How to Dictate in MyCase: Time Entries, Case Notes, and Client Messages

Short answer: MyCase has no dictation button of its own, but any system-wide voice-to-text tool types into it. On Mac, click into a time entry description or case note, hold your dictation hotkey, speak, and release. On iPhone, open the MyCase app, switch to a voice keyboard, and tap the mic.

MyCase lives in a browser tab and in a phone app, and neither one offers you a microphone. That is not a gap in the product. Practice management software owns the record; text input belongs to the operating system. So the fix is not a MyCase setting, an add-on, or an integration you have to shop for. It is a dictation tool that types wherever your cursor already sits.

The reason this matters more inside MyCase than inside most software is volume. A practice management platform is a writing machine dressed as a database. Every matter you touch produces a time entry description, a case note, a task, a message to the client, a memo on an invoice. Most of those pieces of text are two or three sentences long. All of them are typed. And a meaningful share of them get written badly, late, or not at all, because writing a short summary at the end of a full day is the least appealing thing on the list.

Where dictation actually pays off inside MyCase

Not every field wants your voice. Sorting the surfaces first saves you the frustration of trying to speak a dollar figure into a rate box. Here are the places where speaking clearly beats typing, roughly ordered by how much time they hand back.

1. Time entry descriptions

This is the main event. Time entry descriptions are the highest-frequency writing surface in any billing practice, and they are also the one where quality carries direct financial weight. A vague entry gets trimmed by whoever reviews the bill, or questioned by the client who receives it. A specific entry survives both.

The problem is that specificity costs keystrokes, and keystrokes are exactly what you are short of when you are reconstructing six entries at 6 PM. So the entry that should read "Reviewed opposing counsel's proposed protective order; drafted redline narrowing the scope of the confidentiality designation; email to client summarizing the change" gets typed as "Review and revise PO." Same work. Very different invoice.

Dictated, the full version takes about eleven seconds. That is the entire argument. You are not saving time by speaking a short entry rather than typing a short entry. You are getting the long, defensible entry for roughly the price of the short one.

2. Case notes and matter updates

Case notes are where the institutional memory of a matter lives, and they are almost always the first thing to be skipped. A note written immediately after a call captures the tone of the conversation, the thing the client said sideways, the deadline they mentioned in passing. A note reconstructed three days later captures the bullet points and loses everything else.

Speaking a note the moment the call ends changes the economics. You are not sitting down to write; you are talking for forty seconds while the conversation is still in your head. The note is longer, closer to the actual conversation, and, crucially, it exists.

3. Client portal messages

Client communication is the part of practice management most likely to be delayed for reasons of pure effort. The client asked a question that takes two paragraphs to answer properly. Two paragraphs is a five-minute typing job, so it waits until tomorrow, and tomorrow the client sends a follow-up asking whether you got the first message.

Dictation collapses those two paragraphs into about ninety seconds, and the tone of dictated client messages tends to be better. Spoken explanations sound like a person explaining something. Typed explanations, especially when you are rushing, drift toward clipped and cold.

4. Tasks, workflows, and intake records

Task descriptions in MyCase suffer from the same compression problem as time entries. "Follow up" is a task title that means nothing to the associate who picks it up on Thursday. "Follow up with the county recorder about the missing legal description on the deed, they said to call after Tuesday" is a task that can actually be delegated. The second one is longer to type and identical to say.

Intake is the same story. Lead notes taken during the first phone call are the difference between a warm callback and starting the conversation over. Speaking them while the call is still fresh means the record reflects what the person actually said rather than what you remembered an hour later.

5. Longer drafts that start in the platform

Demand letters, engagement letter customizations, status update memos to a client. Anything longer than a paragraph is where the speed gap compounds. Typing at roughly forty words per minute, which is the adult average, a 600-word status memo is a fifteen-minute job. Speaking at 130 to 150 words per minute, which is normal conversational speed for most people with no practice at all, the same memo is a four-minute job plus editing.

Setting it up on Mac

MyCase runs in the browser on Mac, so anything that types system-wide types into it. The setup is short.

1. Install Voice Keyboard Pro and grant it microphone and accessibility permission. macOS asks for accessibility because a dictation tool has to insert text into an app it does not own.
2. Pick a hotkey you can hold without thinking. Most people land on a modifier key they never otherwise use, because you will be holding it dozens of times a day.
3. Open MyCase in Safari or Chrome and click into any text field. A time entry description is the right one to test with.
4. Hold the hotkey, say the sentence, release. The text appears at the cursor.

There is no MyCase-specific configuration, no browser extension, and nothing to enable per field. The tool does not know it is in MyCase and does not need to. It types where the cursor is, exactly like a keyboard does. That is also why it works in the fields MyCase renders inside modals and side panels, which browser extension approaches sometimes miss.

One practical note about browsers: dictation inserts text into the focused field, so make sure the field is genuinely focused before you speak. Clicking a row in a table is not the same as clicking into the editable box inside it. If text lands somewhere unexpected, focus is almost always the reason, and our guide to dictated text appearing in the wrong place walks through the rest of the causes.

Setting it up on iPhone

The MyCase mobile app is where a lot of the highest-value dictation happens, because it is where you are standing in a courthouse hallway with four minutes before the next thing.

1. Install the Voice Keyboard Pro app and add the keyboard in Settings, then General, then Keyboard, then Keyboards, then Add New Keyboard.
2. Enable Full Access for that keyboard. Dictation requires it because transcription happens over the network, and iOS blocks network access for keyboards without it.
3. Open MyCase, tap into a note or a message, then switch keyboards with the globe key.
4. Tap the mic, speak, tap again to stop. The text lands in the field.

