From a backlog of dictations to a mountain of opportunities

Since speech recognition was rolled out at Heaney Watson eighteen months ago, staff at all levels throughout the business have revealed that they could not imagine going back to working without it.

As far as fee earners and secretaries are concerned, the combined technology is allowing lawyers to be far more productive, generating documents far quicker than before, which improves client satisfaction. By releasing secretaries from much of their daily
typing burden, administration staff are able to get far more involved in more rewarding tasks.

To best encapsulate the difference
the technology has made to the company and its staff of 25, Practice Manager Carole Pattinson just has to cast her mind back eighteen months before the firm introduced BigHand Speech Recognition.

“We had introduced digital dictation a number of years ago and this enabled dictations to be shared more easily throughout the practice. It also improved the sound quality of the recordings and made us more efficient and effective,”
she says.

“More recently, we were experiencing problems with backlogs of dictations. Each morning we would spend time prioritising the workload. Speech recognition was of course the next logical step for us to resolve the backlog, to add further efficiency and to put our fee earners in greater control of their workloads.”

“I spoke to someone the other day at a nearby law firm and they still have to do this dated process every morning. You just end up firefighting all the time instead of focusing on growing the business.”

Paving the way for productivity

The firm laid the groundwork well for rolling out speech recognition technology. The software was pre-programmed to spell words that were possibly unique to the firm, such as names of staff members and local judges. It was then introduced to four early adopters before being rolled out to a further five fee earners.

Each received training in using the right spoken commands to control the software effectively and, despite the
users having a wide variety of accents, the technology has never had any
issues with variances in pronunciation.

From day one, the lawyers immediately saw the benefits of the technology which, as Pattinson puts it,
is the equivalent of a secretary working for them any time of the day, any day of the year. It also allows them to be productive when away from the office when, traditionally, they would not have been able to dictate a letter or produce
a document.

“The fee earners were excited to get the technology because they knew what a difference it would make,” recalls Pattinson.

“Our lawyers can now keep records of meetings and calls up to date instantly, without needing to dictate a note for a secretary to type out. It’s the same with letters. They just dictate what’s required to go in a document, speech recognition transcribes the dictation and the lawyer is then able to check it and produce the document required.

“We also have the mobile version of the technology, which our fee earners really love to use. It means they can dictate notes and letters on the move.
It’s been particularly useful for our lawyers when they’re waiting at court. This used to be downtime, but now our fee earners can be productive when they’re out of the office, at any time.”

Savings and development

While there is a very clear efficiency and productivity gain, the technology has also led to improved staff morale. Administrative staff have found that they are able to help fee earners and become involved in other tasks which would not have been possible before speech recognition was introduced.

Furthermore, on the business side, the boost to productivity and efficiency gains meant that the cost of the rollout of BigHand’s technology to nine fee earners paid for itself within just eight months. This is likely to introduce further savings in the future by continuing to drive greater improvements and operational efficiencies throughout the firm.

“Speech recognition means that secretaries are released from the monotonous role of typing for the majority of their working day,” says Pattinson.

“It’s just so much more rewarding for our staff to get involved in the higher value work. Our move from an analogue to a digital dictation solution certainly delivered major efficiency benefits for the business; speech recognition has augmented that further still.”

Better service

A crucial point for Heaney Watson has been that, as a family law firm, there is arguably no other part of the legal industry where fee earners and their supporting administrative staff are
more ingrained in matters that are
central to their clients’ lives.

While it is important that paperwork gets to clients in a timely fashion in all legal disciplines, in family law it can be a way that a business can differentiate itself. People want to instantly know the outcome of meetings with lawyers involved in a case because they greatly affect their future family life.

Hence, speech recognition is helping Heaney Watson to provide as prompt a service as possible through correspondence that is on its way to a client rather than waiting for a secretary
to transcribe it.

It means that the clients get a better service and the staff get a better service by making them more productive, which means that the practice retains its top staff because, as Pattinson points out, there is nobody at the firm that could consider going back to the ‘dark old days’ before speech recognition.

Speech recognition has developed a virtuous circle at the firm. The technology makes fee earners and secretaries’ working lives so much more enjoyable and productive, at the same time as adding value to the business by allowing them to focus on higher value work which, in turn, improves customer service and client satisfaction.

For more information, please contact:

BigHand Ltd

Briana McCrory

Marketing Manager (UK Legal)

briana.mccrory@bighand.com

www.bighand.com

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