Outsourcing helps major regional firm keep costs down

09 March 2006

East Midlands-based law firm Nelsons has outsourced part of its document production to transcription specialist Voicepath as a way of ensuring efficiency while reducing its fixed costs.

Nelsons, who have been acknowledged in ‘The Lawyer’ magazine’s ‘Rising 50’ survey as one of the top 10 fastest growing UK practices for the past 2 years, is based across three offices in Nottingham, Derby and Leicester, all with a full-service offering for both private and commercial clients. It chose Voicepath as its outsourcing partner after considering the concept for some time and monitoring the publicity surrounding firms embarking on similar initiatives.

Chief Executive, Tim Hastings, comments: “While we were interested in the potential cost savings associated with outsourcing, we wanted to find the ‘right’ solution that met our criteria before taking the plunge. We knew that any outsourcing solution we chose would not only need to be fast, accurate and cost-effective, but it also had to be logistically manageable. Voicepath seemed to offer precisely such a service.”

Voicepath coordinates every aspect of the firm’s outsourcing requirements from the export of the dictation file to delivering a finished document that has been proof read and checked independently of the typist. It offers firms fast, secure and accurate transcriptions in either 1 or 24 hour timescales, employing the expertise of a nationwide network of teleworkers, all of whom are experienced legal secretaries.

Nelsons had already invested in an nFlow digital dictation solution, so was well aware of how restructuring its approach to support services could improve firm efficiency significantly. This also eased its adoption of Voicepath’s service, which is fully integrated with nFlow’s digital dictation technology, allowing documents to be sent from and returned to Nelsons workflow system automatically The next step for Nelsons was to see if these improvements could be tied in with cost savings.

Tim continues: “We saw using Voicepath as an ideal way to strike a middle path between efficiency and cost-cutting, allowing us to keep up our current speed of workflow while re-examining how much internal support we need.

“With Voicepath on board, we are now able to review each support staff role that becomes available through natural wastage. We can then decide how much work can be dealt with internally and how much can be sent to Voicepath. Typically, we deal with the more complex and specialised work ourselves and would aim to outsource the rest.”

The Voicepath service is gradually being rolled out across the business, with some interesting results. Tim adds: “We have one partner who used the service as part of restructuring his team. This has led to one of his secretaries now taking on fee earning work and changing her role within the business.”

And as Nelsons use of outsourcing through Voicepath continues, Tim looks forward to a future of continued growth and efficiency for the firm. He concludes: “Not only does this allow us to keep control of our internal efficiency, but it also means we can gradually drive down our fixed costs, which can only be a good thing for our overall profitability ”

Voicepath general manager Richard Bate comments: “We are delighted to be able to help Nelsons to become more efficient and look forward to developing an ever-closer relationship, ensuring our service fits with the firms requirements as it continues to grow.”