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.
I am a practicing lawyer in western North Carolina and have primarily been in criminal and domestic and plaintiff civil work. I started practicing in 1974 before computers before online research and some of the typewriters were not even electric. When I was in high school the only people who took typing were girls and for the most part the only males were the ones who wanted an easy grades. In law school and college at University of North Carolina very few people typed for any reason and especially exams were done in handwriting. Even the bar exam was primarily handwritten and typewriters were not allowed. However as a practice of law went from the 80s to 90s and computers and tapping and research was done on computers for the most part the practice of law is now paperless. The creation of forms legal documents and legal research was compartmentalized and became overwhelming for the lawyers who started in the 60s and 70s. Then along comes Dragon speak long beforeNuance bought them out. When we first got Dragon speak in my office it was the second edition and I can remember that powers that I spent with the headset and the program trying to train the computer to recognize a southern drawl with a mountain man dictation. It was extremely frustrating and time-consuming to make the corrections necessary to complete the legal documents. However by the time that Dragon speak five six and seven came along it became apparent to us non-typing lawyers that there was a God in heaven who can help us surf the net, fill in legal forms, and *** Kate legal research. And finally after 33 years of practicing law in the private arena I became an assistant district attorney prosecuting criminal cases and working for the state did not have a secretary and answering service or anyone to assist in the preparation of documents. Thank goodness for dragons speak Number eight and nine and also for the transcribing program of using a dictation machine. However now with the development of computers and going to a 64 byte program Dragon speak nine was unavailable for this new computer that the state had provided me . After contacting the Nuance Corporation and informing them that my Dragon speak number nine would not work on a 62 by unit last fall I was informed that the programs are not compatible but again it's my understanding that Dragon speak number 10 can put an old-timer in the 21st century but with the budget crunch the state will not provide an update. So how about some help