Forward-thinking commercial and private wealth law firm, Penningtons Manches, today announced their plan to upgrade their Fee-Earners, PA’s and document production personnel to the latest version of BigHand’s Digital Dictation technology, BigHand 5. 

In addition, the firm will be introducing BigHand SmartNote, a tool to automate the production of file and attendance notes.

The firm, which has doubled in size in the last two years, continues to optimise opportunities for both expansion and enhanced efficiency. The key objectives of this latest technology upgrade include improving the way work moves around the firm, optimising their existing resources and uncovering extra pockets of capacity to manage the increasing workload.

James Rushton, IT Director at Penningtons Manches comments: “Our business has changed dramatically in recent years and we are now processing considerably more work. This has highlighted the areas of the business which are working well, as well as those that need improving. In order to support our expected growth, we need to make sure that every aspect of the business is operating in the most efficient way, that our processes are completely streamlined and that we benefit fully from economies of scale. This is why we started looking into new technology options that would help improve our back end processes.”

Once the roll out is complete, Penningtons Manches will be automating the production of their attendance notes with BigHand SmartNote, a tool that transcribes, creates and stores routine documents without the need for human intervention. This will free up hours of PA capacity across the firm, allowing greater client-focus. Users are also being given access to BigHand Workflow Management, a tool that will let them digitise traditionally paper-based tasks, like photocopy requests and travel bookings, and enter them into the same BigHand workflow as their Digital Dictations. Once in the BigHand workflow, tasks can be picked up and processed by the next available resource, and can be tracked through to completion.

Finally, the firm have chosen BigHand Capacity Manger, a real-time dashboard to give them visibility of the number of tasks submitted to each team, the amount of work processed each working day, the amount of outstanding work and a calculation of the effort required to reach their SLAs.

James adds: “BigHand Capacity Manager is going to help us understand how our BigHand Workflow Management tasks and Digital Dictations are moving around the firm so that we can manage our resources more effectively as the workload increases. We’ll have a clear view of the departments working well and those that need further support. With this insight we’ll be able to react quickly, intelligently reallocating work or assigning extra resource where it’s needed.”