Outsourcing helps Legal Aid specialist keep practising

09 November 2005

Leading London legal aid practice, Hereward & Foster, is using Voicepath’s outsourced transcription services to help keep costs down to a level which allow it to continue as a specialist practitioner

As an increasing number of firms close their doors to legal aid business, specialist practices such as Hereward & Foster face the challenge of offering their services to the vulnerable in society on ever tighter margins.

Firm partner Chris Wilson comments: “In an environment where the pay for legal aid work per hour is a quarter of its commercial equivalent, every penny counts. We have to be a lean firm to survive. Being legal aid solicitors means we are not in it for the money, but to help people who would otherwise find it hard to get access to justice. The current climate, however, can make that difficult.”

The firm, which recently dealt with high profile class action on behalf of thousands of unaccompanied child asylum seekers, first considered using outsourcing as a means of controlling its fixed costs in 2004. Chris continues: “We originally outsourced our legal cashier service and found ourselves getting more efficient and saving money in this area.
From here it wasn’t long before the firm investigated outsourcing its time-consuming transcription work. Chris adds: “We recognised that this was an opportunity to increase our efficiency while driving down costs further, though it would mean investing in a digital dictation system.”

This accomplished, the firm turned to UK-based outsourced transcription specialist, Voicepath. It allows fee earners to send a dictation to one of Voicepath’s network of home-based secretaries via a secure internet connection. This is then typed up and returned to the firm by email.

Chris continues: “We chose to use Voicepath for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is a UK-based service which means work is not being sent overseas and we can rely on a good standard of English; secondly, as all Voicepath transcriptionists are experienced legal secretaries, we can rely on the quality of the documents they produce.”

The service is now bedded in and Hereward & Foster is feeling the benefits. Chris adds: “Not only is outsourcing allowing us to keep our costs under control, it is also solving several problems we had as a firm. Tight margins and recruitment problems meant a lot of our fee earners had to do their own word processing, which wasn’t a good use of their time.

“Now however, we can send this work to Voicepath and get on with doing what really matters to us – helping people in need get access to vital legal services.”

Voicepath general manager, Richard Bate, concludes: “It is often assumed that outsourcing is something big firms do when they want to squeeze more profit from existing revenue. What frequently gets missed, however, is how the same principle can be used to benefit small firms for whom every penny counts.

“Legal aid firms squeezed by the current system can, like Hereward & Foster, use these services as a way of saving that vital extra cost that keeps their legal aid operations in business. We are delighted that we can help such a dedicated and ethically minded firm continue their work.”