When clients started demanding greater efficiency and value in the aftermath of the Great Recession, many law firms turned to technology to boost productivity and reduce costs. Decades later, technology continues to play a pivotal role. One area where technology delivers significant efficiency gains is documentation, so it’s not surprising that speech recognition has become a widely-adopted productivity tool in the legal industry.
By Maria Cataldo
March 14, 2016
Speech recognition technology is having an increasingly profound effect on the way law firms conduct daily business. In the ITLA Survey more than half of respondents (52%) reported using desktop speech recognition. Given that most people can talk 3 times faster than they can type, it makes sense that speech recognition is being widely adopted as a way to speed and simplify documentation and paperwork in law firms. The same study revealed that use of mobile devices is on the rise among today’s legal professionals. In the survey, 82% of respondents reported that their firms provided financial support for smart phones and that close to half (40%) of the attorneys in their firms use tablets on the job. This begs the question: How can lawyers enjoy the significant productivity advantages of speech recognition when they’re on the move?
Mobile dictation solutions can help. Here are a few productivity boosters you can use today:
Take legal work to go
In this day and age, few lawyers spend their time sitting behind a desk. On the contrary, the tasks involved in preparing cases and serving clients frequently require legal professionals to be out of the office. In a single business day, their work may take them to client meetings, depositions, court appearances and more. But a backlog of legal documentation doesn’t have to pile up back at the office.
Mobile dictation solutions like Dragon Anywhere professional-grade dictation for iOS and Android, allow lawyers to manage those paperwork demands even when they’re away from their computers. With a smartphone or a tablet, they can dictate, edit, and format complete documents and reports outside the office and easily share them via email or a cloud storage service. The flexibility of mobile solutions ensures that lawyers and other professionals can maximize any idle time in the field—whether they’re waiting for a client meeting to begin, facing delays at the courthouse, or stopping for their morning cup of coffee.
Reduce transcription costs and delays
In a traditional legal documentation workflow, lawyers typically record case notes into a handheld recorder for later transcription by support staff or a third-party service. But outsourcing transcription can be costly—with many services charging multiple dollars per minute. And the reliance on overburdened support staff can slow document turnaround and put the firm at risk of missing critical deadlines.
Mobile solutions like Dragon Anywhere allow lawyers to dictate, edit and format entire legal documents directly on their mobile devices. They simply speak and see the results of their dictation immediately. To increase speed and accuracy, they can even add custom words specific to their clients or specialty and create custom commands for quickly inserting standardized content by voice. There’s no need to wait for transcription and go through time-consuming, back-and-forth editing. Lawyers can complete case briefs, contracts, citations, and correspondence directly on their phone or tablet and then send them—via email or cloud storage—to support staff for final proofreading and submission.
Achieve seamless productivity across devices
If a lawyer starts dictating a case brief while waiting outside a courtroom, they want to be able to continue working on that document—without any hassles or compatibility issues—when they return to their office desktop computer. Otherwise any productivity gains achieved in the field may soon be lost. Dragon Anywhere automatically synchronizes custom words and commands with the user’s Dragon desktop (for supported editions) next time they log into the network so they can work seamlessly wherever they go. Because legal professionals can create these customizations within Dragon Anywhere or from their Dragon desktop, they don’t have to worry about which device they’re on. They can continue their documentation work on any of their devices without missing a beat, leaving them more time to spend on client service.
