Speech recognition supports the customer focused approach at Frank Irvine Solicitors

Background

Frank Irvine Solicitors is a leading civil law firm providing specialist legal advice in mental health law, incapacity law and public law. Providing a client driven professional service to its clients is of paramount importance to the firm’s success. Frank Irvine Solicitors continually invests in its people and processes.

Being an early adopter of new technology when it has demonstrable advantages in terms of efficiency and productivity, Frank Irvine had introduced a digital dictation system in 2009 which was supplied by Voice Technologies. Digital recordings were transcribed by in and out-of-house administrators and documents returned to the relevant solicitor for verification before being sent out.

The digital dictation system helped to streamline the creation of correspondence however the firm is continually looking to improve its service so in 2016 it asked us how to further speed up the process.

Speech recognition decreases turnaround time

Based on our pre-existing knowledge of the firm, we proposed a speech recognition system designed not only to fit its budget and business objectives, but which we knew would interface seamlessly with its existing processes.

The system comprises hand-held Philips LFH3200 microphones and Dragon Professional Group speech recognition software. We selected Dragon because it allows the firm’s solicitors to dictate directly into their existing practice management software, LawWare, avoiding the need for typing altogether.

Our Project Lead installed, configured and tested the hardware and software on-site, and subsequently carried out one-to-one training with each solicitor to ensure that they were confident in using the system.

The firm’s solicitors now create documents using a combination of voice commands and dictation, picking from either standard templates or bespoke documents. They have found that the speech recognition system brings value to the business by enabling them to make significant savings:

• The turnaround time to create documents is more than halved
• Most of the team now do their own transcriptions which allows the practice to avoid the cost of outsourcing this service.