The Secret To Better Documents Is Right In Front Of You

Episode Notes

Transcript

Introduction:

So if I was starting today as a New Solo, I would entrepreneurial aspect, Change the way they’re practicing leader, what it means to be, make it easy to work with your clients, New approach, new tools, new mindset, New Solo and it’s leap. Making that leap, making that Leap leap.

Adriana Rinares:

Welcome to another episode of New Solo on Legal Talk Network. As usual, I’m Adriana Rinares, your host. My guest today is Barron K. Henley, one of my dearest friends and I’ll just apologize in advance. Dear listeners, dear attorneys, you know how much we love you for the SHA and Freuder that Barron and I are going to have today with you because we are going to talk about three big problems you don’t know you have and that includes word, excel, and voice to text. So before we start with the giggles and the laughs, Barron, please introduce yourself in case someone in this legal world has not heard of you before or got to work with you.

Barron K. Henley:

I’m sure lots of people have not heard of me. Hi, my name is Barron. I am a nerdy lawyer who got sick of practicing law in 1997 and decided to do something fun, which was technology and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since and I’m a founding partner of Affinity Consulting and we’re like a hundred plus recovering lawyers and legal support staff and legal IT people who all help law firms and legal departments maximize technology.

Adriana Rinares:

An important part of your current status, which I’m sure this is actually what all your statuses say, is that you’re on the board of the A tech show for 2025.

Barron K. Henley:

Oh yeah, and I’m on the board. I’m doing my fifth tour of duty on the a a tech show board and we are just having a great time.

Adriana Rinares:

One of the reasons I wanted to have you on before the end of the year, this is our last episode for 2024, was not only to inspire us for 2025 to become better technology users, but because I know that come the end of the year, we’re all looking for expenses to throw onto the ledger before the end of the year and it would be a great time to register for the A tech show which happens in

Barron K. Henley:

April 1, 2, 4, I believe

Adriana Rinares:

April the very beginning of April. Registration will be open by the time this records if it’s not already and there’s probably an early bird special happening right now.

Barron K. Henley:

Yeah, April two to four is when it is and it’s moving to McCormick Place for the first time. So we’re in a much larger venue and not the hotel scenario we’ve had in all the years past. That’s going to be great. Plus it’s the 40th anniversary I believe, and so there’s going to be a lot of tech just throwback stuff. I have a whole 1985 outfit that I’m going to wear. Nice. A tech show. I got the whole mullet wig, I got the mere glasses.

Adriana Rinares:

This has got to be seen.

Barron K. Henley:

I got the pastel colors. It’s really going to be offensive and I’m going to wear it around proudly at tech show. Awful.

Adriana Rinares:

Well listen, let’s talk about a couple of things I want to start with. Well let’s start with you and I have been doing this for a very long time and I think we should use this opportunity as a public plea to all attorneys and the people that they manage and control and work with to please help Barron and I get to the next level of training and technology use because for 25 years I have been teaching training and working on the exact same things people that Barron is going to talk about today and he’s been doing the same thing. So I want to start with the biggest problem you don’t know you have in legal and it has to do with your legal documents, the thing that you create and sell and we can call it that that’s what you’re doing. You have a product, you’re selling it, it’s your documents which takes your knowledge and your experience and formalizes it in a way that another person can take advantage of that. So Barron, has Microsoft Word changed much in the past 25 years?

Barron K. Henley:

Well, okay, so short answer is it’s structurally, fundamentally the same. They’ve put some extra things on top like speech recognition and things like that, but fundamentally it’s the same program. It does the same thing. It has always done and it remains mysterious to people because the interface continues to hide most of what you need to know. If you walk somebody through the process of setting up a five level deep auto paragraph numbered outline, that will work perfectly in any circumstance no matter what the universal reaction will be. Are you kidding me?

