Innovative and award winning law firm Eric Robinson Solicitors has nine offices located across Southampton, Basingstoke, Winchester and the New Forest. Established 50 years ago, more recently Eric Robinson has driven major expansion and innovation.
In particular, its fast-growing commercial team now has 250 clients with deals worth in excess of £12m. It provides services to a wide variety of sectors, developing one of the most diverse and exciting client portfolios of any legal firm on the South Coast. The growing firm needed a new case management system offering seamless integration with its existing BigHand Digital Dictation and BigHand Speech Recognition software.
The solution
As Eric Robinson Solicitors had become increasingly digitised, it was clear that a case management system, that was fully integrated with BigHand would allow fee earners to use the pooled resource of secretaries more efficiently. At the same time, Eric Robinson wanted to roll out BigHand Speech Recognition to further enhance efficiencies within the firm.
The firm of solicitors had used BigHand for more than a decade. During the process of sourcing a case management system that would integrate seamlessly with BigHand, it considered a number of suppliers before deciding on Tikit’s Partner for Windows (P4W). Tikit was chosen for their in-house skillset and ability to deliver the level of integration required. Additionally, Tikit’s strong partnership with BigHand was a deciding factor.
BigHand already enabled solicitors and secretaries at Eric Robinson to share files across the different office locations. One of the main aims of the integration of BigHand within Tikit’s P4W case management system was to build on this capability. In the past, references within a BigHand dictation to a particular matter may have been isolated on a single file. The firm wanted to be able to cross-reference matters and share this information across offices, allowing more people to collaborate across the business.
Tikit software developers worked with Eric Robinson Solicitors’ IT team and BigHand to create an integrated solution that would deliver everything Eric Robinson needed. Tikit worked hand-in-hand with the in-house IT team to develop a solution that just worked from within the single P4W application.
Tikit and Eric Robinson’s IT team then identified some power users within the firm who were able to help check that the BigHand integration was working seamlessly with the P4W case management solution. It was important to have the fee earners, who would actually be using the solution day-to-day, iron out any wrinkles, so they received the full benefits of the integration.
Once the solution was up and running with a pilot group, it was then fairly straightforward to roll it out to all the users. Only half an hour’s training is now needed to demonstrate the BigHand dictation features from within the P4W case management system to employees and new recruits.
This was a highly sophisticated integration process. Throughout the process Tikit provided well managed, responsive project management to drive the development of a solution that does everything Eric Robinson wants it to do, whilst increasing efficiencies and document production turnaround times.
The benefits
Eric Robinson have seen a vast improvement in the time it takes to create documents. The BigHand solution ensures effective dictation, speech recognition and mobility for the recording of tasks from any location, this in turn integrates fully with Tikit’s P4W case management system to provide a unified seamless user experience, increasing efficiencies for Solicitors and Secretaries alike.
The multiplier effect of the time savings each fee earner and secretary is making, by not having to switch between multiple applications, alongside the added time savings of automated transcription with BigHand Speech Recognition, is driving massive cost efficiencies at the firm. The time overhead for transcribing and producing documents and sending them out to clients has also reduced.
Running the firm’s activities centrally, from within a single case management system, has brought broader business efficiencies. Within P4W, BigHand allocates consistent filenames to dictation files so that anyone wanting to find documents about a particular matter may do so easily.
As all secretaries can now find and access relevant documents centrally, there is no need to bring in expensive external secretarial resource during times of peak workload or illness. Instead, the firm’s pool of in-house secretaries can pick up work from different fee earners as and when required. It has also become much easier to on-board new staff, as everything they need to access is in one place.
The integrated solution, with the introduction of BigHand Speech Recognition, has meant that some of the more mundane secretarial typing tasks can be automated, leaving secretaries free to concentrate on higher value work and delivering better client services. Without a doubt the P4W/ BigHand integration has brought a far higher level of visibility and efficiency to Eric Robinson Solicitors’ multi-site operations.
For more information about P4W visit https://www.tikit.com/products/mid-sized-law- firms/practice-case-management/
For more information about BigHand visit http://www.bighand.com/
