Whilst reading a recent article “Why you need to stop typing and start dictating” in “Tips for Lawyers” it struck me that some lawyers still operate ‘the old fashioned way’ by having their personal assistant or secretary type their correspondence and documents for them. This method can prove costly and is quite time consuming. The raw speed-advantage of typing over dictating is significant. On a traditional keyboard, most people only type 20-30 words per minute. Touch-screen typing is even worse. (You can easily time yourself if you’re curious.) Professional typists, in one study, typed about 57 net words per minute (Salthouse & Saults, 1987). But the latter don’t need to do the creative part of the work, which obviously slows typing. In contrast, lecture speech is about 142 words per minute (Tauroza & Allison, 1990). This suggests significant potential productivity benefits for dictation, particularly given that good speech-to-text software on a fast computer can handle high burst rates.
“Change! If you keep doing what you’re doing, You’ll keep getting what you’re getting.”
As secretaries usually have many tasks to complete and are are in high demand, it would make good business sense if the day to day typing and manuscript work could be placed elsewhere with the secretaries focusing on more value added tasks. Lawyers doing their own typing is not a good way to spend their time. After all, they did not get a law degree as preparation for typing long documents! This can cause frustration for lawyers as they are not trained to format large complex documents and not all of them can touch type.
Today’s technology makes typing easy for everyone; using speech recognition software makes it even easier. The lawyer prepares the dictation via speech recognition and sends it – faster output and less errors. However, this process is not entirely electronic and still requires some human input. With technology managing typing quickly and efficiently, lawyers and secretaries will have more time to focus on other tasks which add value such as maintaining client relationships, giving the best advice etc.
Dictation might feel awkward at first, but ‘practice makes perfect’, as it did with handwriting and typing. You eventually learned to think deeply while writing by hand; then, with practice, you became increasingly competent at thinking while typing. Dictation is another step which, with the ever-improving speech-to-text software, will gain in popularity in the legal profession.
Using an outsourcing company to prepare documents would be a smart way forward – typing, formatting, proofreading and saving documents to the relevant document management system – saving even more time for client-focused work. This could really make a difference, if you are willing to change …..
Author : Penny Pio | Head of Document Services | Exigent Virtual Support
