If you’re as old as I am, you remember when drafting a document meant scribbling illegibly on a yellow legal pad, then typing your chicken scratch up on an electric typewriter and eventually a PC or Mac. Over time, as most of us acclimated to technology, we slowly and sometimes reluctantly trained ourselves to draft directly at the keyboard which became the default mechanism to create work product.
This isn’t a nostalgia play but rather, an example of how technology rewires how we work. And we’re on the cusp of the same shift again. Only this time the jump isn’t from paper to keyboard but keyboard to voice. And while you may be thinking that you’ll never surrender the written word, there are compelling reasons why solos and smalls should make voice their drafting tool of choice in an AI age.
Voice Has Come a Long Way
Although dictation has been around for at least a century (first through human scribes, then through more rudimentary tools like Dragon Dictation), it wasn’t until recently that AI-powered transcription was truly ready for prime time. Modern speech recognition systems routinely hit 90% accuracy in quiet conditions with decent microphones, and newer models continue to improve. At the same time, the underlying voice AI market is expected to climb from about $3.14 billion in 2024 to a projected $47.5 billion by 2034, which reflects the fact that businesses are actually deploying these tools at scale. So if your last experience with dictation was a clunky desktop program that mangled half your sentences, it’s time to take a second look.
The Speed Advantage Everyone Already Knows About
Let’s start with the obvious advantage of voice: it’s faster than typing.
A Stanford study found that speaking is 3x faster than typing -or 150 words per minute for speech versus 40 words per minute for the average typist. Even professional typists cap out around 65-75 words per minute. Do the math: A 500-word client email takes 12.5 minutes to type but only 4 minutes to dictate which represents a 68% time savings. For busy solo and small firm practitioners, the time saved can add up to 10+ hours back per week.
Voice also saves time by letting you work while you’re doing something else. Instead of leaving court, climbing into your car, and trying to thumb out a few cryptic notes on your phone in the parking lot, you can hit record and dictate a full summary of the hearing while you drive. By the time you walk back into your office, that stream-of-consciousness recap has already been transcribed into a written summary, ready to drop into your file, your practice management system, or a draft motion. For solos and small firms, that kind of “found time” between locations is often the only place you can reclaim an hour from an already overscheduled day.
A Better Way to Tackle the Blank Page
Speech is also more effective in tackling the blank-page problem. I don’t know about you but for me, the conventional advice to “just write anything” to overcome writer’s block never worked. Even a minute of staring at the resulting clunky text was too demoralizing. But when you talk instead of type, you can freely think out loud, wander, and circle back. AI can capture your ramblings, clean up the tangents, and tighten the structure so that by the time you see it on the screen, it already looks like a real draft instead of a mess you have to rescue.
Voice Preserves Authenticity
Voice also preserves authenticity. It can also help us communicate our clients’ position more effectively. Increasingly, clients are relying on AI to summarize their case when they reach out for help — which can flatten their unique voice. But giving clients a tool — like an AI chatbot or a transcribed intake interview — can capture your clients’ exact language verbatim, and make their story more authentic. As for lawyers, you can deploy the idioms and cadence you want to preserve in your writing and instruct AI to retain your unique voice even as it cleans up the grammatical errors and verbal tics.
For all of its benefits, voice won’t work for every scenario — particularly for the kind of complicated precision writing required for an appellate brief, a multi-footnote law review article, or a contract for a billion-dollar transaction. Still, there are a myriad of other use cases such as demand letters and settlement negotiation narratives, internal memos, and case strategy and client communications. And yes, you’ll need to edit and refine — but you have to do that with any writing.
Tips to Implement Voice
So, if you’ve made the decision to use voice, the next question is: what should you use to capture it?
Wispr Flow has emerged as a quiet gold standard among AI‑savvy lawyers, thanks to its powerful engine, strong accuracy, and seamless integrations into legal workflows. Google Docs Voice Typing is also surprisingly good for something that’s free and already sitting in most lawyers’ toolkits. And nearly every major AI platform you’re already using — Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT — now offers some kind of built-in voice recording mode, so you can talk through an issue and get a cleaned-up transcript or draft back instead of staring down a blank page.
The same ethics cautions that apply to every other use of AI govern here. Choose a platform that doesn’t train on your recordings, uses strong security, and gives you control over retention. If you’re recording or transcribing client conversations, always obtain informed consent.
Voice is not just a new input method; it’s a way for solos and small firms to move faster while still retaining authenticity. When you combine modern transcription with light AI cleanup, you get drafts that keep your authentic voice and your clients’ real stories, while reclaiming hours you can’t afford to waste at the keyboard. If you’re serious about staying human in an AI-driven market, making voice your choice is one of the simplest, highest-leverage moves you can make.
Carolyn Elefant is one of the country’s most recognized advocates for solo and small firm lawyers. She founded MyShingle.com in 2002, the longest-running blog for solo practitioners, where she has published thousands of articles, resources, and guides on starting, running, and growing independent law practices. She is the author of Solo by Choice, widely regarded as the definitive handbook for launching and sustaining a law practice, and has spoken at countless bar events and legal conferences on technology, innovation, and regulatory reform that impacts solos and smalls. Elefant also develops practical tools like the AI Teach-In to help small firms adopt AI and she consistently champions reforms to level the playing field for independent lawyers. Alongside this work, she runs the Law Offices of Carolyn Elefant, a national energy and regulatory practice that handles selective complex, high-stakes matters.
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