The advantage of a keyboard over the built-in dictation on iOS is that it works the same way in every app, and it keeps working when you switch between the MyCase app, your email, and your calendar during the same five minutes. If the keyboard does not appear in the switcher, the usual cause is the Full Access step, which we cover in enabling Full Access for an iPhone keyboard.

Teach it your client names before you teach it anything else

The single biggest predictor of whether a lawyer keeps using dictation is whether it spells proper nouns correctly. Legal writing is dense with names that no general-purpose transcription has any reason to know: your clients, opposing counsel, the judge, the local court, the statute you cite forty times a week, the shorthand your firm uses for a recurring matter type.

Voice Keyboard Pro's Smart Vocabulary handles this with a personal dictionary and replacement rules. You add the terms once and they get spelled correctly from then on. The practical way to build it is not to sit down and brainstorm a list. It is to work normally for two days and add each term the moment it comes out wrong. After a week your vocabulary reflects your actual practice, which is a much better list than anything you would have written from memory.

Worth adding early:

• Every active client and matter name, including the ones that are ordinary words used as names
• Opposing counsel and firm names you correspond with regularly
• Local judges, courtrooms, and county names
• Statutes and rules you cite by number, if you say them aloud often
• Firm-internal shorthand, so that saying the short form produces the long form in the entry

That last one is the underrated trick. A replacement rule can expand a two-word spoken phrase into a full standard description you would otherwise retype constantly. Our deeper walkthrough of custom vocabulary that learns your words covers how to structure those rules so they do not fire when you did not mean them to.

Punctuation, formatting, and the habits that make it feel natural

Dictation reads better when you speak in complete sentences and let the transcription engine handle the commas. Most people over-dictate punctuation at first, saying "comma" and "period" at every pause, which produces stilted text and slows you down. Modern transcription infers sentence boundaries from your delivery. Speak normally and it usually gets there.

The exceptions are worth learning explicitly:

• Paragraph breaks. Say "new paragraph" when you want one. There is no way to infer this from audio.
• Lists. If you want numbered items, say the numbers. Otherwise you get prose.
• Dates and amounts. Speak them the way you would read them aloud, then glance at the result. Formatting conventions vary and a quick check costs nothing.
• Citations. Long citation strings are one of the few things genuinely faster to type. Dictate the prose around them and type the cite.

The other habit that separates people who stick with dictation from people who quit in week one is not trying to produce final text on the first pass. Say the paragraph, then read it and fix it. This is faster than typing carefully, and it is much faster than typing carefully and then rewriting anyway. If the fix is small, Voice Keyboard Pro's Voice Edit on iPhone lets you speak the correction rather than tapping into the middle of the text to make it.

Client calls and Meeting Mode

A large share of what eventually becomes a MyCase note starts as a conversation. On Mac, Meeting Mode records with speaker detection and produces AI notes, which turns a client call into a draft summary instead of a memory test. Calendar meeting detection means it can notice the call is starting rather than waiting for you to remember.

The workflow that works: run the call, let Meeting Mode produce the summary, then paste the parts that belong in the record into the case note and dictate the two sentences of your own analysis that no automated summary can produce. That last part matters. The value of your note is not the transcript of what was said. It is your read on what it means.

Obvious but necessary: recording a call is a legal question before it is a technical one, and consent rules vary by jurisdiction. That is your call to make, not a setting to flip without thinking about it.

What leaves your machine

Any lawyer evaluating dictation should ask where the audio goes, because client confidentiality is not a preference. Voice Keyboard Pro sends audio for transcription and returns text. Our server stores only operational pings, meaning counts and timings. As of the privacy change we shipped in May 2026, no audio and no transcript content is stored on our servers.

That is a statement about our architecture, not a compliance opinion about your practice. Whether dictation fits your firm's obligations depends on your jurisdiction, your engagement terms, and the sensitivity of the matter. Ask the question deliberately and answer it once, rather than never asking it. Our overview of legal dictation software for Mac goes further into how to evaluate that, and voice to text for lawyers covers the practice-level workflow in more depth.

What not to dictate

Being honest about the limits is what keeps the habit alive. Do not dictate:

• Structured fields. Rates, quantities, dropdown selections, date pickers. Type or click these. Speaking a number into a field that expects a specific format is a fight you will lose.
• Anything requiring exact character-level precision. Docket numbers, account numbers, long citation strings. The keyboard is better at these and always will be.
• Text you are composing while thinking hard. Some writing is thinking. If you are working out an argument rather than recording a known one, the slowness of typing is sometimes the point.
• Anything in a room where the content should not be overheard. This is not a technical limitation, but it is the most common practical one in shared offices and courthouses.

Dictation is best at converting known content into text. Time entries, case notes, task descriptions, and client updates are all known content by the time you write them. That is exactly why MyCase is such a good place to use it.

The arithmetic, one more time

Say you write forty time entries a week. Say the honest, defensible version of each entry is thirty words, and the version you actually type when you are tired is eight. Typing at forty words per minute, thirty words is about forty-five seconds; speaking at 140, it is about thirteen. Across forty entries that is roughly twenty minutes a week of pure typing time, which is not nothing but is also not the real number.

The real number is the difference between forty specific entries and forty vague ones, repeated every week for a year. That shows up in realization rates, in how many entries survive billing review, and in how many client questions about the invoice you have to answer. Speed is the visible benefit. Completeness is the one that pays.

Voice Keyboard Pro has a free tier with daily limits, and Pro is $4.99 a month or $34.99 a year if you use it constantly. The sensible way to evaluate it is to dictate one full day of MyCase entries and then compare them to last week's. If this week's are longer, more specific, and were entered while the work was still fresh, the question answers itself.