Five winning stories will be selected by a panel of judges, and the winning entrants will each receive an Amazon Kindle 2 as well as Dragon NaturallySpeaking upgrades for three years.
The number of lawyers in my firm has been slowly declining for sometime as former colleagues have moved on. My partner and I decided not to add new attorneys but to look for ways to reduce overhead costs. Personnel costs were and are the highest expense item.
I decided that I could make do without a paralegal if my talented legal assistant could assume more paralegal tasks. To free up more of her time, I started doing more of my own typing. I type slowly so the trade off on the loss of my own productivity to free up my assistance’s time was not very efficient.
I had tried Dragon in the late 1990s and found that the product’s learning curve then was slow and eventually I gave up on it. A friend (a good typist but who had developed carpal tunnel syndrome) informed me that especially with Dragon Legal 10.0, the product had advanced enormously over the last decade or more.
Last summer, I purchased Legal 10.0, and now use it daily. Out of the box, it was decidedly more efficient than my old version. I have followed Nuance’s on – line tips to increase its accuracy and speed. Not to be overlooked is the fact that I had become reasonably adept with Windows and WordPerfect over the last decade. I find that the combination of mouse clicks and verbal commands works best for me.
As I have become more facile in my use of 10.0, I create documents that I would never have in the days when my secretary did all my typing. For example, I have become a member of "The Green Team" in my city. The team has been formed to advise the Mayor and City officials of various ways to become more energy efficient. Over the years, I always took notes at any kind of meeting I attended. (I focus better with a pen in hand and a yellow pad in front of me.) Now, I create my own minutes of those meetings. Afterwards, I can cut and paste from them as need be for e-mail correspondence with members.
Recently, my neighborhood was alerted to a planned project for our lovely City park. The park serves the region, and it is a place of pride and concern for myself and neighbors. Over the last 20 years, a sizable fraction of the park’s "green" areas has been lost to various groups’ pet projects; such as a band stand, horseshoe pits, and more and more sports fields, etc. While each of these projects had many positive attributes, the neighborhood was greatly concerned over the trend and any additional loss of green, open space.
It took copious notes and created informal minutes of the public meeting on the project, recording commitments from the project planners and objections from the public. After distributing those minutes to local government officials, members of the public and the planners, I received many complements on their balance and thoroughness. I would never have created such elaborate notes of meetings were it not for the ease of use of Legal 10.0. Because of Dragon, I am doing more with less.
Francis G. Murphy
Stewart & Murphy, P.A.
Manchester, N.H.