Litigator's thoughts on Dragon software

A couple of weeks ago I had a lengthy meeting with a large litigation based law firm. I have had the pleasure of working with this firm in the past. A managing partner was present, along with the IT Director and several partners involved in the technology committee. This meeting was focused on two topics- 1. Capturing time throughout the course of the month so that no time is "lost" 2. Reviewing the typical case prep steps to see if any efficiency could be gained through software This group had recently expressed interest in Dragon Legal Speech Recognition. The managing partner had some interesting insight after viewing what Dragon 13 is capable of. He first stood up from the conference table and shook his legal pad at the group. "Look at this" he exclaimed. This legal pad is full of my handwritten case notes. I write quickly and some of the notes are difficult or illegible when I go back to review them. Would I be able to speak my case notes and have the text appear on my PC as I speak? This question started a great conversation regarding the benefits of speech recognition. Not only could the partner dictate case notes, he could manipulate that raw text immediately without the need for his legal assistant to be involved. This was important as his case prep continues well beyond normal business hours when support staff has left the office. The group was also excited to see that they could use Dragon to dictate into their cloud based time/billing software program. The narrative section for time and billing could now be more detailed and complete. This was important to the firm when a client questions a bill. We also discussed mobile recording applications for the purpose of capturing time and billing. To tie this altogether we reviewed Philips Speech Processing dictate software integrated with Dragon speech recognition. Now the attorney can choose when creating case notes, summaries or other legal briefs. Do you wish to work with the document yourself or click "send for correction" and your legal assistant can edit and format the document for you? This workflow functionality add-on from Philips provided the solution for the firm was looking for.