Legal typing and dictation
Legal typing and dictation,
every option costed.
Every Irish practice solves the same problem: a solicitor or barrister dictates, and someone has to turn that dictation into a properly formatted legal document. There are four ways to do it — an in-house secretary, a legal typing service, speech-to-text software, or an AI clerk. Here is what each costs, how long each takes, and where your audio goes.
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Typing, dictation, transcription — the words people use interchangeably
They are three different things, and the difference decides what you should be buying.
What is legal typing?
Legal typing is the work of turning a lawyer's dictated audio or handwritten notes into a correctly formatted legal document — a fee note, attendance note, letter, brief or opinion. It is done in-house by a legal secretary, outsourced to a legal typing service, or produced by software. The distinguishing feature is not the typing speed but the formatting judgment: legal documents have conventions, citation formats and house styles that general typing does not.
What is legal dictation?
Legal dictation is a lawyer speaking a document aloud — into a phone, a digital dictaphone or a dictation app — instead of typing it. Dictation is the input. Typing, transcription or software is what turns that input into the finished document. Barristers and solicitors dictate because they speak far faster than they type, and because the natural moment to record an attendance note is walking out of court, not at 9pm.
How is legal transcription different from legal dictation typing?
Legal transcription converts existing recordings — a hearing, a meeting, an interview — into a verbatim written record of what was said. Legal dictation typing converts a lawyer's purpose-made dictation into a formatted document, which involves interpretation rather than verbatim capture: headings, structure, corrections and house style. Most Irish services offer both, but they are priced and delivered differently.
The options
Four ways to get legal dictation typed
The difference is who does the typing, how long you wait, and what it costs you per hour of dictation.
An in-house legal secretary
Where a firm has one
- Knows the firm's house style and the clients by name
- Available only during office hours, and only for that firm
- A salaried cost regardless of dictation volume
- The bottleneck when several fee-earners dictate at once
A legal typing service
TranScribe, My Secretary, Type Assist and others
- You send audio; a trained legal typist sends back the document
- Pay per audio minute, plus VAT — no fixed cost when you don't dictate
- Worked as a queue by a team, during office hours
- Formatting judgment from experienced legal typists
Speech-to-text software
Dragon Legal, dictaphone software, generic voice typing
- Instant, and cheap after the licence
- Hands back a block of transcribed text, not a document
- You or a secretary still do the formatting and filing
- Struggles with citations, legal Latin and Irish firm names
An AI clerk
clerk& — speech-to-document
- Dictate on your phone between hearings or after a call
- A finished, formatted document back in moments, any hour
- One flat plan; no per-minute meter running
- Counsel, solicitor or clerk reviews — nothing sent without sign-off
Side by side
What a legal typing service costs, against the alternatives
Typing services have served the Irish legal profession well for years — TranScribe, for one, since 2008. The comparison is not about the quality of the people; it is about what each model can and cannot do. Service figures are published rates as of July 2026.
Who does the typing
- In-house secretary
- A legal secretary you employ
- A legal typing service
- A team of human legal typists outside your practice
- clerk&
- Automated — no human outside your practice hears the audio
What comes back
- In-house secretary
- A finished document in your house style
- A legal typing service
- A typed document in the requested format
- clerk&
- A finished fee note, attendance note, letter or opinion, in your house style, filed to the matter
When it comes back
- In-house secretary
- During office hours, subject to their other work
- A legal typing service
- When it reaches the front of the queue; office hours are typically Mon–Fri
- clerk&
- Moments after you stop dictating, any hour, any day
What it costs
- In-house secretary
- A salary, whether you dictate that month or not
- A legal typing service
- Published rates around €2.20–€2.40 per audio minute + VAT — an hour of dictation is roughly €132–€144 + VAT
- clerk&
- €69/user/month flat + VAT (early-adopter rate; €99 standard), with 10 hours of dictation included
Where the audio goes
- In-house secretary
- Nowhere — it stays in the practice
- A legal typing service
- To the service's typists — reputable Irish services operate under confidentiality terms and GDPR
- clerk&
- Processed and stored in the EU only; never used to train models; Article 28 DPA available
Typing-service pricing shown is TranScribe's published rate card (transcribe.ie, July 2026): €2.20/min regular, €2.35/min app, €2.40/min case-management dictation, all plus VAT. Turnaround varies by service and workload; most services do not publish a guaranteed turnaround time.
