One out of five field lawyers in huge insurer uses a digital voice recorders, but only every now and then

A major US insurance company headquartered in Boston has nearly 700 lawyers in 63 field legal offices. Of them, about 120 use WinScribe’s OnDemand “cloud based” digital dictation workflow technology. One out of five is impressive penetration of the productivity tool. I have not seen any other data on even a single law department and the penetration of dictation capabilities (See my post of April 8, 2008: dictating while commuting; May 27, 2008: post-mortem nuggets of learning; Feb. 4, 2009: seven vendors of dictation software or equipment at LegalTech: April 20, 2009: productivity of dictation compared to typing; and Feb. 23, 2008: dictation with 5 references).

This actual example of how many lawyers use a productivity tool – digitized dictation followed by manual transcription – stands out from all the marketing publicity that never gives specifics. The volume of use is impressive in absolute numbers but much more modest when put in terms of documents dictated per week (between 1 and 3). Still, other law departments have a role model for this tool.