Posted on July 20, 2020 by
Working from home means we must adapt and change our long-established routines. That can pose a major challenge for some lawyers, particularly those who depend on their legal assistants to take dictation for all correspondence and legal memos. Senior partners spending all their time hunting and pecking on the keyboard results in major declines in productivity.
But there is an easy way to dictate correspondence and documents at home, without a secretary or any special software other than Microsoft Office. Dictation is now built-into Microsoft Word, and it works incredibly well. There is no longer need for any voice training or initial set up, which has been necessary with earlier versions of dictation software.
In fact, this entire blogpost was dictated not typed, and came through exactly as the words were uttered. The only glitch is that you have to remember to include punctuation marks as part of your dictation, otherwise sentences will run on and questions end up as statements, etc.
Even so, that gives you a good idea of how feature and function rich your home office is today. So, adpating your routines to succeed while working from home may require little more than becoming familiar with the broad range of capabilities existent in the software that is already on your desktop.