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TECH SUPPORT Talking digital Dictation systems updated for the modern age. BY GERRY BLACKWELL tion for a few years may wonder why any law firm would continue to do it the old way — or, indeed, how it survived before installing its Olympus DS-5000 transcrip- tion management system in 2006. TDS partner Bill Olson enumerates F the many advantages. He no longer has to worry about losing the tiny mini- cassette tapes the firm used to use, or getting them mixed up and having to listen to all of them to find the one he wanted, or having the tape wear out — as it inevitably did over time — so his recordings were unintelligible to his assistant. "The sound quality with those old tape machines wasn't particularly good either," adds Olson. He also no longer has to remove the tape from the Dictaphone, get up, take it out to his assistant, and give her instruc- irms like Winnipeg's Thompson Dorfman Sweatman LLP that have been using digital, networked dicta- tions. Or go searching for another avail- able assistant if his is already busy or off sick or on vacation. Perhaps best of all, if he wants to head to the cottage for the weekend or the week but still has dicta- tion work to do, he can take the system with him and e-mail recordings back to the office instantly. "In the old days, you had to drive the tapes back to the city or courier them," notes TDS' man- ager of information technology, Trevor Anderson. "We don't have to do that anymore — it's all automatic." With the Olympus system, Olson dictates into the hand-held digital Dictaphone, places it into a cradle attached to his PC, and that's it. The system auto- matically sucks the audio recording off the Dictaphone, stores it on the firm's network, and backs it up — and there it remains in its pristine digital quality until deleted. If he ever needs to listen to it again, it will sound exactly the same. The system also automatically sends the recording to his assistant's desktop — not as a tape with a bunch of other recordings on it, but as a discrete tran- scription job, so no instructions required. It shows up in her Windows system tray as a new job. If she's not available, the system will reroute her work to other assistants. If Olson is at the cottage, he connects the DS-5000 to his laptop with a standard USB cable and when he's finished record- ing, attaches the resulting audio file to an e-mail. It's sent to the office, and put into the transcription management system as if he had put the Dictaphone in the cradle in his office. It was easy to learn the new system, says Olson. "Surprisingly easy, and I say 'surprisingly' because I'm one of the old guard and generally slow to adapt to new technology. But this was very painless. It took me about 15 to 20 minutes at my www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com NO VEMBER / DECEMBER 2010 27 MATT DALEY