Who this is for
The typing problem looks different in every practice
Solicitors and legal secretaries
Where a firm has a secretary, the dictation usually joins a queue behind reception, files and the other fee-earners. The typing is not the hard part of their job — it is the part that crowds out the rest of it.
For solicitors and secretaries →Barristers and their clerks
At the Bar there is often no secretary at all. The fee notes and attendance notes get typed by counsel, late, or sent out to a typing service by the minute — and the clerk chases both.
Typing service or AI clerk? →Small firms and sole practitioners
Too much dictation to type yourself, not enough to justify a full-time secretary. This is exactly the gap a per-minute typing service was built for — and the gap where a per-minute meter hurts most.
See pricing →The honest trade-off
What a legal typist does well — and what no typist can do
A good legal typist brings real judgment: the formatting conventions, the spelling of the firms instructing you, an ear for what was meant rather than what was said. Some Irish services guarantee a minimum accuracy rate, and pay-as-you-go genuinely suits a practice that dictates rarely. None of that is the weakness.
The weakness is structural. A human team works a queue, during office hours, at a per-minute price — so the fee note dictated on Friday evening is typed when the queue allows, and a single hour of dictation costs more than a month of clerk&. And every dictation is heard by someone outside your practice.
clerk& keeps what mattered about the typist — the finished, properly formatted document, reviewed before it leaves — and removes the queue, the meter, and the third party. You dictate; the draft lands in moments, in your house style; you or your clerk reviews and sends.
Privileged material
Where the audio goes is the whole question
Legal dictation means privileged material leaving your desk. Dictation has passed through other hands for as long as there have been dictaphones — typists, secretaries, transcription bureaus — and that never stripped privilege, because those parties handled it in confidence. What matters is not whether a third party is involved, but whether the disclosure is controlled.
With clerk&, audio and documents are processed and stored in the EU only, nothing crosses to the United States, your matter content is never used to train any model, and an Article 28 data-processing agreement is available.
Questions
Legal typing and dictation, answered
How much do legal typing services cost in Ireland?
Irish legal typing services typically charge per minute of dictated audio rather than by the hour of typing. TranScribe's published rates run €2.20–€2.40 per audio minute plus VAT (transcribe.ie, July 2026), so an hour of dictation costs roughly €132–€144 plus VAT, every time you dictate. Other services publish their own rate cards; check the current figure before you rely on it. An in-house legal secretary is a salaried cost instead. clerk& is one flat per-user plan with ten hours of dictation included each month.
Can AI replace a legal typing service?
For the dictation-to-document pipeline — fee notes, attendance notes, letters, opinions, case summaries — yes, that is exactly what clerk& does, and it returns the document in moments rather than when the queue allows. What it does not replace is review: the draft goes to the solicitor, counsel or clerk before anything is sent. If you dictate only a few minutes a year, a pay-per-minute service may still suit you better.
Is legal dictation typing confidential?
Reputable Irish typing services operate under confidentiality terms and GDPR, and many have served the legal profession for years. The structural difference is that with a typing service a person outside your practice hears every dictation. With clerk& the processing is automated and EU-only, your content never trains any model, and a signed Article 28 data-processing agreement is available.
Do I need Dragon or separate speech-recognition software?
Not with clerk& — it does the speech recognition itself and then drafts the document, so there is nothing else to licence or install. Dragon Legal is excellent at raw transcription; the difference is that it stops at text, leaving you or a secretary to build the document from it.
How long does legal typing take to come back?
A typing service works a queue during office hours, and few Irish services publish a guaranteed turnaround — same-day is usually a premium tier where it exists at all. An in-house secretary turns work around when their other work allows. clerk& returns a finished draft in moments, whether you dictate at 4pm on a Tuesday or 11pm on a Sunday.
Does legal dictation software understand Irish legal language?
General-purpose dictation usually does not. clerk& was built for Irish practice: it recognises Irish neutral citations such as [2012] IESC 18, legal Latin like res judicata, the Circuit, High and Supreme Courts, Irish-English spelling, and the solicitor firms instructing you — so the draft comes back right the first time.
Put your AI clerk to work.
Free 14-day trial. No credit card. Five-minute setup. Whether you’re a sole practitioner or running a busy clerk’s room, clerk& earns its keep on the first fee note.
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