I have spent the last day in New York City at the LegalTech tradeshow. LegalTech is, as you might expect, a tradeshow focused on legal technology. Nuance has many great customers in the legal field -- including law firms of all sizes who are using Dragon Legal or some of our imaging products including PDF Professional, PaperPort or OmniPage.

We had a booth on the tradeshow floor or had the opportunity to speak to a number of customers and we also hosted a very nice dinner for some of our larger customers. Here are some of my general thoughts from the show:

• Dragon is extremely well known and respected within the legal community -- but many people are unfamiliar with the latest capabilities of Dragon Legal Version 10
• I have observed a growing interest law firms to add speech recognition capabilities to their existing digital dictation workflow solutions (from companies like WinScribe, BigHand, etc.) -- this seems to be driven by a strong interest in maximizing investments in productivity applications
• Some of the existing Dragon customers are not getting the full value out of Dragon -- this is largely because of a lack of training or centralized IT support for the application. We often see law firms who purchase our consumer products through retail and they often have limited success without a legal vocabulary -- or the ability to do more sophisticated customization of the vocabulary using the advanced professional tools
• There is a significant generation gap among attorneys related to their ability to dictate documents. Younger attorneys don't seem to learn the skill of dictation in law school -- instead, they're expected to type very quickly. While many of them do, it is still far more expensive to have one of your attorneys typing 80 words a minute versus leveraging a much less expensive administrative resource. I believe that if more younger attorneys learned to use Dragon more effectively, they would get the benefit of seeing the work created in front of them without the significant cost of time associated with typing.
• In the UK, many law firms have moved from an hourly billing model to a fixed price model -- the productivity delivered by Dragon Legal will make a huge difference with law firms that use that business model

Overall, I'm excited about the value we can offer to the legal community. In these difficult times, finding creative ways to work more effectively through the document creation process will help law firms remain competitive.