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01 January 2002
If you are trying to find ways to improve efficiency, productivity and profitability and to increase your ratio of fee earners to staff, a fundamental area to consider is dictation workflow and its subsequent document production.
Firms use various methods to transfer dictation from fee earner to secretary. Although some have tried digital dictation and speech recognition the majority of firms' fee earners still dictate onto tapes, which have to be moved around the office with the relevant files. This may decrease the productivity of both fee earners and secretaries and can have a knock-on effect on revenue: for example, when work is urgent and secretaries need to search through a tape to find the relevant dictation, or if backlogs pile up because work can't be turned round quickly enough and too many files are open at once. These problems are augmented if staff are unreliable and don't turn up to work.
As with any IT investment, it's easy to assume profitability will automatically increase once digital dictation is introduced. But how do you know? Has it changed your staffing ratios? Has it cleared your backlogs? Has it improved your fee earners' and support staff's productivity and efficiency? Has it affected your revenue? I'm sure that you can answer yes to at least one of these criteria but can you answer yes to all of them? If not, would you like to?
Voicepath has been working with a top 100 law firm for the past 18 months, developing a fully integrated remote dictation and transcription facility using the internet and dedicated lines to transfer dictated audio files and return transcribed documents. Every single digitally recorded piece of dictation - well over 100,000 so far - is now transferred via Voicepath's data centre for transcription by either an internal secretary or one of Voicepath's teleworkers. Each time a fee earner dictates he can choose whether his secretary or a Voicepath remote worker will transcribe. This is extremely flexible.
The service was rolled out to all departments, fee earners and secretaries over 12 months. The gradual rollout was a deliberate strategy to help ease in the change, as was the task of liaising to a senior administrator. What made the relationship work so well was that the firm understands the need to make a strategic commitment to the service to yield the greatest benefits.
The immediate objective was to reduce in-house typing. This has been achieved now that Voicepath transcribes approximately 60 per cent of all dictations. In addition backlogs have cleared as more work is turned round on an immediate response basis, stress has reduced, productivity and efficiency have improved, new clients have come on and the ratio of fee earners to support staff has increased. I would stress that no one has been made redundant, but when a secretary leaves there is no need to employ a new one and a fee earner can be employed instead.
Being integrated allows individuals to gain access to detailed information relating to the status of work in progress. For example, by determining the number of dictations per day and per user one can determine future trends in workflow types and usage. One can then identify areas of work that may need to be changed or improved.
Voicepath is providing a service, not the resale of software and hardware. It offers firms the means to take advantage of a specialised and extensive technical infrastructure and technical knowledge as well as our highly trained remote transcribers.
Author: Joanne Linfoot Source: In Brief Monthly, December 2001
