BigHand is the dominant enterprise dictation and workflow platform in UK and Irish law firms. If you’ve worked in a large solicitor’s firm, you’ve probably used it — it’s the system that routes your recorded dictation to a secretary’s queue, manages priority levels, tracks turnaround times, and integrates with your practice management software.

For large firms, BigHand does what it’s designed to do. For individual barristers and solicitors in smaller practices, it’s the wrong tool — and trying to use it creates problems that don’t exist with a different approach.

What BigHand is built for

BigHand is workflow management software that happens to include dictation. Its core value proposition is the management of dictation at scale: a partner dictates, the audio routes to the appropriate secretary or typist, the secretary types it up, the document comes back for review. Multiply that across 50 fee earners and 20 support staff and you have a workflow problem that BigHand solves well.

The product assumes:

A firm with multiple fee earners generating high dictation volume
A secretarial or transcription pool to receive and process work
An IT department to deploy, maintain, and integrate the software
A practice management system to integrate with (Keyhouse, Leap, Clio)
A billing relationship at firm level, not individual level

These are reasonable assumptions for a 30-partner solicitor’s firm. They don’t apply to a barrister at the Law Library, a solicitor in a two-person practice, or any practitioner who handles their own documentation without a secretarial layer.

Why it doesn’t work for individual practitioners

No IT department, no deployment

BigHand requires installation, configuration, and ongoing IT support. For a sole practitioner or small firm without a dedicated IT function, this is a real barrier. The product isn’t designed to be set up by the person who will use it — it’s designed to be deployed across an organisation.

You need a secretary to receive the work

BigHand’s core workflow is: fee earner dictates → audio goes to secretary’s queue → secretary types → document comes back. If you don’t have a secretary receiving dictation, the workflow breaks. You’ve recorded audio and it’s sitting in a queue that nobody is processing.

Some barristers have a personal assistant or use a shared secretarial service. But many — particularly junior counsel early in practice — handle their own documentation. For those practitioners, BigHand’s workflow model is simply not applicable.

Cost and structure

BigHand is licensed at firm level, with per-seat pricing that reflects its enterprise positioning. The cost is justified when it’s replacing the overhead of managing a secretarial pool across dozens of fee earners. For an individual practitioner paying for their own software, it’s expensive relative to what you need.

Desktop-first in a mobile world

Like Dragon Legal, BigHand’s core dictation model assumes you’re at a desk with a dedicated hardware microphone or dictation device (Philips SpeechMike, Olympus recorder). Mobile apps exist, but the product was designed around fixed-workstation dictation. For barristers who need to dictate between courts, consultations, and home, this is a constraint.

What individual practitioners actually need

The dictation problem for an individual barrister or solicitor without secretarial support is different from the enterprise workflow problem BigHand solves. The requirements are:

Phone-based recording — dictate anywhere, not just at a desk
AI transcription and formatting — structured documents produced automatically, without a typist
EU-only data — GDPR compliance for privileged material
No IT setup — working in minutes, not after a deployment project
Individual pricing — paying for what one person uses, not an enterprise seat

This is the problem that modern mobile AI dictation tools are designed for. The comparison isn’t BigHand vs dictate& on features — they’re solving different problems for different users. BigHand manages dictation workflow at firm scale. Mobile AI dictation eliminates the workflow entirely by producing structured documents directly from voice.

If your firm uses BigHand but you need mobile dictation too

This comes up for solicitors at firms that have BigHand deployed, who also need to dictate on the move. The firm’s BigHand installation handles desk-based dictation routed to secretaries. Mobile dictation handles the in-between moments — attendance notes after a client meeting, a quick letter dictated on the way back from court.

These aren’t in conflict. They serve different moments in the working day. Some practitioners use both for different tasks.

The short version

If you’re a barrister looking for dictation software and someone has suggested BigHand: it’s not built for you. BigHand is a firm-level workflow tool that requires IT deployment and a secretarial layer. The category of tool you want is mobile AI dictation — built for individual practitioners, works on a phone, produces formatted legal documents directly, EU-only processing, no setup required.

dictate& is built for Irish barristers specifically — junior counsel and senior counsel — who want to produce attendance notes, opinions, and briefs without a secretarial intermediary or an IT department. See how it works →