Jan Tromp, an admitted attorney, notary and conveyancer, obtained his BA LLB degree at UCT. He attends to the personal, property and commercial legal matters of his clients in an integrated way to create lasting solutions. He specialises as a mediator. He is married with two sons. He enjoys mountains, is a yacht skipper and has published a book of poetry.
As a professional who’s integrated speech recognition software into his business, we asked if we could interview him as part of our Dragon Profiles series.
Tromp first heard about Dragon approximately 10 years ago while managing a one-person legal practice. After researching productivity enhancing systems on the Internet, he came across speech recognition software in an effort to speed up the processing of his legal work.
While many of them were found to be unworkable, he eventually led to the Dragon and never looked back. “Dragon is simply brilliant!” says Tromp who believes the product to not only be highly effective but makes it a pleasure to be in the office.
“Dragon has become an essential.”
Comparing the before and after of preparing time-consuming written work, “it’s like chalk and cheese”. Not only is it a pleasure, but Tromp is able to jot down key thoughts quickly and prepare long documents with attention to detail in no time at all. The software has played a major role especially in the context of virtual offices, which has been accelerated by the pandemic. Working out of office or with little or no staff makes Dragon not only a pleasure but essential.
Tromp loves how quickly he can access the Dragon toolbar and the software’s ability to dictate immediately into almost any text field. Whether he’s using Word, email or a desktop version of WhatsApp, he’s able to generate text at record-breaking speed in almost any application. If a window doesn’t accept text directly, a dictation box pops up giving him full control and making the software indirectly compatible.
“…the organisation [is] more profitable by a quantum leap in productivity.”
Dragon’s accuracy and speed means greater productivity. Tromp says he’s now quicker at preparing written work and documents, then editing them in real-time. Processing more work in less time equals more profitability. Not having to rely on secretaries for menial work saves costs and they can manage other responsibilities, ultimately improving the organisation’s reactivity and productivity.
Dragon helps free up time for Tromp to focus on consultations, where he has the time to give his full attention to clients as well as to research and to creating legal solutions. These competitive advantages certainly give him the edge. Moreover, he considers Dragon to be part of the economic life-saving solution given difficult economic times for traditional brick and mortar businesses and law practices.
When it comes to using the software on a daily basis, Tromp finds himself primarily in Outlook where he uses it to dictate emails and issue commands. Converting speech to text is the software’s main attraction, but he’s also able to highlight text, create paragraphs and manage his email all by voice command. “Send mail”, “Compose mail”… each of these commands help navigate or manage email and help cut through a full inbox.
As the use of personal email has increased in the correspondence work of attorneys, more efficient email management has been a massive boost in terms of productivity.
Always being up to date with emails keeps Tromp on the front foot when it comes to correspondence. Using Dragon in Word, Jan has much of the same functionality when it comes to formatting and document generation.
“Dragon is literally part of the economic life-saving solution…”
When asked about tips and tricks he’d recommened to other users, Jan likes the sleep (standby) feature, which gives him greater control of his microphone and dicattion. Tromp says “attorney practices can be prone to interruption and this feature provides a lot of control for dictation.”.
Saying “Go to sleep”, he’s able to stop dictating and answer the phone, work with Zoom or speak to somebody in the room. Using a combination of verbal commands and keyboard shortcuts has made the use of Dragon highly versatile. What he recommends is having a wireless headset like his Sennheiser so that he can move freely whilst dictating or listening to phone messages.
You can mail him jant@boshoffinc.co.za, visit the website or connect on LinkedIn.