Adriana Rinares:

How long has that been there? It

Barron K. Henley:

Is been the same since forever. And the problem is to deconstruct and rebuild a document properly in Word, none of the steps are hard. There’s just a lot of steps. But if one would learn that progression, they could fix literally any document that exists. It doesn’t matter what kind of document it is, what practice area, et cetera, and yet they don’t. And I think it’s this false sense of security that they already have figured it out when they have not. And people tend to have blind spots when it comes to that. They aren’t aware of what they don’t know and I’m sure you get the same thing. They come to a class, particularly young people who think they know everything about technology

Adriana Rinares:

And so do their attorneys that hire them and are so happy to have a young person in the firm who understands how to use technology. Again, they don’t

Barron K. Henley:

Surface level just absolute surface level.

Adriana Rinares:

So we just described how word hasn’t changed much. Guess what else hasn’t changed much attorneys listening to this podcast, the skills of your legal assistants. So for those of you who like to tell people like me and Barron that you have a great paralegal or a great secretary because they’ve been using Word for 20 years or you get the resume of an experienced legal professional who’s been using Word in a law firm for 20 years, we are here to tell guess what

Barron K. Henley:

Their skillset is actually far below where it should be generally speaking. Dismal.

Adriana Rinares:

Dismal,

Barron K. Henley:

Yeah. And it’s unfortunate

Adriana Rinares:

With all due respect to your legal professionals who you love and support you and would do anything for you, we want you to know they don’t know how to use word.

Barron K. Henley:

And here’s the underlying problem. I think 25 years ago legal support staff was strictly a clerical analog position. In between then and now, it became a technical position.

It is a technical job and all you do all day is deal with technology and there’s a generation of support staff that never upgraded their skills. They either didn’t get the training, they weren’t interested. We’ve all done training where clearly these people are at least one person in the room is disengaged, they don’t care. You can show ’em how to do everything better and they’re not going to do it better. They’re going to go right back to the old way of doing things and typing tables of contents and typing paragraph numbers and typing tables of authority and doing everything manual. And all that means is it’s going to take a lot longer than it should to crank out documents and that’s a lose lose proposition. And it doesn’t matter how the firm bills flat fee, contingent fee hourly, if it takes you longer produce complex documents you lose. There’s not really a counterargument to that.

Adriana Rinares:

And I want to talk about this just in multiples and why this matters to you attorneys. There’s never a perfect document that gets created out of the gate. So you might have a long will, a trust something and it gets created, but then you have to keep editing it and crafting it and honing it, which means the shelf life of that document is really long and the longer you have to spend fighting with formatting to get the levels to increase and decrease and get and manually bold, underline and cap something, the longer it takes that document to get to the finish line. And that is an insane amount of time when you are not using the built-in automation tools. They’ve been there for 25, 30 years that Barron is going to describe now. So Barron, if there was three or four things, important skills that someone should know to use in Word, the first one is we could almost say it together.

Barron K. Henley:

Styles, styles, styles, yeah.

Adriana Rinares:

Okay. Quickly just describe to us what styles are in Word, why they are so important and why they will save you so much time and why you need to start using them.

Barron K. Henley:

A style is a formatting definition. So fun. It’s a collection of formatting attributes that you can apply with a single click. So if I was a litigator and all my pleadings were times New Roman 14 point justified paragraph alignment, double space, first line, half engine and Arabic paragraph numbering, I could create a style called Barron’s pleading and I could apply that to any paragraph and it would do exactly what the style tells it to do because the style always wins. But here’s the big problem, as you know, there’s no way to not use styles in Word Word applies a style to every paragraph and every document since it was invented. So people tell me, I’m sure you hear this, I don’t like styles, I don’t use

Adriana Rinares:

Styles, I take ’em out, I don’t use them.

Barron K. Henley:

I know, I’m like, do you use Word? Yeah. Oh then you’re using styles and what’s happening is you’re being victimized by them because either you control them or they control you and there’s nothing in between. You either learn styles or you never learn word. The Venn diagram of mastering styles and mastering word are two overlapping circles. There’s nothing else out there. If you don’t get that, you’re not going to learn Word. It’s just going to be a wrestling match. And I know people are used to it. I always say this is not how people experience Word. They’re not used to it doing what they want. I am sure you’ve been emailed documents where someone has claimed it’s possessed and it does this other thing. I am not even clicking on anything and the formatting is changing on me. Whole document changed and of course always goes back to styles.

