Leading Cheshire law firm, Poole Alcock LLP, has switched from their previous dictation supplier to BigHand’s voice productivity technology as they continue to streamline business processes, optimise resources and improve efficiency.

Scott Harding, Deputy Managing Partner and IT Partner at Poole Alcock, says: “Before implementing BigHand, each of our offices were working independently - each with their own backlog of dictations to process. This meant that some support units were extremely busy whilst others were left redundant; some dictations were being transcribed in a matter of hours and others took days.”

Since the implementation of BigHand, the firm have embraced the new work distribution process and have recorded a significant increase in efficiency across all offices.

Scott adds: “All dictations are now entered into one centralised backlog, which is highly visible across departments and can be reported on. All support team members work from the same workflow and each dictation is completed in turn. Our fee-earners are confident that their documents will be processed efficiently and our secretaries are feeling the benefits of a more equally distributed workload.”

In addition to BigHand’s core digital dictation services, Poole Alcock are benefiting from BigHand’s speech recognition and mobility applications. Fee-earners can now send documents such as emails, letters and attendance notes via their smartphones or tablets directly to BigHand’s speech recognition server.

Scott adds: "Fee-earners are able to make better use of time that would otherwise be unproductive by using their mobile devices to record, submit and review dictations, which presents opportunities for increased client contact. In addition, BigHand speech recognition means that our secretaries only require a fraction of the time to proof read a document rather than to manually transcribe it. Overall, our administrative processes are considerably slicker than they were and we are delighted with the results.”

The firm’s switch to BigHand followed a comprehensive review of their businesses needs and the solutions available. The key drivers for choosing BigHand’s technology were its ease of use, intuitive nature, robustness and compatibility with the firm’s Windows 7 operating system.

“We feel confident that we have the right technology partner and infrastructure to meet our requirements now and into the future, and are very much looking forward to developing a long-term relationship with the BigHand team,” Scott concludes.