Since I am practically only digitally on the move in my everyday life as a lawyer and lecturer, I now also use numerous digital aids, access to which I provide here. The chapter is, like intla.ch in general, continuously updated.
Ten-finger system is obsolete – dictation software
For a long time dictation software was unusable. But in recent years it has made enormous progress. The “Dragon” dictation software from Nuance is almost perfect. I use the basic version «Dragon Home» in my office for EUR 159 (sic!). The much more expensive version “Dragon Legal” is not necessary. The software is ready to use immediately. A training is not necessary. In addition, the software learns continuously and adapts to the individual vocabulary used.
Listen to texts instead of reading – Voice Dream
As a lawyer I have to read a lot. It’s often tedious. That’s why I have almost everything read to me in the meantime. And that works like this at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), for example. I read the NZZ on the iPad or iPhone. I send an article that interests me via the «share function» on the Voice Dream app. There I can have the text read aloud to me using various voices (in my opinion «Arthur» is the most pleasant voice). From the Tages-Anzeiger app I first send the articles to the Instapaper app and then import them from this app into the Voice Dream app. With some apps this indirect transfer works better. This also works with PDFs. But these have to be processed with OCR character recognition. This can now also be done directly in Voice Dream. Offline texts, especially books, are best scanned with the Scanbot Pro app (with automatic OCR character recognition) and then also transferred to the App Voice Dream as PDF or text with the “Share” function. Since I have newspapers read to me, I use the respective content as intensively as never before. Of course, this means that people like to listen to texts, which is not everyone’s cup of tea. I hope you are one of the former, then the App Voice Dream is really the hit!
myCloud from Swisscom
Increasingly, we in the law firm have to exchange larger amounts of data with our clients, i.e. amounts of data that can no longer be transmitted by e-mail. For this purpose we have in the meantime tried out various services, including those of the big players Microsoft, Google & Co. We have come to the conclusion that the «myCloud» service from the Swiss telecom provider Swisscom currently has the best handling/safety/data protection ratio. There are more secure solutions, but our clients cannot use them. The myCloud service is also freely available to users who are not Swisscom customers, but for those with limited but relatively large data storage. The service even allows you to transfer data to a non-registered user of myCloud as well as to have data transferred by a non-registered user of myCloud. Both is done very simply by sending a link. A login is not necessary in this case for the non-registered user.
ZIP
In times of «Big Data» you also need software that helps you to bundle or even compress them. A ZIP program is indispensable for this. The ZIP file format is a format for lossless compressed files, which on the one hand reduces the space required for archiving and on the other hand functions as a container file in which several related files or even entire directory trees can be combined. The file extension for zip-archived files is «.zip» ” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP file format). I myself use the probably best known software WinZip, which can be downloaded from the following link: www.winzip.com/win/en. But there are also free Zip programs, such as 7-Zip: http://www.chip.de/downloads/7-Zip-32-Bit_13004776.html.