Twenty years ago, almost all lawyers dictated their letters and briefs into a desktop tape recorder, and secretaries spent hours wearing headphones, tethered to ubiquitous transcribers. But these days, a computer is the tool no lawyer can work without. E-mail has replaced letters, electronic filing eliminates trips to the courthouse, and word processing has revolutionized the process of writing documents. Dictation, some say, is a beast best allowed to go extinct.
Rumors of dictation’s demise might be greatly exaggerated, but there’s no doubt today’s lawyers work differently from their predecessors. Of the dozen attorneys I consulted for this article, only one reported regularly recording dictation. A few had used a Dictaphone previously but abandoned it, and many had never dictated.
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