Dennis Kennedy today asks "What Are Your Legal Tech New Year's Resolutions?".  All five of Dennis’s resolutions ring true.  I would like to comment specifically on a couple of these resolutions, and also generally on them, in the context of law firm productivity, collaboration and innovation.

 

Speech Recognition

Market leading Dragon Naturally Speaking speech recognition has been a personal favourite of mine since I started to use it in 1999 when I became self-employed.  Speech recognition, and its more familiar and used counterpart application in the UK legal profession, digital dictation, made me dust off several articles I wrote about both subjects in August 2002 (Killer applications - digital dictation and speech recognition) and September 2003 (Legal IT/Philips’ Survey: The rise of the digital dictators) (both also attached).

 

Digital dictation has continued to go from strength to strength in the UK in the last four / five years since those articles, whereas speech recognition has made little mainstream progress.  I am not proposing to go into the reasons for this now.  However, given the constant references in the business press in recent months to innovation and keeping talent within the organisation, one particular quote I gave to Legal Week for their 2003 survey on digital dictation (which is from my second article), still resonates today: 

“One of the next interesting developments will be how quickly firms enhance their existing digital dictation capability with speech recognition capability. Although the potential for increases in productivity are often realised and are not to be ignored, implementation of digital dictation involves little actual change of working practice, since analogue ‘tapes’ are simply being substituted by digital tapes or files.  The typing of the files or the carrying out of instructions on the files remains an overhead. However, the ability for lawyers to ‘communicate’ with the various applications on their desktop by speech progressively over time would certainly transform any legal practice.”

I am still using version 8 of Dragon, but I note with interest that Dragon’s owners, Nuance, put out a Press Release on 14 December 2006 entitled “Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 Gives Bloggers A Voice / Nuance invites blogging community to use speech recognition and initiates an online typing test for everyone”.

 

Like Dennis, I need to get back in the habit of using my speech recognition more regularly.  Most of my rough notes to produce all my Blog entries so far have been speech delivered.  But the marketing blurb about Dragon and Bloggers suggests closer examination of the potential benefits to organisations of using speech recognition.  Indeed Nuance invites Bloggers who use Dragon to advertise themselves and offer their user experiences at http://www.nuance.co.uk/voice2bloggers/.

 

Mind Maps

Within minutes of reading your Blog, Dennis, my Mindjet Insider Newsletter for Jan 2007 arrived.  How uncanny!  Then I added several Mindjet RSS Feeds to Bloglines (too easy not to).  Finally, I had a quick look at two of Mindjet’s highlighted template maps.  In particular, "The Science of Productivity and The Art of Innovation" instantly fired me.

 

Conclusion

Tying your Legal Tech resolutions together with other hot themes of the last few days (e.g. Richard Susskind in Times Law, Justin Patten in Human Law and Charles Christian in The Orange Rag), one might conclude that: 

“The consumerisation of IT and its migration into the mainstream of corporate and government / local government enterprises will enhance collaboration both inside and particularly outside the firewall, power increased productivity and, thereby, free up more time for leaders and senior managers, which they can choose, if they wish, to nurture their talent (whether young or older) to achieve innovative change within their respective organisations and industry sectors.”