How Voice Technologies helps legal firms work smarter

At Voice Technologies, we are proud to have worked with some legal industry leaders on providing digital dictation support for a more efficient and optimised business.

By supporting legal firms, and companies in the legal sector, we help them work smarter with voice technology and digital dictation. Here is a rundown of our favourite case studies from within the legal sector.

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP is an international law firm headquartered in London. It is among the world's oldest law firms and is a member of the Magic Circle of leading London headquartered law firms. With just under 5,000 employees, the firm has 27 offices in 17 jurisdictions across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America and advises national and multinational corporations, financial institutions and governments.

We provide Freshfields with Service Desk support and ongoing maintenance for their SpeechExec Enterprise solution which is a combination of mobile dictation apps, portable dictation devices and SpeechMikes. We also have regular account management meetings to ensure they are happy with the level and delivery of our services and to address any technical challenges.

Freeths LLP

Freeths is a leading national law firm with 13 offices across the UK. With over 155 partners, and more than 900 members of staff, the firm delivers a comprehensive range of legal services to businesses, the public sector and to private individuals.

They came to us looking to reduce the cost and turnaround time of creating documents and with an existing digital dictation solution in place that was costly and ineffective.

Following a review of the firm’s existing processes, we proposed Nuance Dragon Professional Anywhere (DPA), a cloud-based speech recognition solution that allows business professionals to create high-quality documentation using their voice.

We then provided Freeths’ IT staff with training using a ‘train the trainer’ model which they then passed on to the actual users. We also advised on how to best use the technology in everyday working practices, and provide regular usage stats to demonstrate the firm’s return on investment.

Freeths has found that the DPA speech recognition system has brought value to the business by enabling them to make significant savings:

• The turnaround time to create documents has reduced
• The team now handles their own transcriptions which avoids the cost of outsourcing.

Frank Irvine Solicitors

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.

We have worked with Frank Irvine on their digital dictation solution since 2009. The digital dictation system we provided helped to streamline the creation of correspondence however the firm is continually looking to improve its service so recently asked us how to further speed up the process.

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 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.

Lindsays Solicitors

Lindsays’ 200 employees provide legal services to individuals and businesses worldwide from five offices in Scotland but they were operating a long winded and time consuming system of dictating onto tape and then handing tapes over to the 40-strong secretarial team for transcription. When Lindsays was planning to upgrade its IT equipment, its management decided to improve the data capture and transcription process at the same time. It came to Voice Technologies to eliminate the delays and inefficiencies associated with an analogue dictation system.

We assessed the current workflow and identified the need for an up-to-date system that would improve efficiency and subsequently supplied and helped to implement a digital dictation system. The systems we put in place enables Lindsays employees to use their time efficiently and to send time-sensitive dictations to the secretarial team instantly so that urgent documents are issued without delay.

The dictation methods we introduced deliver significant benefits:

• Audio clarity results in fewer typing errors
• Metadata identification makes searching for and tracing recordings easy
• Job list interface of pending transcription tasks and central management configuration helps to prioritise transcriptions.

Not only allowed Lindsays to improve efficiency and productivity, it has also enabled the company to restructure its secretarial team, resulting in a reduction in overhead costs.

Legal practices generate significant volumes of documentation on a day-to-day basis. The speed of turnaround and accuracy are key for improving client service and optimising business efficiencies. Many legal professionals dictate documents using outdated analogue or digital systems, some of which involve manually sending tapes for transcription. Our voice recognition systems help legal practices to work faster, more accurately and support the need to work from anywhere.

Our digital dictation solutions combine powerful speech recognition software with the convenience of the cloud. Users can dictate even the most complex legal documents quickly, accurately, and from anywhere – with a solution that knows legal terms right from first use.

Get in touch with Voice Technologies to help your legal firm work smarter with digital dictation solutions.