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.
My professional life, that is. After 25 years of practicing law, my partnership dissolved, and I was once again a sole practitioner. Although I still had substantial business and Estate Plan clientele to service, I could not afford to continue to pay the high salaries and fringe benefits that skilled secretarial personnel required. Unfortunately, however, my typing skills were too poor for me to draft, edit, and finalize legal documents and correspondence.
I attempted to resolve the problem by dictating my letters and documents to tape, and then sending the tapes out to a transcription service. Although it usually took 2-3 days to receive the documents back, they almost always required some changes or corrections. I then had to send them back to the transcriber, and again wait 2-3 days to get them back.. Lengthy legal documents took up to a week to complete.
Assuming that the second drafts were correct, it therefore required a 4-7 day "turnaround" before the letters or documents were ready to be signed, mailed, or filed. This made it practically impossible for me to adequately service my clientele. In addition, the transcription process was not only inefficient, but was also very expensive.
Since I did not wish to work for another firm, I seriously considered giving up the practice of law. It was about that time that I discovered Dragon NaturallySpeaking. After a very short learning and self-training period, I was able to draft, edit, and finalize my correspondence, e-mail, and legal documents the same day, with no "turnaround" time or expense. I also reduced my annual overhead by the $50,000-$75,000 I had paid to secretarial help, without any detrimental effect on my practice or clientele. This is why I say that Dragon NaturallySpeaking literally "Saved My Professional Life!"
When I retired, about five years later, I was so impressed with what Dragon had done for me, that I volunteered to demonstrate the Dragon NaturallySpeaking program to the residents of the 5000- home retirement community in which I lived. I showed them (many of whom had little or no typing skills) how they could use Dragon to easily correspond with friends and family, as well as to prepare documents for any business or professional endeavor in which they might still be engaged. A substantial number of these retirees subsequenly told me that they had purchased the Dragon program, and were delighted with it.
Helping these seniors was a very rewarding experience. Thank you Nuance for Dragon!
I have continued to use and praise the merits of the Dragon Naturally Speaking program to this day, and am therefore very pleased to be able to relate my experiences and to express my appreciation.
Sincerely,
Larry Allen