Speaker 1: If you're a litigation lawyer also known as an advocate in India, you're spending a big chunk of your time doing drafting. Anytime you have to approach any judge, you have to defend your client before any judge or a multitude of other things you have to do. You always have to draft a petition, a response, any miscellaneous application before you can plead in the court before the judge. Whatever you are pleading, it must be supported by written affirmations and that is why lawyers are spending a lot of time, you know, drafting their drafts for their clients. Now, when you're drafting a major chunk of your time is spent doing this, you need to be able to efficiently pull out as much of results as possible. Over almost 10 years now of practicing litigation, I have come up with a few ways and I wanted to share a few of them with you and special focus on this one particular way that I found to be very very interesting which not a lot of advocates know about. So of course the first way to do the drafting is the good old-fashioned way of just you know typing out on your keyboard and finishing off the whole thing. Much prior to me my father, my uncle, my grandfather did it the really, really old fashioned way of using a typewriter to type out their drafts. In fact, I remember when I was a child, for those of you who don't know, my father, my grandfather, you know, I mean, I'm a third generation lawyer. So, you know, I even have memories of my father, you know, inviting me to use the typewriter that had been lying in the in the you know storage unit for several years and let me tell you these men have extremely strong fingers because typing on a typewriter takes a lot of effort in any case i digress the the you know for us you know old-fashioned way is typing on a keyboard something that i started playing around with for a short while which i found to be very very impressive you know a friend who worked at this very prestigious law firm told me that he has been effectively using it so I started using it back even in my law school days to prepare my research reports research papers and and even you know to help out my seniors during my internship days there is a software called dragon naturally speaking and you know basically what it does is you purchase the package I don't know whether you know what's the status with them right now I'll talk about what I do instead but at that point of time you know they had a they had a microphone and a software on a CD which they would supply and basically you could be dictating to the artificial intelligence guided software of this extremely expensive software you know provided by this company and of course you know being a law student at that time and soon thereafter a recent law graduate I never really got around to purchasing any copy of Dragon naturally speaking let's just say that I borrowed it from here and there from time to time anyways a friend of mine you know motivated me to kind of try it I gave it a shot and I really enjoyed it for a couple of months I believe I was very you know I was able to get a lot of benefit out of using this software and what's even more impressive is that around the same time I met a senior advocate a senior designated advocate who right now, in fact, is a sitting judge of the Honorable Delhi High Court. And in his office, I saw the mic, I saw the software, and he told me that he himself, even though being a senior advocate, that's usually not what most of them do. And most of them anyways, don't do much drafting work. You know, he still did all his written submissions, you know, anything else that needs to be done. He was doing himself by dictating to this software. However, I after some time I switched back because I kept testing out speeds and you know for for an advocate speed is of paramount importance and I calculated and I maybe it was computing power problems you know back then I could not even afford a very very powerful laptop and maybe that was the difficulty but whatever the reason I calculated that me typing out although more stressful and for some reason very very painful for my neck my neck would always cramp up it would still be much more faster for me to type out on the keyboard instead of dictating and that's why I switched back to typing but now this is something that I've been doing for the the past few years and I've had phenomenal results as a person who is pressed for time. I don't have the liberty of sitting down and spending 5 to 7, 10, 15 hours a day doing my drafting like I used to have way back in the day. Now I have a large team of very very competent professionals, advocates and law students who help me out with all of my matters and nowadays what I do is and And I've been doing this for effectively for the past, I believe for the past five years now. And I started doing this as just a way of kind of testing it out and it got phenomenal results. So basically what I started doing back then and what is something that I even do now is that I would dictate to the best possible extent I can just as a narration in an audio recording, you know, in my in my phone or on my laptop, I would, I would record a five or 10 minute clip audio clip, in which I have dictated the entire case of the plaintiff, the appellant, the defendant, the petitioner, the respondent, whoever it is, or, you know, the applicant, if it's a small application, whatever it is, I have dictated the contents of the entire draft to the to you know and and I've sent it to the associate and the beauty of this is that a huge chunk of time in these draftings is spent on filling up data which you can't remember you know by heart unless you have an idyllic memory such as you know what dates this particular incident transpired? What is the location? What is the address? So I would just basically go about, you know, petition by Mr. So and so, son of Mr. So and so. Or I'd say just, you know, son of Dash. And now I have, you know, narrated the entire version of events as I remember them from whatever the client has narrated to me. And then I hand it over to my associate who then you know reads the documents, fills out the blanks, asks the client okay what was this particular data, that particular data and my job is done in about 5 to 10 minutes in that audio note and now the associate is spending anywhere from 4 to 8 hours just you know fine tuning, finalizing you know and also kind of like filling out the fill in the blanks and and it's been you know very very helpful of course the associate has the benefit of you know fine-tuning their drafting skills and I have the benefit of spending only a fraction of time which I otherwise earlier used to spend several hours almost my entire day doing this and of course once the draft is ready I can you know vet it myself it takes me you know perhaps one-tenth of the time to vet the draft compared to if I had to do it all from scratch myself. So you know this is something which has helped me out which I found to be much more easier for me, much more time-consuming, effortless effortless for me compared to even you know of course from the good old style of typing away and even compared to something like dictation softwares. I am curious if you are a practicing advocate if you are independent or if you have a team available to you or if you are working for somebody else what are the various methods of effective fast drafting that you have seen if you can share in the comments that'd be fantastic