Professional legal transcription services make life so much easier for lawyers, paralegals, law firms, and the whole office. That’s for many reasons, which we’ll cover here. But essentially it breaks down to this: professional legal transcription services provide fast, accurate documentation services so that law offices can focus on their cases – and their clients.
- Quality transcription faster
- A specialized professional to lighten your workload
- Useable documents for better case building
- Outstanding customer service
- A great addition to your legal team to take care of document management
Four Ways Professional Legal Transcription Services Help Your Case
Preparing cases, gathering information, and even simple day-to-day tasks associated with managing your cases and clients require a certain amount of documentation. It’s one of those necessities that can quickly pile up. Professional legal transcription services can make your well-oiled machine run even more efficiently. These specialists take care of the “invisible” documentation tasks that you don’t think twice about, yet take up so much of your day.
Most lawyers don’t realize how much time they and their team are spending transcribing meetings and interviews, gathering handwritten notes, and pulling together various other pieces of documentation. But consider these stats. According to MetaJure, lawyers spend about 11.2 hours per week dealing with challenges related to document creation and management. Further, lawyers and paralegals waste about 2.3 hours per week searching for documents that they never even find. This all adds up to over $9,000 in wasted time per year. For large law firms, that could mean upwards of $1 million in time costs. And that doesn’t include any dollar figures on lost productivity.
There are at least four ways that professional legal transcription services can help you reduce wasted time and costs associated with document management.
1. Time is Money
It’s an old saying, but it’s so true – especially for lawyers. Time is money, and you can either be spending it or making it. Professional legal transcription services help by taking a large portion of that documentation creation and management hours off your plate. These include transcribing:
- Summaries and depositions
- Conference calls and recorded phone conversations
- Recorded Zoom calls or other videoconferencing calls and meetings
- Client-recorded audio such as phone conversations and meetings
- Handwritten and printed materials that need to be converted to digital documents
- Court recordings
- Mediation meetings
- Legal briefs
- Personal notes, both audio and handwritten (more on this below)
Delegating to your team may seem like the best option to save you time, but you won’t necessarily be saving money. Further, your team will be pulled away from other important tasks that require their expertise.
Contracting your documentation needs out to professional legal transcription services solves all these problems, providing outstanding documentation while freeing up your time and saving you and/or your firm money. Plus, they create documents faster and more accurately. This leads us to…
2. Accuracy is Everything…
Not only are time and money important, but accuracy is also vital. You’ve no doubt heard of cases that have failed or gone further than they should because of inaccuracies. That’s something you want to avoid at all costs. Working with experienced legal transcription professionals improves accuracy.
…and Latine Loquimur
Along those lines, it’s important to find professional legal transcription services that truly specialize in legal transcription. Working with experienced legal transcriptionists means fewer blanks and corrections later including for legal and Latin terms. (At iMedat for example, latine loquimur – we speak Latin! Legal Latin, at least…)
3. Organization is King
Documentation is one thing. Organized documentation is quite another. Professional legal transcription services can help you manage your documentation as well as help you create it.
For example, iMedat’s legal transcriptionists can use a system of tags so that each completed document can easily be filed in the right folder. We can even provide finalized documents on your letterhead and in other templates on request. That saves one more step – just review and your document is ready to print, send, or file. We can work on your system or help you create a logical and efficient organizational system if you need it.
4. Ctrl+F is a Godsend
One of the huge advantages of digitizing audio files, handwritten notes, and other physical documents is that they are so easy to search. Remember the 2.3 hours spent per week mentioned above searching for – and not finding – documents? Converting all your materials to searchable text means that you can find that information and find it faster. Just hit Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F if you’re using a Mac) and you can find any keyword you’re looking for in seconds within documents or file folders.
How Do You Use Legal Transcriptions?
People keep talking about “digital disruption” like it’s a bad thing. That hardly seems fair since digitization brings so many advantages! For lawyers, time and costs go down while speed and accuracy go up. Sure, there are those of us who love the feel of physical paper in our hands. But this is one of those times when change is good. Digitization ultimately makes building and organizing a case faster and easier.
Here are a few ways it does that. Instead of transcribing your own audio, simply upload your audio files and receive the final transcription usually within 24 hours (depending on the number of audio hours submitted). Digitizing written or printed notes works in a similar way: scan to a PDF file, upload to iMedat’s servers, and we’ll send you back the document in Word format (or whatever – file type you like).
You can even use iMedat’s legal transcriptionists as your personal dictation/transcription service. Recording notes using a digital recorder or your cellphone is much faster than writing down notes and typing them later. We create a whole compendium of your thoughts and ideas that you can refer back to later through a simple keyword search.
Use professional legal transcription services for:
- Digitizing printed and handwritten materials including notes, photocopies, letters, old documents, and more
- Dictation and transcription: dictate your notes instead, which is much faster than writing or typing, and upload the audio files
- Creating searchable, archivable documents from meetings, interviews, and any audio source (and most video sources, too)
- Organizing your documentation
- Developing your case
In fact, there are as many ways to use professional legal transcription services as there are lawyers. We can tailor a system that best meets your needs for streamlined documentation.
Contact iMedat for Professional Legal Transcription Services
Why not find out for yourself how professional legal transcription services can help? Contact us using our email form or call 888-779-5888 right now to find out how we can help. Save time, save money, and improve your productivity. We have a legal transcription solution that fits you.