So that feature is difficult to digest and master by just clicking around on the home ribbon. There’s that little bar at the top and that doesn’t really tell you anything about the styles and plus in Word for Windows there’s a bunch more tools for dealing with styles than there is in word for Mac and word for Mac. Users tend to be unaware of that. It’s just a difficult subject, but once you learn to control styles, word does exactly what you went all the time and I don’t have to figure out why my documents screwed up because it never gets screwed up and that’s not what people are used to. They’re used to this happens and then I have to try to fix it and this happens and I have to try to fix it. And to your point, people just recycle old documents. They’re not even going back to a consistent starting point.

They’re finding the last one that’s pretty close to the next one. They need saving as a new file name and making changes to it and they end up fixing the same stuff over and over and over and over and they do even alignment issues. I want to make sure that a title is on the same page as the subsequent paragraph and that kind of stuff. They’ll wait till they’re done and then they’ll add page breaks and hard returns to try to get everything lined up instead of using the tool that would do that for them easily. And then they say, well I’m done editing so it’s okay for me to add all these page breaks and things to get things to line up. And then a month later they use that same document as a template and all of it goes sideways and they have to take out all those hard page breaks and extra hard returns. They added for alignment previously when if they had set it up right in the first place, they would never have to do that again. We’d be done.

Adriana Rinares:

What we’re saying here people is your Microsoft Word documents can be very easy to control and manipulate if they have these things called styles in them which help control the document. That includes things like numbering. So if you like a 1.1 or you like an A and then a little A and Roman A and all that stuff, that’s all automated and part of a style. If you want the heading of a paragraph to never get separated from the actual paragraph below it, you tell the style that’s the heading, Hey, don’t ever leave that guy behind. No paragraph left behind when you’re wearing this style.

Barron K. Henley:

Literally,

Adriana Rinares:

Literally.

Barron K. Henley:

That’s exactly what you can do.

Adriana Rinares:

So styles are very important. They also help you and we just a couple more things Barr, to get people’s appetite sort of wet about learning styles better. It also helps with their table of contents. All you people who want an automated table of contents, instead of having your secretaries, or sorry, your legal assistants today create them manually. How do those get produced? Barron?

Barron K. Henley:

They are derived from the styles in the document and then interestingly, so let’s say I want heading one, two and three to pull into my table of contents. Then once the table is created, as you know, a new set of styles takes over to handle the formatting of the table and if you try to manually format the table as soon as you update the table, it’ll go right back to what it was before and undo all of your work. That’s right, unless you modify the styles TOC one through nine, which control how that is formatted. The same thing with the table of authorities. There’s TOA heading and table of authorities two styles control that and that’s not obvious at all. Even if you generated one, you might still be perplexed by how to get it to look the way you want and that also is a styles exercise. When I’m teaching classes on this, I’m like, if you don’t like your formatting, your takeaway is a style must be causing it. Your job is not to select it and paint over it and try to bludgeon it

Adriana Rinares:

Today. It’s never control a never, ever control a

Barron K. Henley:

Direct formatting is not good.

Adriana Rinares:

Quick comment here. If you’re wondering why your document is in times through Roman that your page numbers and your footnotes are an aerial, guess why?

Barron K. Henley:

That’s a style thing. That’s the normal style, which is your default formatting in every document. That’s another, interestingly, that’s one of the things I cover in the beginning of the classes is to make people aware of the fact that every Word document has default formatting built in. And I wouldn’t even talk about that fact if it would leave us alone, but it won’t. And the default formatting keeps percolating to the surface while you’re editing and that’s what causes the phantom format shift that most people complain about. I’ll just start out the class and I’ll say, has anybody ever been working on a Word document? And all you’re doing is simple editing, adding stuff, deleting stuff. You’re not even clicking on any buttons and yet the formatting is shifting on you and you didn’t do anything to cause it. It’s just like random shifting. And they’ll be like, yeah, I’ve seen that before.

