A desk with bound documents, a fountain pen and a closed laptop

Use cases

Dictation for lawyers: the audio does not leave the machine

Legal dictation has one hard requirement before any feature: privileged material must not be transmitted to a third party. That rules out most of the market before you compare anything else.

Read the security note Use cases

Last updated 11 September 2026

The requirement, stated precisely

Legal dictation contains privileged communications, client identities, settlement figures, witness accounts and unfiled positions. The question a firm has to answer is not whether a vendor is trustworthy but whether the material was disclosed to them at all.

A cloud dictation service processes the audio on its infrastructure. That may be encrypted, may be immediately deleted, and may be covered by a processing agreement — but a transfer occurred. On-device recognition means no transfer occurred, and the difference is one you can demonstrate to a partner or a regulator rather than assert.

	Cloud dictation	On-device dictation
Privileged audio transmitted	Yes	No
Third-party processor to assess	Yes	None for recognition
Demonstrable	By contract and audit	By disconnecting the network
Works in a room with no signal	No	Yes
Requires a data processing agreement	Usually	Not for recognition

Where the time actually goes

Legal practice is unusually text-heavy, and most of the text is not the document everyone thinks of. It is the surrounding correspondence:

Attendance notes. The single highest-value dictation in a law firm. Written immediately after a call, they are accurate; written at six o'clock, they are reconstructed. Dictating one takes ninety seconds while it is still fresh.
Client correspondence. Long, careful, repetitive in structure.
Instructions to counsel. Prose, and the parts that matter are the explanatory ones.
File notes and chronologies. Always postponed, always regretted.
Internal handovers. The thing that is missing when a matter moves between fee earners.

Drafting the instrument itself is a different task and often better typed — precision of wording is the whole job, and precedent banks handle the bulk. Dictation earns its place in everything around the drafting.

Setting it up for legal work

Verify the architecture before anything else Install, complete first run, disconnect the network, dictate. Record the date you did it — that note is what a compliance review wants.
Test the rewriting step offline too Many apps tidy dictation using a cloud model. That sends the text of a privileged note. Check it specifically.
Decide history retention deliberately A local history with audio is genuinely useful for recovering an attendance note. It is also a store of privileged material on a laptop. Choose the period; do not inherit a default.
Turn on FileVault Non-negotiable for a machine holding client material, dictation or otherwise.
Teach it the vocabulary Counsel's names, client names, chambers, the courts you appear in, the statutes you cite. Legal English is full of words a general model has never seen.
Write the one-page note for your COLP What runs where, what is retained, for how long, and how it was verified. See the template below.

What to put in the compliance note

Speech recognition runs on the device; verified on date with networking disabled.
No audio is transmitted to the vendor or any third party.
Transcripts and audio are retained locally for n days at path, on a FileVault-encrypted disk.
Automatic rewriting runs locally; cloud providers are not configured.
The vendor is contacted for licence validation and updates only; no matter content is included.
The vendor claims no certifications — state this plainly rather than leaving it to be discovered.

Try it on this

Dictation your security team can sign off

For a firm rather than an individual, talk to us about a volume licence and get the security note in front of your COLP before anyone installs anything. For an individual fee earner, Free is 1,000 words a week with no sign-in — enough to run the verification yourself.

Talk to sales Read the security note

Plans

Free: 1,000 words a week, on-device. No sign-in.
Pro: $5.99 a month or $49 a year. Unlimited words, 2 devices.
Founder Lifetime: $39 once, first 5,000 customers.
Pro Lifetime: $99 once, no renewal.

How to buy: download and dictate free first, then open Settings → Account in the app, or buy from the pricing page. Card payment is handled by Stripe. US customers are charged in US dollars; sales tax is added at checkout where it applies. Elsewhere the card is charged in pounds sterling at the equivalent published price. Every purchase and renewal is refundable in full within 14 days — refund policy.

What on-device dictation does not solve

Being overheard. The most likely breach on this page. Open-plan offices, shared rooms, trains, cafés. You are speaking privileged information aloud. A close headset microphone lets you speak far more quietly than you expect.
Where you type the result. Dictating into a cloud practice management system puts the text in that system. The dictation was private; the destination is governed separately.
Backups. The local history is on the disk, so it is in your backups. Know where those go.
A shared or unencrypted machine. FileVault, and short retention.
Your firm's own monitoring. Endpoint tooling sees what is on the machine regardless of the dictation app.

Dragon, and what happened to it

Many firms standardised on Dragon years ago. Nuance records Dragon Professional for Mac 6 as end of life effective 22 October 2018, with no Mac release since. Existing licences still work; nothing is being fixed.

The modern replacements are better at recognition and cheaper, and worse at voice-driven document control — Dragon's command layer has no real equivalent on the Mac. If your fee earners used the commands rather than just the typing, evaluate macOS Voice Control before committing. See Dragon on a Mac: what to use instead.

Questions

Is on-device dictation sufficient for privileged material?

For the audio, yes — it is not transmitted, and you can demonstrate that. The complete position also needs FileVault, a retention period you chose, confirmation that any rewriting step is local, and awareness of where the resulting text is stored.

Does VV have a data processing agreement?

For standard dictation there is no processing to agree: the audio is not sent to us. We do hold account and billing data if you buy a licence, which our privacy policy covers. If your firm needs a DPA covering dictation content, the honest answer is that there is no dictation content on our side to cover.

Is VV ISO 27001 certified or SOC 2 audited?

No. We hold no certifications and claim none. If your procurement requires one, that is a legitimate reason to choose a certified cloud vendor instead.

Can I use it for attendance notes immediately after a call?

That is the highest-value use in a law firm. Ninety seconds of dictation while the conversation is fresh produces a better note than twenty minutes of reconstruction at the end of the day.

What about court or client premises with no Wi-Fi?

On-device recognition works with no connection at all, after the one-off model download. That is a practical advantage as often as a privacy one.