Higgs & Sons Solicitors, a forward thinking legal practice based in the West Midlands shares its experience of rolling out BigHand Speech Recognition technology and explains how, as a result of this, the firm has moved to a more innovative way of working.

With BigHand Speech Recognition, users can turn their voice into text automatically and this can be used to produce lengthy documents such as long email correspondence or file notes, saving the need for manual transcription.

Sarah Murphy, Secretarial Services Manager at Higgs & Sons explains the need for the technology, “We ran a 10 user Speech Recognition pilot of the technology late last year and the feedback from that group was so positive, we knew that there was a firm-wide need for the technology. It’s something that with the right project guidance, we knew would create massive efficiency gains.”

Higgs & Sons rolled out the technology to over 100 users throughout its Waterfront offices in Brierley Hill. Sarah explains how the training and delivery worked, “We had the BigHand training team in for a day each week to deliver the training to each department and carry out floor-walks. This was to really support the staff during the transition.”

Sarah continues, “As a team, we followed up the training by encouraging best practices for the use of BigHand Speech Recognition. This could be anything from an email including hints and tips when using the tool, to just a simple check in to see if there was anything that we could help with. We really are keeping the momentum of the project going in order to both drive the change and keep people using it. This ensures they don’t fall back into old practices. It’s working really well and over 30% of all dictations sent are now transcribed using Speech Recognition. As a result, we’ve had a really good response to the technology and the majority are now using Speech Recognition on a day-to-day basis.”

Sarah continues, “Some departments are even hitting the 50% mark on putting transcription through Speech Recognition. These are the teams which produce the lengthier dictations in the form of email, telephone and attendance notes. It’s these kinds of documents that lend themselves well to Speech Recognition.”

Moving forward, Higgs & Sons Solicitors plan to upgrade its BigHand system to the latest version BigHand 5, and have chosen to install BigHand Workflow Management in the near future.