How to dictate a legal brief by voice

Why the first attempt goes wrong

When you type, you think and edit at the same time without realising: you go back half a line, change a word, move a paragraph. Writing and revising are mixed together and you don't notice because the keyboard is slow and gives you time for both.

That doesn't happen when you speak. You go four times faster (about 160 words a minute against 40 when typing; the sums are in how much time you save by dictating) and there is no room to edit on the fly. If you start talking without knowing what you are going to say, what comes out is exactly what you have thought: in a muddle.

The solution is not to dictate more slowly. It is to separate the two phases: first you decide the structure, then you fill it in by speaking.

Step 1. The skeleton, before you open your mouth

Five minutes writing the outline of the filing save twenty of reordering afterwards. For a claim, something like this:

• Heading and identification of the parties
• Facts: one the contractual relationship, two the breach, three the demands for performance, four the damages
• Legal grounds: jurisdiction and competence, standing, procedure, merits, costs
• Suplico (the prayer for relief)
• Otrosíes (additional requests)

The basis for that skeleton is article 399 of the Ley de Enjuiciamiento Civil (the Spanish Civil Procedure Act), which requires a claim to set out «the facts and the legal grounds, numbered and separated» and to state «clearly and precisely what is sought».

You don't need to write it out in full. The headings are enough, typed into the document as placeholders. From there, dictating is filling in gaps, and filling in gaps is easy.

Step 2. Load the matter's vocabulary

This is the step that saves the most time and the one everybody skips. Before you start, add to your dictation dictionary the terms that are going to come up a hundred times:

• The surnames of the parties, especially uncommon ones
• The exact name of the company, with its legal form
• The court and the town
• The matter's acronyms
• The terms of your specialism that are not in common use

One minute there saves you correcting the same surname forty times over the course of the proceedings. And it is not just for this filing: the vocabulary stays for the next one.

Step 3. The facts: tell them, don't draft them

This is where you gain the bulk of the time, and the trick is simple: dictate the facts as you would tell them to a colleague who has just joined the matter. In chronological order, one fact per block, short sentences.

Don't try to make it come out with the solemnity of the final filing. What comes out is the narrative, and the narrative is the expensive part of drafting. The formal register is adjusted afterwards (and with modern dictation it is adjusted by voice, not by hand).

Two practical rules:

• One idea per sentence. Four levels of subordinate clauses get tangled when you speak and get tangled when you read. If you get lost dictating, the reader will get lost too.
• Say dates and figures slowly and check them later. It is the point where any dictation (and any typist) fails most.

Step 4. The legal grounds: state, cite, develop

Legal grounds dictate well with a fixed pattern of three moves per block:

1. State the thesis. «El contrato es un arrendamiento de servicios y no una relación laboral» (the contract is one for services, not an employment relationship).
2. Cite the provision. Say the article out loud (how that citation is written, in how to cite a law, and a court ruling, in how to cite a court ruling; if you first need to find it, in the CENDOJ case-law search).
3. Develop it. Why the provision leads to your thesis in this particular case.

The citation is traditionally the point where dictation breaks down: you stop, open the search engine, find the text, copy it, come back. Each interruption takes you out of the thread and costs you more than the seconds it lasts.

Step 5. The tone, by voice

The classic mistake when you finish the draft is to open it and start rewriting by hand whatever sounds too informal. That is throwing a good part of what you gained out of the window.

With modern dictation the adjustment is also made by speaking: you ask for a paragraph to be shorter, more formal or more direct and it is rewritten. In ablalo, you can also have different modes set up (court filing, email to the client, case note, internal message), each with its own tone and format, and choose the right one before dictating.

Step 6. The review, which is not negotiable

This needs saying plainly: dictation speeds up the draft, it doesn't replace your judgement or your responsibility. No speech recognition, however good, is infallible, and there are errors a spellchecker doesn't see because the result is a perfectly valid word.

Before signing, always check:

• Figures and amounts. An extra zero doesn't jar when you read.
• Dates and deadlines. Especially those that are running.
• Names of the parties. Even if you loaded them into the dictionary.
• The citations. That the article inserted is the one you wanted and that it says what you think it says.
• Negations. A missing «no» changes the meaning of a whole legal ground.

And before filing it: if the brief has a maximum length, such as an appeal in cassation to the Supreme Court, check it with how to count characters in Word; convert it to PDF within LexNET's limits and keep your ACA certificate at hand to file it.

Five habits that make the difference

Dictate standing up or walking around

It sounds like magazine advice, and yet it works: the narrative flows better when you are not hunched over the screen. Many people find they dictate the facts much better standing up than sitting down.

Speak quietly and close to the mic

There is no need to raise your voice. Modern recognition works at normal conversation volume and with the laptop's microphone; a decent mic helps, but volume doesn't.

Don't dictate the punctuation

If you have got used to saying «coma» (comma) and «punto y aparte» (new paragraph), try not doing it and look at the result. With dictation that punctuates on its own, saying it out loud is extra work (and, depending on the tool, even counterproductive).

Be careful where you dictate

The noise objection in a shared office is real, but the important one is another: if you dictate the facts of a matter in a room full of people, the problem is not that you are a nuisance, it is professional secrecy. For sensitive content, a separate room.

Start with the easy things

Don't try out dictation for the first time on the claim your week depends on. Start with emails and case notes for a few days. When dictating stops making you self-conscious (and it stops for everyone within a few hours), move on to court filings.

What you won't be able to dictate

So that the expectation is the right one: dictation is excellent for narrating, arguing and capturing. It is bad at precision work character by character. Tables, settlement statements, cadastral references, IBANs, amortisation schedules: those are typed. Nobody is taking your keyboard away, and there is no need to.

In short

Structure first, vocabulary loaded, facts narrated as you would tell them to a colleague, legal grounds in three moves, tone adjusted by voice and a full review before signing. With that method, a filing that used to take you a whole morning comes down to a long while, and the time you get back you don't get back once: you get it back on every filing.

Sources: BOE, Ley 1/2000 de Enjuiciamiento Civil, article 399 (in Spanish); Dhakal et al., Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes (CHI 2018); Ruan et al., Comparing Speech and Keyboard Text Entry on Touchscreen Phones (2017). Checked on 12 October 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Can you dictate a whole claim by voice?

The draft, yes, and that is where you save the most time: facts, legal grounds and reasoning come out much faster when you speak. What doesn't change is the review: figures, dates, amounts, deadlines and citations always have to be checked, just as in a typed filing.

Do you have to say the punctuation marks out loud?

With classic dictation and with the free system dictation, in practice yes. With modern dictation you don't need to: punctuation is inferred from the rhythm and meaning of the sentence, which is exactly what makes dictating faster than typing in a long text.

How do you dictate the proper names and acronyms of a matter?

By adding them to your own dictionary before you start. It is the step that saves the most time on a long matter: uncommon surnames, the company name and the acronyms are recognised correctly from the first time instead of failing in every document.

Can you dictate in a shared office without disturbing anyone?

You dictate quietly and close to the microphone; there is no need to raise your voice. Even so, in a shared office it is best to dictate in a separate room when the content is confidential: the problem then is not the noise, it is professional secrecy.