Tube journeys in London are a wonderfully varied experience. One minute you are chatting to a friendly tourist about where Harrods is, the next you are wondering if the enormous person who has parked themselves next to you has bought two tickets, to cater for the fact that they are taking most of your seat space, along with their own. When I am not wrestling with those variables, I like to see what gadgets people are using. Yesterday a shabby-looking chap whisked out a strange device – a laptop keyboard with a tiny monochrome screen. Turns out it was a portable typewriter, and in the time it took to travel about eight stops, he had written a huge chunk of material.

It struck me that sometimes simple really does work best. Not only was the device much quicker to use than a laptop, the absence of a foldout screen made it more rugged and more portable. Perfect if you have an idea for a blog or report and want to type instantly.

Typing, of course, is a large variable in any law firm. Even with the advent of better dictation and transcription technology, as well as automated routines and document systems that have enabled them to produce typed output much more quickly, law firms still employ vast numbers of secretarial staff. I am not sure what percentage of a secretary’s time is taken up with typing, but it must amount to a substantial sum once you multiply it by the number of them in an organisation.

Digital dictation was really spawned by speech recognition. Or to put it another way, speech recognition back in the late 1990s was appalling, so some bright spark decided that using the bits from it to make dictation more streamlined was the answer. Nowadays most law firms use this technology. As the market gets more saturated, the vendors look to other avenues for additional revenue, and – lo and behold – the spectre of speech recognition has made a return. Digital dictation software can now be linked to speech recognition engines. This means that the person dictating can send the output to a speech recognition engine rather than a secretary, thus reducing the time taken to type. The neat bit of these set-ups is that the secretary can then review and correct the output. The corrections get relayed to the speech recognition engine, which means it will be more accurate for the user next time round.

Other than the cost of installation, I can’t think of a downside to this approach. Most secretaries I speak to think they have too much to do, so moving their role slightly from typist to reviewer not only eases the burden, but also allows them to concentrate on more important elements of their work. Some may argue that it is a step down the slippery slope to the removal of secretaries altogether, but I don’t see that. Most, if not all, legal people need administrative support, and the current atmosphere of cost reduction should point firms in the direction of making better use of their support staff. Surely reviewing work is quicker than typing it, as well as being more interesting.

There are of course other benefits. Travelling lawyers can get material transcribed any time of the day or night, and those fee-earners who do prefer to produce their own output get to produce documents faster.

If there are efficiency gains to be made in terms of secretarial staffing, I would expect the natural attrition rates for these posts to allow this to happen seamlessly. A switched on HR department should be able to provide data on this. What’s not to like?