Band Hatton Button LLP, one of Coventry’s largest single law firms, has swapped out its previous incumbent provider for BigHand’s core enterprise digital dictation solution. BigHand will offer the firm additional mobility and speech recognition features as part of the firm’s continuing strategic focus on customer satisfaction and service excellence.

The development, which is an evolution of the firm’s prior use of digital dictation technology, brings BigHand’s speech recognition and mobility capabilities to Band Hatton Button’s 36 fee earners and enables effective utilisation of the admin team. BigHand Speech Recognition will:

• enable remote connectivity, and;
• enhance document production processes.

The firm reviewed available solutions during the early part of 2014. Band Hatton Button selected BigHand for the robustness of its solution and its proven expertise in the sector.

“BigHand offered all the functionality we wanted, and also had a very user-friendly reporting interface,” says George Campbell, IT Manager at Band Hatton Button. “The BigHand team was also really engaged right from the initial meeting. They gave us confidence that they would support us in achieving the maximum benefit from the solution.”

The successful completion of the pilot among 15 users in the firm’s litigation and employment departments demonstrated significant productivity and efficiency gains for both fee earners and secretarial staff.

Fee earners have been able to make better use of time that would otherwise be unproductive. BigHand allows them to use mobile devices to review the status of both dictations and task lists alike, which presents opportunities for increased client contact. As a result:

• Document production team productivity has increased, and;
• Secretarial staff are also now being used to the best of their abilities.

The pilot enabled confidence in Band Hatton Button that a full introduction of the speech recognition and mobility technology would support its strategic focus on continuously enhancing customer satisfaction.

George says: “We had been using digital dictation technology for six years across the whole business. But we wanted to expand upon our existing system’s capabilities to increase fee earners’ productivity outside of the office and make our support staff more effective.”

“This brings clear and obvious advantages for us. Our fee earners benefit from faster turnaround time, while we are able to optimise our internal resources and drive both productivity and staff satisfaction. Moreover, from a client point of view, we can now provide an even more responsive service. It’s a really exciting development, and great news for the business.”

Band Hatton Button is rolling out BigHand across its residential and probate departments.

George added: “BigHand has been great throughout the process. The trainers were able to show all the benefits of the new technology to our fee earners. Their project management was very good. We feel confident that we have an infrastructure now that not only meets our current requirements, but is a future-proof, mobile-first solution.”