Langleys Solicitors is a leading UK based law firm offering a full range of legal services to a portfolio of large national clients.

The firm chose a 168 user, firm-wide Speech Recognition rollout this year to drive efficiencies throughout every one of their departments.

Langleys Solicitors is a leading UK based law firm offering a full range of legal services to a portfolio of large national clients. The firm chose a 168 user, firm-wide Speech Recognition rollout this year to drive efficiencies throughout every one of their departments.

In recent months, the firm started to feel the pressure of a higher workload driven by the increased demand for their legal services. Dawn McGuire, Legal Support Manager for Langleys Solicitors explains, “We could see the demand increasing, which is fantastic for the firm but to maintain the high standard and long-standing relationships we have with our clients, we needed a solution that would help us speed up some lengthy processes.”

BigHand Speech Recognition automatically converts voice into text, so you can create whole documents just by using your voice. The purpose of Speech Recognition technology has always been to enable people to work more efficiently. With BigHand Speech Recognition, busy people can use their voice to increase the amount of work they can process, and can dedicate their time to higher-value tasks as a result. Transcribing a 300 word recording would take a transcriptionist around five minutes whereas it would only take BigHand’s Speech Recognition platform a matter of seconds.

The Fee Earners at Langleys Solicitors picked up the technology quickly and are already using it on a day-to-day basis. Dawn comments, “The Partners have picked up Speech Recognition on their iPhones, which is perfect for them as they spend a lot of time out of the office.

Their confidence with the technology is extremely high.” Dawn continues, “Approximately 350 Speech Recognition dictations are sent through the system per week and since the technology was installed, we have seen every group pick it up and run with it. It is clear, there was a need for this technology.”

Dawn pioneered the BigHand Speech Recognition project at Langleys, closely monitoring the accuracy of each Fee Earner as they trained their voice profile. Dawn explains a key objective for the project, “I think people question how accurate Speech Recognition really is. So as a measure of success, we set a project objective of having everyone hitting over 95% Speech Recognition accuracy by the end of June 2016. We are well on our way to achieving this target. For example, in April 2016 at the Lincoln office, the technology was rolled out to 17 Fee Earners. Six of these Fee Earners achieved accuracy levels of over 95% in week one. One partner even experienced over 99% accuracy on one of his first Speech Recognition dictations. We have some Fee Earners that dictate quickly, some slowly and some with stronger accents than others. The technology just learns how you speak and gets better and better.”

The future scope of BigHand Speech Recognition at Langleys Solicitors is to send more complex documents through to be transcribed like lengthy reports, instructions to counsel and client letters. Dawn expects to hit and surpass the accuracy target by the end of June 2016.