I’m like, okay, well here’s what causes that. What that word document is telling you is your underlying default format is in disagreement with what’s been painted on top and the underlying, when the formatting is shifting, it’s shifting to its default. It wants to keep going back to its default. So if you insert a footnote or a page number and that comes in a different font, different point, size, different anything, what you’re seeing there is your default. And if you want to see what it is, select any paragraph in any document and click the clear all formatting button, which is a little capital A with the purple eraser on it, on the home ribbon and word for windows and word for Mac. And if you’re formatting changes, then your underlying default is in disagreement with what’s been layered on top. And until, unless you fix that, you’ll have persistent formatting glitches that you’ll have to fix repeatedly. They will not go away until you fix that.

Adriana Rinares:

It’s like Jason, you can keep killing it, but it keeps

Barron K. Henley:

Coming back. It keeps coming back

Adriana Rinares:

Until keeps coming back until you decide to exercise it with some skills. Okay, let’s take a quick break, listen to messages from some sponsors and we’ll be right back. All right, I’m back with Barron Henley. So hopefully we have encouraged you, not just you attorneys, but your assistants and all the people that support you to learn more about Microsoft Word and get that help. The last thing I want to talk about in this first segment just about documents and word Barron is for the first time in the past couple of years, I am very pleased that more and more attorneys are coming to me asking about document automation and document assembly, which I think has become a little bit easier than ever because we used to really only have hot docs or maybe you had a program that helped you. So can you talk to us just a little bit about why being able to use document assembly tools, which are more readily available than ever is important? And another thing that attorneys should really, really jump onto and maybe what your favorite tools are if hotdogs is still king or queen or if we can use the things that are built into some of our case management systems that many attorneys are really using today.

Barron K. Henley:

Well, so the starting point of any automation initiative is to have a template, a document to which you return whenever you draft that particular type of instrument. Ideally, we like to put in, I’m a big fan of consolidating all similar instruments into a single template because this is one of the reasons why I think copilot AI fails a lot of people. I automate documents, so right now I’m going through 12 different revocable trusts that are supposed to be the same, but for a fact pattern variation like one’s an AB trust, one’s an ABC trust, one’s a probate avoidance trust, et cetera. And when I run red lines between those versions, there are so many unintended differences that have crept into those documents over the years that we have to have these big long web meetings with the client to rectify the discrepancies. And most of the time they’re like, oh my god, has it been like that? Oh, I never knew that was. And I’m like, I know that’s because it’s nobody’s job to maintain 12 different trust templates over a long period of time and make sure the common language is actually common and it becomes different between them. And that’s why I think AI struggles because the underlying body of work most lawyers have created has no consistency. There’s all kinds of random discrepancies and different ways of phrasing this and phrasing that

Adriana Rinares:

Based on this matter and this case and this situation and let’s just create a new document for that.

Barron K. Henley:

And so that’s what I think causes the problem. But back to discussion. You got to have a template upfront then now you have options

Adriana Rinares:

Which wait, that template better be formatted correctly and powerfully with

Barron K. Henley:

Styles. And if you have that now you can do some other cool things. Your first cool thing you could do would be to use what word has always been capable of natively, which is its merge function, which you can have a self-contained merge or you can pull data from a data source like an Excel spreadsheet and just does a simple thing. We’ve all been asked, is there some way where I can enter a client’s name in one spot? It automatically appears everywhere else it needs to go.

Adriana Rinares:

Yeah, yeah, no, the word has not wanted you to do that for 30 years. Word wants you to keep using it like a typewriter that doesn’t exist.

Barron K. Henley:

You could easily use it for even that kind of a thing. But word merge, I can do pronoun calculations based on gender. I can do verb conjugation, I can do conditional inclusions or exclusions, of course I can fill in blanks. I can control how each insertion of the client’s name is here, it’s in and here it’s first letter, not et cetera. You can do all that kind of stuff with Word. Now, is it easy to set up? No. But once it’s set up, it works beautifully going forward and it does not break and it doesn’t cost you anything. So there’s that.

