Whisper for Law Firms
This page is for the person who has to sign off the rollout, not the fee earner who wants to stop typing. The commercial case is simple, and so is the risk case: a dictation tool that transmits nothing does not become a supplier you have to diligence, contract with, and name to your clients.
Whisper runs the speech model on each fee earner's own machine. Privileged audio never leaves it. Licences are $29 for the first seat and $15 for each additional seat, per year. It is one flat, predictable price with no auto-renewal and no per-user subscription to true up at year end.
Why firms move dictation on-device
It shortens the client questionnaire
Large clients now ask which suppliers can access matter information and where it is processed. "The recording does not leave the firm's device" is a short, checkable answer. Naming a cloud vendor and its sub-processors is not.
No processor to onboard
Engaging a cloud dictation provider means supplier due diligence, a written contract, confidentiality undertakings and a record you keep current. A local tool does not create that obligation for the transcription step at all.
A flat yearly price, not a per-user subscription
Twenty fee earners on a $17.90 per user per month plan is $4,296 a year, before any speech recognition add-on, and it recurs. Twenty seats of Whisper is $314 a year, and nothing renews automatically.
It works in court and on locked-down machines
Dictation runs with the network disabled: in a courtroom with no signal, in a prison visit room, and on a hardened laptop your IT team keeps off the public internet.
Answers for a client security questionnaire
These are the questions that actually appear, in the form they appear. Copy them into your response. Where the answer is that the control is yours and not ours, we say so.
Does the supplier have access to client or matter data?
No. The speech model runs on the user's device. Neither the audio nor the transcript is transmitted to us at any point.
Where is data processed and stored?
On the firm's own endpoint, in whatever location the firm controls. There is no processing location on our side because there is no processing on our side.
List your sub-processors for this service.
None for transcription. For licensing and payment we use ordinary business vendors, which are listed on our security page.
What is your data retention and deletion policy for client content?
Not applicable: we hold no client content. Retention of the resulting text is entirely governed by the firm's own document management policy.
What certifications do you hold?
We do not hold ISO 27001 or SOC 2 and we do not claim to. We would rather say that plainly than imply a certification we have not earned. What we can evidence is the architecture, which is the control that matters here.
Can the service operate offline?
Yes. A connection is required only for download, licence validation and updates.
How is the software deployed and updated across managed devices?
Standard installers support silent installation. There is no central management console, and we say so on the deployment page rather than let procurement discover it later.
We publish no certification we do not hold. Where the honest answer is "that is your responsibility, not ours", we say so rather than imply otherwise. Full detail on the security page.
Rollout and licensing
One licence covers Mac, Windows and Linux, so a mixed estate does not need separate purchases. Seats are added at $15 each at any time. For the silent installation commands and an honest list of what we do not provide, see the enterprise deployment page.
What a team actually pays
$29 for the first seat, $15 for each additional seat, per year. No subscription, no auto-renewal.
| Seats | Total per year |
|---|---|
| 1 seat | $29 |
| 5 seats | $89 |
| 10 seats | $164 |
| 25 seats | $389 |
| 50 seats | $764 |
Questions from firm management
Does using cloud dictation breach professional confidentiality rules?
Not automatically, and in most jurisdictions engaging IT suppliers is expressly permitted provided you select them carefully and bind them to confidentiality in writing. In Germany, for example, § 43e BRAO sets out that duty for lawyers and § 203 StGB backs it criminally. So cloud dictation is lawful when the process is followed. The point of an on-device tool is that the process is not triggered, because no supplier sees the material. Nothing here is legal advice.
Can we standardise on this after Dragon?
For dictation, yes, and it will feel better because there is no voice profile to train. For hands-free control of applications by voice command, no tool on our comparison fully replaces what Dragon did, and we would rather tell you now than after the rollout. If a small number of your users depend on voice commands rather than dictation, plan for them separately.
How do we handle leavers and machine changes?
Seats are licences you administer, not accounts we host. The firm uses one licence key on each device up to its seat count, so moving a seat to a new machine means removing the old device at /account and activating the key on the new one, not a data migration. Nothing of the leaver's dictation exists on our side to export or delete.
What is the real three-year cost for fifty fee earners?
Fifty seats of Whisper is $764 a year, so $2,292 over three years, at a flat price with no per-user subscription creep and no auto-renewal. Fifty users of a $17.90 per user per month plan is $10,740 a year, so $32,220 over the same period, before add-ons. If your firm needs digital dictation hardware, job routing and a typing pool, a workflow product earns that difference and we say so on our comparison page. If it does not, the difference is simply cost.
Do you offer a trial for a pilot group?
Buy a small number of seats for the pilot and add more at $15 each when it works. Everything the app does is listed before you buy, so a pilot starts without a procurement process in front of it.
Talk to us about your team
Pilot, invoice, purchase order or a security questionnaire. We reply by email, usually within two business days.
One supplier fewer on the risk register
$29 for the first seat, $15 for each additional seat, per year. No auto-renewal. Mac, Windows and Linux.