Transcription for Lawyers: Hearings, Statements and Client Calls

Legal work has the highest cost of a wrong word of any use case we see, so this piece is as much about limits as about method.

Machine transcription is a first draft

Say it plainly: an unreviewed machine transcript is not a record of proceedings and should never be filed, served or relied on as one.

What it is very good at is turning six hours of audio into something you can search in seconds, so that the review you do perform is targeted rather than exhaustive. That is a real saving. It is a different saving from "we no longer need to check".

Where it earns its place

Client calls and attendance notes. A transcript of a long call turns into a file note in minutes and captures instructions in the client's own words, which is worth having when instructions are later disputed.

Witness statements. Taking a statement from a recording rather than from memory means the first draft already carries the witness's phrasing rather than yours — which matters, because a statement in a lawyer's voice reads like one.

Internal hearings and disciplinaries. Frequently recorded, rarely transcribed, and the source of most disputes about what was actually said.

Long disclosure. Where recordings form part of the material, a searchable text layer over them changes what is practical to review at all.

The Nigerian specifics

Proceedings and client conversations here move between English, Pidgin and a local language, often mid-sentence and often at the most substantive moment. A tool set to plain English will render those passages as confident nonsense.

Set the language to what is really in the recording. Where support is partial, the languages page says so.

Names are the other exposure. Parties, counsel, courts and places will be the words most often wrong in the first pass, and they are the words that must be right. Review those first, every time.

Confidentiality

Client material is privileged, and you should know where it goes before you upload anything. Our privacy policy sets out what is stored and how to delete it, and recordings are never used to train any model. If your matter carries specific undertakings, read that page before you start rather than after.

A workable method

Record with consent and say so on the recording. Upload the original file, not a re-recording. Set the language honestly. Review the first pass against the audio, correcting names, figures and dates before anything else. Keep the audio as the authoritative record and treat the transcript as a finding aid over it.

For a firm

Where several fee earners share one pool of hours on a single invoice, this becomes a chambers-level cost rather than a personal expense. See the pricing section.

A free account includes transcription minutes each month with no card, which is enough to test it on a non-privileged recording first. Sign up and try it on something that does not matter before it does.