Adriana Rinares:

It costs you the time of learning how to do it, which is a skill you will use forever. It’s priceless.

Barron K. Henley:

Now then you could take it where merge kind of falls down is it does not allow you to create an intelligent dynamic interview that gathers the information necessary to create this document in an efficient, elegant way. That’s really what document automation platforms do. It’s really centered around an interview that you design, like all the questions you’ve been asking and answering in your head to get a document you want. You probably never written ’em down, those have never been codified anywhere. And a document automation tool simply requires that you do that. Case management programs all have some kind of document automation built in. Many of them have purchased document automation platforms, even Net Docs, which is not a case management program. Instead a document management program. They own Pattern Builder, which is also a document automation platform. So everybody’s getting into that game and the program that I’ve been using for 27 years is Hot Docs, which is now with its fourth owner I think during that time or fifth.

So it’s annoying when these things get sold and acquired and then you’ve got this whole new team to deal with and they have new ideas about pricing and functionality and they don’t really, they lose all their institutional knowledge. They don’t know who their client base is, et cetera. It’s kind of annoying, but it’s just part of what happens. But anyway, if you take a document automation platform, if my deliverable is a set of documents, like let’s say I’m an estate planning attorney, a real estate attorney, whatever, I’m basically being paid to generate a complex set of documents, then document automation really needs to be on your radar because it minimizes the opportunity for error. It’s a teaching tool. I mean, we’ve talked to a million lawyers, everything’s in their head and it’s not easy for them to share that with anybody else even if they want to. A document automation tool allows you to do that because you can build in, you can walk somebody through a very complicated drafting process they may be unfamiliar with and minimize the opportunity for them to make a mistake. And you can provide contextual help. Like if you’re making this decision between these four options, here’s what you need to be thinking about to make,

Adriana Rinares:

That’s why you would pick this one over that, right?

Barron K. Henley:

And they’re all web-based now. So you can generate super complex documents on an iPad on your back deck if you want. We’re not tethered to anything. You log into a website, you answer the questions you set up and you click on a button to download your documents and they’re letter perfect set up, right? Assuming the underlying template is right and you can make any further modifications you want. And then you can also take the responses. Let’s say I’m doing a set of estate planning documents for a husband and now I want to do his wife’s okay, they may have a lot of the similar elections in terms of what is going to go into their plan. I want to be able to use the first spouse’s answers to plug in for the second spouse. And then all I have to do is change the answers that need to change, but I don’t have to re-answer any of those questions.

And then if the client comes back to me five years from now and wants to update specific requests and their trustee, I can open the answers they gave that I entered five years ago and simply change the two and generate a new set of documents infinitely faster than trying to edit the ones they executed five years ago. And if the law has changed and I’ve updated my templates in between in those five years than it will use the new version of the template and give me the new language and the new upgrades that have to be in that document because the law changed

Adriana Rinares:

It’s magic.

Barron K. Henley:

It kind of is. And that’s what afflicted me. I automated my own estate planning documents back in 1993 with Hot Docs version 1.0 and I was like angels saying, I was like, this is incredible. And because I have some character flaw where that appeals to me on a cellular level, I don’t even know why I like doing that, but I like to tear things apart and see how they come back together. And then all my friends who were lawyers were like, dude, can you do that for me? And I was like, I think I see a business model here. And that’s ultimately what led me out of private practice was it was actually document automation. That’s all we did for the first several

Adriana Rinares:

Years. You’re a magician

Barron K. Henley:

And here I am all these years later doing the same, still doing it, still love it. I dunno why I love it, but I love it.

