AI transcription for lawyers

The billable-hours math: re-listening vs reading

An hour of audio takes an hour to replay, and for a solo attorney that is the whole problem.

The interview you recorded to protect the facts becomes a file you avoid opening, because opening it costs real time that is either unbillable admin or padding a client will not accept.

Reading scales with what matters

A transcript changes the unit of work. Re-listening scales with the length of the recording, and reading scales with how much of the recording actually matters. Searching does not scale with length at all: a name, a date, or a dollar amount surfaces in seconds across every matter you have uploaded, whether that is one file or three years of them.

Run the numbers on your own week

• A one-hour client interview, replayed twice while drafting, costs two hours that you cannot put on a bill in good conscience.
• The same interview as a timestamped transcript is a skim plus a handful of targeted searches, with the audio one click away when exact wording matters.

Sonix is pay as you go at $10 per audio hour. If you bill $100 an hour or more, a single six-minute billing increment covers transcribing an entire audio hour.

A month of recordings, transcribed

Suppose your practice generates ten recorded hours a month: four intake and client calls, a half-day deposition, two hearings, and a scatter of dictated memos. Reviewed by replay, that is more than ten hours of listening before a single minute of drafting. Reviewed as transcripts, it is a stack of searchable documents that cost $100 to produce, and most of those hours go back into work you can bill: drafting, strategy, and court time.

What never shows up on a timesheet

Notes taken live are a filter, and the filter is you on a busy day. The detail that seemed minor in the moment (a date, a prior injury, an offhand admission) is exactly the detail you cannot reconstruct three months later. A transcript does not filter. It keeps everything, and search makes everything retrievable.

None of this replaces your judgment. It means your judgment goes into what was said instead of into finding where it was said, because transcription is how a recording becomes a document.

Client interviews and intake, on the record from day one

The facts a client gives you in the first twenty minutes decide the next six months of the matter.

Record the consultation, upload it to Sonix, and the transcript comes back in minutes with timestamps and speaker labels. What the client said in minute three is still exact, quotable, and searchable when you draft the engagement letter, the demand, or the complaint.

A searchable case file from the first call

Every interview becomes part of a searchable case file. When a story shifts between the intake call and the follow-up six weeks later, one search across both transcripts finds each version, with the audio behind every line.

Better calls on which matters to take

Deciding whether to take a matter often means re-checking what the prospect actually said about dates, prior counsel, and what they signed. With the consultation transcribed, that check takes minutes, and if you decline, the record of exactly what was discussed protects you later.

Confidentiality you can document

Sonix is SOC 2 Type II audited every year, encrypts files with TLS in transit and AES-256 at rest, and never uses your recordings or transcripts to train AI models. Two-factor authentication and access controls keep each matter restricted to you. Read the Sonix security overview before you upload a client file, and confirm your own bar's guidance on recording conversations and using cloud tools. Security controls support your ethics obligations; they do not replace them.

Deposition prep and review without the replay

Upload deposition audio or video and Sonix returns a speaker-labeled working transcript in minutes, so you can outline testimony the same afternoon you take it.

The certified court reporter's transcript remains the official record. Sonix gives you the same-day working copy you prepare from while the official transcript is still on its way.

Exact words for impeachment prep

For impeachment prep, precision is the whole game. Sonix supports verbatim transcription, and every word carries its timestamp, so you can pull the exact statement, confirm it against the audio with one click, and have the moment cued before the witness finishes walking back the story.

When testimony outruns your evenings

AI deposition summaries condense a full day of testimony into key points you check against the source line by line. For case chronologies, multi-file search pulls every date and event out of the matter's transcripts, each tied to its moment in the recording, so the timeline you assemble never drifts from the record.

Legal dictation and memos: talk now, file clean text later

Sonix replaces the old dictation workflow, not your voice: record a memo, upload the file, and clean, timestamped text comes back in minutes.

Most dictation software for lawyers types as you speak. Sonix works from the recording instead, made on the Sonix mobile app or any recorder, and for a working attorney that is usually the better trade: you talk at full speed between hearings, and the typing happens without you.

The dictaphone and typist, in one upload

Attorneys use Sonix the way a previous generation used a dictaphone and a typist:

• Case notes dictated in the car after client meetings
• File memos captured while the hearing is still fresh
• First drafts of letters talked through on the walk back from court

Upload when you sit down, polish the text in the in-browser editor, and export to DOCX with the facts already on the page.

Your memo carries its own source

Working from the recording has one more advantage over typing as you speak: the audio is kept, and every word of the text links to its moment in the recording, so each memo carries its own source.

Built for the matters you handle every day

Each practice area produces its own kind of recording, and the same transcript workflow handles all of them.

Criminal defense

Discovery productions arrive as hours of bodycam audio, interrogation video, and jail calls. Transcribe the whole production, search every recording at once, and find the statement that changes the case before the hearing, not after it.

Transcription for criminal defense

Personal injury

Client interviews, recorded statements, and adjuster calls become one searchable record, so the timeline in your demand letter matches what was actually said, word for word.

Transcription for personal injury

DUI defense

Stop video and station audio decide these cases. A timestamped transcript of the audio lets you check the officer's narrative against the recording line by line.

Transcription for DUI defense

Medical malpractice

Expert interviews and case conferences run long and dense. Transcripts make them quotable, and Enterprise plans offer a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement when the evidence includes health records.

Transcription for medical malpractice

Auto accident

Witness statements taken in week one stay exact through settlement in month fourteen, searchable by name, date, and dollar amount through every stage of the claim.

Transcription for auto accident cases

Practicing with other attorneys and staff? Sonix for law firms adds permission levels, shared team folders, and firm-wide administration. For the full legal toolkit, start at Sonix for legal.

Multilingual clients, one workflow

When a client does not testify in English, every recording becomes two jobs at once: re-listening and translating in your head.

Sonix transcribes 54+ languages, so a client interview conducted in Spanish, Mandarin, Vietnamese, or Tagalog becomes a transcript in its original language first. From there, Sonix translation produces a working English version alongside the original, synced to the same timestamps, so you prepare from the English text and verify any line that matters against the client's actual words.

Machine translation is a case-prep tool, not a certified translation. Courts generally require a certified human translation for filed documents, and Sonix does not replace that requirement. What it replaces is the wait, and the fees, just to find out which ten minutes of a two-hour interview are worth certifying.