Legal transcription

How speech to text software helps the legal profession

Members of the legal profession have to be on top of their game every single day. They must combine efficiency with accuracy, while ensuring they use each person in their firm to their best advantage, so as to maximise billable hours. It’s often a juggling act, with never quite enough time available to get everything done. The advent of Covid-19 arguably made the juggling more difficult by putting an end to in-person meetings and office-based working, forcing legal professionals to work from home with little time to put systems in place. We learned about how the legal profession uses speech to text software in our research earlier this year.

Dragon Professional Anywhere brings productivity advantages to legal professionals, helping them produce documentation faster and more accurately, and, at the current time, being a particularly useful support to working from home. We carried out a survey in June this year to find out how legal professionals were coping with working from home, and what speech to text software could bring to help them be more efficient.

Here are some of the things we learned:

  • Legal professionals told us they spend an average of three hours a day typing. That works out to around two full days a week. Speech recognition software like Dragon Professional Anywhere can dramatically reduce this time, creating space for other tasks, such as client liaison.
  • 70% of IT decision makers in legal firms said productivity tools are a great investment with regard to staying competitive in the future, and 60% said thin client support in virtual environments was important for them when making IT decisions. Dragon Professional Anywhere  is a perfect fit, as it is cloud based and supports thin client  environments like Citrix, Windows Terminal Server and VMware.
  • 89% of legal professionals said they use external transcription services some of the time. Transcriptions services can add to document turnaround time, and, if they are used on an ad hoc basis can be a costly unbudgeted expense. Dragon Professional Anywhere is an annualised expense so it is easier to budget for. Where legal professionals create their own meeting and other case-relevant documentation using Dragon it can be both more detailed and more quickly produced.

Overall our survey found that 80% of legal professionals using speech recognition felt properly equipped for working from home before Covid-19.

As Covid-19 presents new challenges to the legal profession, and may keep us working from home for the foreseeable future, there has never been a better time to try Dragon Professional Anywhere.

We’re always here to answer your questions about how Dragon Professional Anywhere can help you. Book a demo today.

You will find our full research report here.