Adriana Rinares:

I know, me too. Let’s take a quick break, listen to messages from some sponsors and we’ll be right back. All right. I’m back with Barron Henley. We’ve had a really exciting conversation I think that I hope has inspired you for yourself and for your firm to please learn more about Word and document automation. And it’s possible you already have the tool to do well. You already have Word, but you might also have the tool to do more document automation built in if you’re using a case management system or if you have hotdogs, please take the year the new year to make that part of your goal. For the last segment of today’s show, I want to talk to Barron about two of my other favorite topics, which I know are two of his as well. And it is more encouragement to learn a couple more really important skills and that is let’s start with Excel and then we’re going to talk about voice to taxpayer. I don’t know how anybody runs a business of any sort of any level without using Excel. So could you tell us just briefly why it is so important for us in the legal world to become better Excel users kind of the same way you did 30 years ago?

Barron K. Henley:

Well, the best use of your technology dollar is to master what you already own, and we already own Excel and unfortunately, I think some of it comes from the word perfect era because word perfect tables are actually spreadsheets. They’re very powerful because word perfect came from dos when you could only run one program at a time. And so word perfect tried to be everything to everyone. They wanted to be Lotus

Adriana Rinares:

1, 2, 3 for many still is

Barron K. Henley:

And a word processor, true and word Microsoft never had that restriction. They came out with Office in Windows 3.1 and you could run multiple applications simultaneously. So they didn’t have any need to make tables in Word as powerful as spreadsheets are in Excel and there was no effort to do that. So unfortunately though a lot of people try to use tables in Word and then they’re perpetually frustrated with that because it’s just not functional most of the time. But Excel, the classes I teach in that are really how law firms use it. So if you want to do any kind of an accounting, if you want to, if you have any table of numbers, any math that comes into it could be something as simple as a settlement agreement. Just want to make sure the numbers are all correct and you can take an Excel spreadsheet and get it into Word multiple ways very easily. But if I have data, if I have a list I need to manage, if I want to have a merge document where I’m going to pull in client information in Excel’s great for that. You can use Excel for graphing data. Excel can calculate dates. Most people don’t even think of it for something like that. Excel is anytime. I’m trying to just play with the numbers to see how things shake out. Excel is where you should be. And so the classes are really, all the exercises are how law firms use Excel. Most of the time. The attendees of those classes are surprised that there’s so much application for it broad based across a lot of stuff they’re doing that it’s easy.

It’s easier than what they thought. You think of spreadsheets and you’re like, oh, that’s complicated. I’m never going to figure that out. But if you actually just dip your toe in the water, it’s not bad at all. And there’s a ridiculous amount of free resources on the web for that. Microsoft’s site is very good, but there’s all these Excel geeks out there that, I don’t know why they give it all away for free, but they do. And that’s like for example, I know what I want to do in Excel and I figure there’s some formula that does it and I dunno what the formula is now. I just did this recently, so I went into copilot. Copilot is supposed to be able to tell me what formula to use. It took five times as long for copilot to tell me than just go out to the web and type the thing a search. It was so much faster still to use the web. So I’m like, okay, copilot, it’s got potential. I’ve got a two gig up and down internet connection. It should be fast and it’s just not so okay. But Excel has broad applicability in all practice areas and even if ultimately I need that data or that table back into Word, if you copy and paste it comes in as a plain table or you can actually bury the spreadsheet inwards so that it retains all of its functionality, including the formulas

Adriana Rinares:

And stays linked.

Barron K. Henley:

Or you can link it back to a spreadsheet because what I have in Word, I don’t care. I just want it to be whatever’s in the spreadsheet so you can bury the spreadsheet, in which case they’re not linked any longer or you can link the spreadsheet where they are, or you can just plop in a table where there’s no function. It’s just a plain table, static numbers or text, but it’s easy.

Adriana Rinares:

That’s exactly what I was just about to say, which is we talked about styles, we talked about document automation, and here we’re talking about Excel. And I don’t want listeners to think that this stuff is hard. It’s just not. As a matter of fact, once you understand how styles work and it clicks, and believe me it does, takes a minute, takes a couple times hearing it, trying it, it clicks. It is so easy. You will kick yourself for not having learned how to use this when you started your law practice. Same with Excel and Excel. I will give you my best tip for Excel attorneys. Go into Excel’s template library, find anything, and here’s what I use as an example. Let’s say you want a trial budget calculator. Go into Excel’s template library, find a wedding budget calculator, and then all you do is change the titles from flowers to experts, from hotel to travel, and it will actually help you calculate and then you start to get a feel for how easy Excel is. You can even break down the formulas. You can look at them once you get a little taste of how formulas work. It’s kind of not that hard.

