Draft briefs, dictate memos, and capture case notes at the speed of speech. Steno turns your voice into text inside any application on your Mac, so you can focus on the law instead of the keyboard.
The legal profession runs on written documents. Briefs, motions, contracts, memos, discovery responses, client correspondence, case notes, and court filings make up the daily output of nearly every practicing attorney. And yet, the primary input method for producing all of this writing has not fundamentally changed in decades. Most lawyers still type everything out, character by character, even when speaking would be three to four times faster.
Law school does not teach typing speed, and it does not need to. Legal reasoning is the skill. But the gap between how quickly a lawyer can formulate an argument mentally and how quickly their fingers can commit it to a document creates a bottleneck that costs thousands of billable hours across a career.
Open your document in Word or Google Docs, place your cursor, hold the hotkey, and speak your argument. Steno transcribes your words and inserts them directly at the cursor. You can dictate section by section, pausing to review and edit between passages. The first draft flows at the speed of speech rather than the speed of typing.
After a client meeting, deposition, or court appearance, dictate your notes while the details are fresh. Steno captures the substance of what happened without requiring you to sit down and reconstruct events from memory later. Immediate dictation produces more accurate and detailed notes than delayed typing.
Email is a major time sink for lawyers. A substantive client update that takes ten minutes to type can be dictated in three minutes. Open your email client, start a reply, and speak your response. The conversational tone of dictation often produces clearer client communication than carefully constructed typed prose.
During document review, you need to annotate findings quickly without losing your place in the review queue. Hold the hotkey, speak your observation, release, and the note appears in your review tool. The speed of voice lets you maintain your review pace while capturing thorough annotations.
The productivity difference between typing and dictation is stark for document-heavy legal work. Here is how a typical day of legal writing compares.
| Document Type | Typing (40 WPM) | Voice with Steno |
|---|---|---|
| Client email (300 words) | 8 minutes | 2.5 minutes |
| Case memo (1,500 words) | 38 minutes | 12 minutes |
| Motion brief (3,000 words) | 75 minutes | 25 minutes |
| Discovery annotations (50 notes) | 40 minutes | 12 minutes |
| Estimated daily savings | 2 to 3 hours returned to substantive legal work | |
These estimates assume speaking at a natural pace of 130 WPM and include time for Steno's near-instant transcription. The actual time savings depend on your typing speed and the complexity of your work, but you can calculate your personal numbers with the time savings calculator.
Voice dictation is not new to the legal profession. For decades, attorneys dictated to secretaries, paralegals, or recording devices. The practice declined as law firms reduced support staff and computing became ubiquitous. But the fundamental insight was correct: lawyers think and speak faster than they type, and dictation captures legal reasoning more naturally than typing.
Steno brings this workflow back with modern technology. Instead of dictating to a person or a tape recorder that needs manual transcription, you dictate directly into your document. The text appears in under a second. There is no delay, no intermediary, and no transcription queue. You get the speed of traditional dictation with the immediacy of typing. Learn more about the speed advantage of speaking over typing.
Lawyers handle sensitive client information every day, and any tool that processes that information must meet high security standards. Steno transmits audio over encrypted connections, processes it for transcription, and immediately discards both the audio and the resulting text from its servers. No client data is stored, logged, or used for model training. The transcribed text exists only on your Mac, in the document where you dictated it. Review our privacy policy for full details on data handling.
Yes. Steno's AI transcription engine recognizes legal terminology including Latin phrases like habeas corpus, res judicata, and stare decisis, as well as statutory references, case citations, and specialized legal vocabulary. No custom dictionary setup is required.
Steno transmits audio over encrypted connections for transcription. No audio or text is stored on any server after processing. The transcription is returned to your Mac and inserted directly into your document. Steno does not log, retain, or share any content.
Steno works in any application that accepts text input on macOS, including Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther, NetDocuments, and any browser-based platform. It inserts text at your cursor position in any text field.
Voice dictation lets you produce the same quality of work in less time. A memo that takes 45 minutes to type can be dictated in 15 minutes. Whether this increases your billable output or frees time for additional client work depends on your billing model, but the productivity gain is substantial either way.
Join thousands of professionals who have reclaimed hours from documentation. Steno is free to download for Mac.
Download Steno Free