McMillan Williams aspire to have more specialist solicitors in more offices on more high streets. Already one of the fastest growing law firms in the country in terms of employee numbers, office locations and services provided, now the time has come to align themselves with flexible, agile technology that can grow with them.

Chief Information Officer, David Fazakerley today talks about his decision to switch to BigHand Speech Recognition and BigHand Go to help ensure the firms’ reputation, as a provider of legal excellence, remains intact and they emerge leaner and more productive following the expansion.

First off was the need for robust technology that had the scalability to cope with growing numbers of staff and offices. The decision was made to switch from their previous Digital Dictation provider. David explains, “We wanted a robust solution, one that was already designed, delivered, tried and tested. I had deployed BigHand Digital Dictation in previous roles and was impressed by it, so in my head there was no-one else to even consider. It comes down to trust, I have trust in the product and trust in the company”.

With 21 offices dotted around London and the South of England, and many more in the pipeline, David is keen to ensure that legal staff moving from branch to branch can pick up where they left off, using the same technology and processes. BigHand Speech Recognition and BigHand Go is key to this. Legal staff can now be productive no matter where they are. They have the ability to Dictate and send tasks to BigHand Speech Recognition workflows using mobile devices, from any location.

“We wanted to be in a position to rapidly expand Fee Earner numbers whilst keeping support staff numbers stable. BigHand Speech Recognition helps us to achieve this. 50% of the work that our support staff currently do is typing up notes. With BigHand Speech Recognition this process can be automated, productivity is increased and the amount of administrative work needing to be processed manually is greatly reduced, this frees up our support staff to assist Fee Earners on other matters”, points out David.

Ben Mills, Managing Director, BigHand UK Legal comments, “We’re delighted to welcome McMillan Williams as a customer. They are a progressive firm with exciting growth plans. The cornerstones of BigHand’s product development is developing intuitive, easy-to-use software which helps our customers do more in less time. BigHand Go and BigHand Speech Recognition will help McMillan Williams do just that”.

Having just completed the changeover to BigHand in March, McMillan Williams are already seeing the benefits. David concludes, “The transition was seamless, our staff are already noticing improvements in the auto-upload speed of multiple Dictations and much higher voice quality, our support calls have been minimal. It just works and our staff love the simple interface”. Evidence suggests that many consumers want a local, approachable legal service with robust up-to-date technology and delivery methods. With that in mind, McMillan Williams is a firm poised and positioned for high-street success.