Dictate privileged work product on your own machine.

When you dictate a memo into a cloud-based tool, the audio of you working through case strategy traverses the public internet, hits a third-party server, and gets transcribed by a system you cannot inspect. The draft of your privileged work product has touched a system outside your control.

Whether that breaks privilege is a question for your jurisdiction and your bar association. ABA Formal Opinion 477R asks attorneys to make "reasonable efforts" to prevent unauthorized disclosure when using technology — local processing is one architectural answer to that question. What is not in question is that you have introduced a third party into the workflow — and reasonable people disagree on whether that party should ever have been there in the first place.

Dragon Legal solved this twenty years ago by running on your laptop. It still does, on Windows, for around seven hundred dollars. SnailText solves it on Mac and Windows, with the same architectural property, at a fraction of the price.

Whisper handles common legal vocabulary out of the box — better than OS-built-in dictation, in most cases. The terms it misses are the ones specific to your practice: your firm's client names, your jurisdiction's statute citations, your judge's name, the parties to your current matter. Add them once to the custom dictionary and SnailText replaces them on the way to the text field:

Word-boundary aware. Case-preserving. No legal-pack to buy — you write the list yourself, which means it actually matches your practice. Custom dictionary auto-replace runs on the Pro tier.

Is voice dictation safe for privileged legal work? It depends on whether the audio leaves your device. SnailText runs the speech-to-text model locally, so it does not.

A draft brief, a memo to file, an email to a client — these are the kinds of documents that attorney-client privilege and work product doctrine exist to protect. The architectural property you want is that those documents never traverse a server you do not control.

SnailText runs Whisper locally. The audio is processed in RAM and discarded the moment the text is ready. Nothing on disk, nothing transmitted. You can verify in your network monitor — no outbound traffic during dictation. The only outbound calls SnailText makes are software update checks (disable in Settings) and, for Pro users, license verification once per session.

Whether this is sufficient for privilege purposes in your jurisdiction is, ultimately, a question for you and your bar association. The architectural property is the thing we can guarantee.

Dragon Legal Anywhere has been the go-to local dictation tool for attorneys on Windows for two decades. It still works. SnailText is the cross-platform, lower-cost alternative for everyone else — including every attorney whose firm switched to Mac.

• · Dragon Legal Anywhere: around $700 one-time (or $99/year cloud version), Windows-only, legal vocabulary pack included, voice macros for signature blocks and standard clauses.
• · SnailText: $7.49/month or free to start, Mac and Windows, build-your-own custom dictionary, runs OpenAI Whisper locally on your device.
• · What we do not have yet: a pre-loaded legal vocabulary pack, voice-activated macros, or two decades of fine-tuning on dictating attorneys. If you have an existing Dragon workflow that depends on those, SnailText is not a one-for-one replacement. If you are starting from "I need dictation on my Mac and Dragon does not run there", SnailText is the simpler answer.