Barron K. Henley:

And also styles are in Excel too, and styles are an outlook and styles are in everything. So if you’re using a Microsoft product, styles are being used without your knowledge or consent, and it doesn’t matter what application you’re using. And so there’s a normal style in Excel. That’s one of the things I show in the class. You don’t like the default Collibra or whatever you get when you create a new spreadsheet. How do you change that for any particular spreadsheet? And it works the same way in Excel as it does in work. So those concepts transfer across the ecosystem.

Adriana Rinares:

It’s amazing. Barron, the last thing I want to ask you about, because to my great pleasure along with asking, being asked a lot about more tools for document automation and finally some excitement building up around that. I am of course still getting a lot of questions about voice to text and Windows has a decent voice to text. The Mac has always had voice to text built in. You still love Dragon and I want you to make the case for Dragon to Attorneys, although I will say this before y’all go out, run out and go grab Dragon. The gateway drug to Dragon would be what’s already built in which going back what Barron said earlier, which is use what you’re already paying for. Start by going to YouTube, find a quick video about voice to text on Windows on your Mac. Start there. Once you’re like, oh my gosh, this magic is amazing. How do I get better at using it more powerfully? Then you might look at something like Dragon. So give us the case for Dragon.

Barron K. Henley:

Okay, so from a legal perspective, they have a legal version which basically has Black’s Law dictionary and the Blue book in it. So you can say, for example, I can state a case or statutory citation and it’ll spit it out in perfect Blue Book format without me having to know anything about that

Adriana Rinares:

Freaking magic.

Barron K. Henley:

It is how much

Adriana Rinares:

Does that cost bar, and I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I don’t,

Barron K. Henley:

7, 9, 9, I mean the list price is 7 99 and it only takes five to 10 minutes to get set up. It used to take three hours to train it. Now it’s just five to 10 minutes. The accuracy is astonishingly good, and you can talk as fast as you want, as long as you enunciate and you don’t slur your words. The accuracy is shockingly good,

And if you want to take it for a test drive, there’s actually an easy way to do that. It doesn’t cost anything. There’s a product called Dragon Anywhere. If you just do a web search for Dragon Anywhere, now it’s not the legal version of Dragon, but it’s an app you can install on any iPhone or Android phone and it’s the full recognition engine and it’ll produce Word documents on your phone. You can email to yourself, but they have a seven day free trial, so it’s $150 a year if you want to sign up for it. But they

Adriana Rinares:

Have, that’s the mobile version,

Barron K. Henley:

The mobile version, but they have, it’s a seven day free trial. So if you just wanted to taste the technology and see if it could work for you, you could do it that way for free. But if you’re going to get, you’re going to buy the desktop version. Now they don’t make it for Mac anymore, it’s only for Windows, which is unfortunate, but now Dragon Anywhere, of course you could use on an iPhone, but the Dragon for Windows, the legal version is quite impressive. And the price difference I think is $200 between the pro version and the legal version. And I think it’s just worth it if you’re doing any kind of case or statutory citations or you’re using legal words that most of the time a speech recognition is going to mess it up. Plus you can correct anything that it mistakes it. You can tell it. This is how I want you to spell this. When I say this word, this is what I want you to type and it’ll kill it. But you can also run your whole computer with it. I can launch applications, I can draft emails. I can say Open Outlook,

Click new email. I can draft, I can say who it’s going to. I can put in the subject line, I can draft it. I can even say click send and it’ll send the email. So all that stuff you can do with speech. And as I mentioned before we got started here, most people can speak 180 words a minute, and I don’t know anybody who can type that fast with accuracy. So even if you’re a good typist, a lot of times it still makes sense. If you got a lot of information in your head and you just want to get it into the,

