Last week I had the extreme pleasure to meet with a delegation of Azerbaijan lawyers to discuss law office technology. I learned a couple of things that may be of interest to you.
These lawyers were visiting the United States as a part of the Open World leadership program and were sponsored by Rotary Club 29 of Oklahoma City. I was happy talk to them about law office technology. They also heard from our OBA Executive Director, General Counsel and Ethics Counsel. Their bar association is organized differently than ours, as a part of the central government rather the states or state courts. So we had a good discussion. I had little prior knowledge about Azerbaijan did a bit of online research before the meeting. I must say that this was one of the warmest, nicest and friendliest group of people you would ever meet. Meeting them was a truly great experience! They have much work ahead as their country's legal system continues its evolution. But I certainly plan on checking in on the news from their country from time to time.
But there were two interesting law office technology aspects to my talk with them. First of all, I decided to do a speech recognition demonstration for them using Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I use this tool almost every day and knew that moving from my office to our larger board room would likely have a negative impact on accuracy. In fact I have set up an extra profile in DNS just so it doesn't change my speech file based on different acoustics. I began my dictation with "Today I am visiting with a group of lawyers from Azerbaijan." 100% accurate transcription. Everyone of the group looked surprised. I paused the dictation and assured them this was the first time I have ever said their country's name into DNS. I dictated some more and DNS performed almost flawlessly.
The other interesting thing was during my brief discussion of practice management software tools and paperless work flow. Our OBA Practice Management Advisor Darla Jackson interjected that one of the tools, Practice Panther, was available in the Azerbaijani language, both the Cryillic and the Latin versions. I was aware they had developed a Spanish language version, but there are many other languages now included, even though unlike the Spanish language version, the others are done through machine language translation only. I'm not sure that they made any purchasing decisions after that but they did ask me to repeat the product name.