Irish based international law firm, MacGuill & Company, have partnered with BigHand to enhance their voice productivity performance and drive efficiency across the company. They initially rolled out the BigHand Professional Edition to enable them to benefit from the core digital dictation software and then took advantage of the additional speech recognition and mobility functions.

MacGuill & Company were looking for a robust, feature rich digital dictation solution which could facilitate fee earners to be more efficient in their daily tasks, empowering them to become more productive using their voice and to ultimately get client documents such as emails, letters and file notes turned around quicker.

James MacGuill, partner at MacGuill & Company comments, “We tried other products in the past but they were in no way as efficient or as accurate as BigHand. Speech recognition has made a significant impact to our daily working practices and improved productivity across the firm. The software is extremely user friendly and responsive which meant everyone here was able to adapt to this new way of working really quickly which was great.”

After deciding to progress with the project, James was impressed with how quickly the implementation and training of the software was completed. Their dedicated BigHand account manager had the solution up and running within two working days of the contracts being signed, and the solution was implemented with minimal disruption to daily activities.

The entire firm has embraced speech recognition, with over 77% of all dictations now being sent to the external BigHand server for transcription, rather than having a secretary manually transcribe these documents. The documents are then returned to the author fully transcribed for proofing which has created huge cost and time savings for the firm and resulted in secretaries having additional time perform more value add tasks to enhance their roles and responsibility.

James was impressed with the accuracy of the speech recognition software, and strongly believes it has had a positive impact on driving the efficiency levels of all users across the company. Having personally sent over 91% of his own dictations through to speech recognition, James considers speech recognition to be an essential business tool. BigHand added speech recognition capabilities to their cloud-based product in 2014 after witnessing the success their Enterprise clients were experiencing.

James says: “The productivity benefits of using speech recognition are clear. This investment into the new technology is an exciting development for our firm enabling us to provide a more responsive service to our clients. I use speech recognition for the majority of my transcriptions now and would happily recommend it to anyone looking to improve their efficiency or that of their firm.”

Dan Speed, BigHand Managing Director for Cloud Services commented “We are delighted to see so many of our Professional Edition clients adopting our hosted speech recognition option and taking advantage of the benefits it can offer. Combining cloud-enabled dictation and speech recognition with the ability to work anywhere, anytime using your smartphone can transform law firm operational efficiency - it's a very exciting time”.