Ad Litem Consulting, Inc.

If you haven’t looked at this kind of software in a while, now may be the time to reconsider. We can all speak more quickly than we can type. It’s a matter of feeling comfortable dictating. We’re all so used to thinking in our heads as we type, this can take a little practice. But, imagine being able to pace the room, mic on your headset, while all your words are captured.

The old barrier to this software was the long amount of time it took for it to get to know your voice. Today, the software reads all your emails and figures out how you speak and which words you use the most. Instead of an hour, it can take 15 or 20 minutes to get familiar.

What is also of interest to me is the ability to feed the software sound files and generate text. There is software on the maker’s website that talks about this.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 8 Mobile [Includes Recorder]

As voice mail is simply a sound file on a hard drive, it won’t be long before we need to start processing that stuff; creating searchable text.

While I prefer to use single page .TIF files in discovery, there are those who prefer the PDF format. Therefore, it is important to know both how to use them to advantage in litigation and also how to modify them.

There is a website called PDFHacks which maintains a list of software and strategies when handling PDFs. This includes, but is certainly not limited to things such as modifying metadata so that the files are searchable for, e.g. Bates numbers.