Voice-to-text integration: a step-by-step guide for legal professionals

By Daryl Green, Account Director and Employee Director, Voice Technologies

Posted on March 22, 2024

We’ve written extensively about how speech recognition software and voice-to-text integration can massively lighten the load when it comes to admin in legal firms. In such fast-paced professional environments, there’s very little leeway to skimp on accuracy, and efficiency.

But despite the many ways in which speech recognition software can help legal firms, many in this industry still report barriers to adoption.

In today’s blog, we’ll first be breaking down why those barriers to adoption are perfectly legitimate. Then, we’ll discuss how legal firms can circumvent those barriers, using speech recognition tools tailor-made for their sector.

Barriers to adopting voice-to-text software in legal firms

As part of a report exploring “challenges, priorities, and tech strategies in the legal industry”, Nuance surveyed over 100 legal professionals. One section of the survey focussed on the aforementioned barriers to voice-to-text adoption in the legal sector. The report states that “nearly two thirds [of the legal professionals surveyed] said that the speech recognition tools they’ve used struggle to recognise specialist legal terminology.”

Even putting aside specialist terminology, 36% of those who reported barriers said that their voice-to-text tools just weren’t accurate enough in general. This was the barrier most widely reported, after “too much IT management” (26%), and “difficult to use” (25%).

So, in the last few years, it’s fair to say that the legal sector has expressed doubts about the reliability of speech recognition software. That’s where Nuance Dragon Legal Anywhere (DLA) comes in, a speech recognition platform designed specifically for the legal sector.

Voice-to-text software: how accurate is it, really?

Dragon Legal Anywhere exists to reduce the burden of legal admin, and help legal professionals meet the high standards of their industry without burning out. What separates it from other speech recognition software is that it’s trained on millions of legal terms, no matter how specialised, or niche, those terms may be. This allows legal professionals to automatically transcribe the most complex documentation- with 99% accuracy.

But it’s not just trained on legal jargon, obviously. DLA recognises all manner of everyday vocabulary. Across the board, Nuance offers some of the most accurate speech recognition software in the voice tech industry. With its user-friendly interface, it also requires minimal IT management.

Voice-to-text use cases in the legal sector

There are a litany of ways in which legal professionals can make the most out of Dragon Legal Anywhere. Let’s break down some examples…

Transcribing interviews or meetings
Legal professionals are regularly required to take extensive notes during interviews with clients, or during meetings. With DLA, your entire conversation can be automatically transcribed. No specialist equipment is required; if you have the DLA app, you can even just use your smartphone.

At this point, you can proof the document for accuracy, and once you’re satisfied, you’ll have a word-for-word transcription of the entire meeting.

Legal correspondence
DLA is particularly helpful when you’re drafting legal correspondence or documentation. In this case, the risk of errors will be even lower than if you were transcribing an interview, because there won’t be any overlapping speech (except when you interrupt yourself!).

You speak your thoughts aloud, your words are transcribed, you proof for mistakes, and then you distribute the finalised documents to the relevant parties. DLA’s transcriptions make the process of legal correspondence three times faster than if you were manually typing.