-based model provides, and given this is your first call, maybe you could talk a little bit about how that informs your guidance philosophy.

Sure. When you think about the visibility the usage model gives us, I think there's elements.

That and I've seen this is not my, first experience with the usage models. I've had the privilege of kind of working with usage models in the past, but I think when you look at it, the larger the scale, the more predictable it becomes. You got pick up the trends that occur within the model.

And so I think as our business continues to scale, we pick up more and more predictability in the usage model. There are still parts of the revenue model, when you look at services. And auto review as it stands today where there is an element to that where it's less predictable but once again I think with scale you gain the advantage of predictability, the law of large numbers type of math.

And so I think you know going into our guidance philosophy, when you think about that part of it, we obviously provide it as a range for that reason we know that our customers are voting with their wallets every time they choose to use disco, and I think that explains a lot of why we do provide the range and you know it, it's, it has, if we look at Q1, a range in software from 9% to 14%, and it's relatively wide for that reason. But I think as time goes on, it allows us to get more and more precise.

The next question comes from Mark Schappel with Loop Capital Markets.

Hi, thank you for taking my question. Nice job on the quarter. Eric, I just want to build on the earlier question about the new commercial model. I was wondering if you could just maybe discuss its origins a little bit more and maybe what potential downsides or trade-offs you foresee with the shift.

Yeah, thanks, Mark. Look, as Richard mentioned earlier, this really originated from our customers. If you think about it, our focus with our strategy on winning more wallet share within our biggest and best customers and getting larger matters from their biggest and best customers. We've got great relationships with our champions at these customers, and sometimes they have struggled to explain our pricing model to the various case teams within their firms.

And so while we might be, getting a nice, $100,000 or a million dollars worth of revenue from some of these customers who might only have 15% or 20% of their wallet, and our champions want to do more with Disco, they want to make sure that they can explain our pricing model. Sometimes we've seemed. More expensive than our competition when we're really not and so we've had to, TRY to teach our champions how to explain our pricing model to customers and. You can do that so long and you realize maybe there's an easier way to just simplify the model.

I also think there's been a number of cases where we've had to discount more than I'd like to discount because our model wasn't as understandable. And so now with this new model it's much more clear, much more understandable, and we think that gives us the chance to really proliferate along our strategy of getting larger matters and more wallet share within our largest customers.

Great, thank you. And then as a follow-up. The start of the year is typically when software companies adjust their sales organizations and they go to market strategies, 18 months, 24 months or so back, you made a significant change to the sales work. I was wondering if you could talk about any meaningful changes to the sales or as we start the year here.

Thanks, Mark. We've had. The the strategy that we execute upon with our go to market shift has worked really well, and it started with ensuring that we're bringing in the right leaders, the right talent, the right reps. It was a matter of, as we made some shifts last year, moving from less account executives to more outside salespeople, so more from inside sales to more outside sales as we're focusing on larger customers and larger matters, so we didn't add cost to sales and marketing last year, but we did shift the way we spent that money. And it's paid off.

Also the comp plan that we put in place to really incentivize sales reps for new matters and new revenue, has worked out really well for us. The systems and processes that we put in place, the contract simplification, so a lot of the things that we have already put into place are starting to work and so the main thing that we're doing is just doubling down and executing on that now. As I mentioned, we didn't add a lot of cost to sales and marketing in 2025 because we needed to go through that process of sort of reorganizing and re-accelerating revenue, I think there's an opportunity, this year, potentially to bring in some additional talent, to take advantage of the opportunity that we see ahead.

Okay, thank you.

There are no further questions at this time. I'll now turn the call back over to Disco CEO Eric Fredrickson for any closing remarks.

Yeah, thank you very much. Look, to wrap up, our performance in 2025 was remarkable. It gave me extreme confidence that our strategy focused on expanding our wallet share with existing customers, focusing on large and strategic matters, and accelerating our Gen I adoption, Gen AI adoption of Sicilian Auto Review. Are the right strategy that focusing on our customers and with you in every case combined with the innovation that we're delivering has really put Disco on the right path.

So we're going to do a lot of the same things that we did in 2025 and 2,020,206. We're going to take advantage of the momentum that we started to gain. We're going to layer on top of that the new agentic AI capabilities that we just announced in our new pricing and platform approach and so. Look, it's been 33 years now where you've been able to see the acceleration, I should say 2 years on top of 2023, where you've been able to see the acceleration.

I think it's a very large market with an e-discovery and litigation that just goes in a prime position to go disrupt and I'm really excited. I think it's going to be a great year. So I look forward to updating you as we progress throughout 2026 and I really appreciate you all joining. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.