Adriana Rinares:

Which attorney doesn’t,

Barron K. Henley:

Right? Just brain dump it. I don’t care about the formatting, I just want to get the text out there. Okay, start talking and it’ll get it. And you can apply the formatting as you go if you want, or you can apply the formatting after the fact. But it’s also, and it doesn’t just work in Word, it’s any program, like if you do time entries on some web application, okay, you can speak your time entries, you can do your emails that way, you can do your documents that way, wherever it is that you need to get text into something, you could do speech recognition. Now, the gateway drug, as you said, windows has upgraded their built-in thing. It’s now called Voice Access. So if you’ve got Windows 11, just do a little search and type voice access and it’ll pop up. It’s baked in and it is better and it’s got more functionality than the old thing did. It’s not to dragon’s level, but it doesn’t cost anything. So if you just want to play around with it, that’s a great thing to play around with.

Adriana Rinares:

Well, I think we’ve got two important things to add to your budget before the end of the year, and that is to register for a tech show and then spend look attorneys. I know $800 sounds like a lot of money, although Barron, you did Hint that you said retail cost is, do you have a thing? Do you

Barron K. Henley:

Have no?

Adriana Rinares:

Do you know a guy?

Barron K. Henley:

I don’t know a guy. It tends to fluctuate. They’ll run sales periodically. And

Adriana Rinares:

So maybe this is what you asked Santa for before the end of the year is Dragon, if this is something that appeals to you and registration for the A tech show during the early bird pricing and before the end of the year.

Barron K. Henley:

One last thing on this speech recognition can transcribe. If you’re using a digital voice recorder, of course

Adriana Rinares:

Get cassette.

Barron K. Henley:

It’ll transcribe. Like if you’re not still using micro cassettes for God’s sake and you’re using a digital voice recorder, it can transcribe it 10 times faster than any human. That’s awesome. So then you’re taking the mind numbing drudgery out of that process and also the expensive part because you’re engaging another employee to type what you just said, it can do that for you. And then the support staff person can just clean up the formatting, which does require brain activity and is more rewarding than simply typing what someone is speaking to me in a headset.

Adriana Rinares:

I love all the inspiration we’re giving people, but of course, just to make sure we drive home the point, the formatting that they’re going to be doing after they’ve gotten the transcription should be using

Barron K. Henley:

Styles, styles,

Adriana Rinares:

Good old styles. Barron, you are not only a wealth of information and knowledge, but you and Affinity offer a lot of good free training and tips on your website. But also of course, you can be hired for and attend Sessions by Barron. He’s all over the country. He’s probably been to your bar association twice this year already, but tell everybody where they can find friend, follow and hire, or just get a lot of free training from you and your company to get started.

Barron K. Henley:

Yeah, you could just go to Affinity A-F-F-I-N-I-T-Y consulting.com and we have a lot of information on there. My email is b Henley, H-E-N-L-E-Y, at affinity consulting.com. You can always, I can fix, I always throw this out as a challenge. I can fix any word issue you’ve ever experienced in two minutes or less, and I’ve never, I love that. And if I can’t, then it’s free. But I’ve never had to give away a freebie. So if you got something, you’re like, this document can’t be fixed. Oh yes, it can.

Adriana Rinares:

Barron.

Barron K. Henley:

I’m just saying I like a challenge. I enjoy these little inbox challenges that show up. See what you can do with this one.

Adriana Rinares:

Thank you so much for coming on, having some fun with us, hopefully inspiring us to learn more next year to be better technology users. You can always reach out to Barron and he would love to hear from you, and let’s get those challenges in his inbox. Barron loves email and I would love to have some fun segments to throw into next year’s show. So thanks everyone. If you are listening to this before the end of the year, I hope you have a wonderful holiday season, and if you don’t get to this until next year, please let this new year be your most prosperous and awesome use of technology and really make your law firm shine. Thanks everyone.

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