Dictation for legal work
Attendance notes, briefs and client correspondence, spoken while the file is still open in front of you. The client types into whatever document has focus — your case management system, a Word brief, an email — so there is nothing to integrate and no typist in the loop.
Is general dictation software good enough for legal work?
For the language, in the ordinary case: general-purpose recognition usually handles ordinary clinical, legal and technical terminology without a domain pack. Case citations, procedural terms and the standard furniture of a brief come through. What will not is a word that exists only in your matter — a party’s name, a local abbreviation, counsel’s initials — because there is no vocabulary here that you train.
We have benchmarked no competitor, so that is the shape of the difference rather than a measured result. Read anything you dictate before it goes out, the same as anything you type.
The note, while it is fresh
Take the attendance note by speaking it as the client leaves, rather than typing it up two days later from four words in a notebook.
Into the open file
Case management systems, a Word brief, an email, a PDF form. If a cursor can sit in the field, dictation can put text there — including desktop software your firm has run since 2011. A terminal-server session is the one worth testing first.
Hearings and calls, uploaded
A recording of a hearing or a long call goes in as a file and comes back as text — up to 10GB on Ultra, with speaker separation so a conversation reads as one.
What it does not do
- No vocabulary you train yourself. Party names, local abbreviations and counsel you deal with weekly stay unknown to it, and you cannot correct it into a profile that remembers them.
- No offline mode. Audio is transcribed on our servers, so a courtroom with no signal is a room where this does not work.
- No case management integration, no matter numbers, no time recording. It types text where the cursor is, and that is the whole of it.
- No typist workflow. There is no queue, no review stage and no one to route a recording to — the text comes back to you.
Client confidentiality
Speech is transcribed on our own servers in Germany. The audio is deleted as soon as the transcript exists or the attempt fails, and it is never used to train anything.
Whether privileged material may leave your firm at all is your decision under your professional rules, not ours. If you need a data processing agreement before you dictate anything covered, write to us and we will send one.
Common questions
Does it know legal terminology?+
Ordinary legal language, yes — procedural terms, the standard shape of a brief, common citation forms. What it cannot do is learn a term that exists only in your matters.
Can I dictate into my case management system?+
If you can type into a field, you can dictate into it. The client sends keystrokes to whichever window has focus, the way a keyboard does, so it does not need to know what the program is. The exceptions are programs that deliberately reject synthetic input — some games, some remote-desktop and virtual-desktop sessions, and some hardened enterprise clients — worth testing if your firm works over a terminal server.
Should I buy Dragon Legal instead?+
If you need a vocabulary you train yourself, or dictation with no network at all, yes — those are the two things it does that we do not. Dragon Professional 16 is a perpetual licence at about €880 in Germany, VAT included ($699 list), and the legal edition is a separate and more expensive product. If neither decides it, €3 a month is a smaller commitment to test against your own notes.
Can I dictate a recorded hearing?+
Yes, as a file rather than live: upload the recording and the transcript comes back, with speaker separation on Ultra so a multi-party discussion reads as one. Recording a hearing at all is a question for the court, not for us.
What about client names it gets wrong?+
It will get some of them wrong, and there is no word list to teach it. In practice this is a search and replace on a name you already know, once per document — worth weighing against the time the rest of the note takes to type.
Last updated . Competitor figures checked August 2026: prices, platforms, and each vendor’s own description of when its text is finished, which is their account rather than our measurement. All of it changes, so check theirs before buying.