By Legal Futures’ Associate SpeechWrite
Salehs are a growing law firm based in Manchester, offering legal support for businesses and consumers alike. The firm has recently grown through the successful acquisition of Solis Law and the sustained growth of other departments, notably Commercial Property and Commercial Finance.
Salehs also specialise in Real Estate and Residential Property with a combined team of 27 fee earners and 15 staff in the admin support team.
The Challenge
Salehs were using an outdated analogue system to dictate and transcribe their legal documents. The disadvantages of using analogue tapes and long transcription were being felt across the firm and were causing many issues for both the fee earners and the admin support team.
The fee earners had to physically hand over tapes to be transcribed to the office adding long delays to the documentation process and making remote working very difficult.
On the transcription side, the admin team found transcriptions difficult due to the rewinding and forwarding of the tapes for error rectification as well as the tapes often being wiped before errors were spotted. Scheduling for transcribers across the team was challenging as the team couldn’t tell at a glance how long the tapes were as there was no way of knowing how long a transcription would take without listening to it.
Staff availability remained the number one issue for the firm as when transcribers were off productivity significantly reduced. Salehs knew that converting to digital would allow the firm to overcome all the issues they were experiencing and have the new ability to outsource transcription work when in-house admin resource was limited.
The Solution
SpeechWrite was recommended to Salehs by another local law firm benefiting from their dictation solutions. After seeing a demo of the flexible digital solution and quickly understanding the benefits for the firm it was an easy decision for Salehs to adopt the new way of working.
Saleh’s key criteria for the new flexible digital solution included increased productivity, reduced staff count and an increase in profitability. Salehs chose the SpeechWrite Enterprise Solution which was designed to run in a specialist VDI IT environment.
SpeechWrite Enterprise, is a workflow digital dictation system developed specifically for corporate environments. The platform incorporates the individual operation requirements of the fee earners, the processing needs of the clerical team and the system demands of the firm’s IT administrator. To assist swift forwarding, the channelling feature routes dictated files automatically to the most appropriate secretarial team, whether that be in house or to the outsourced team.
This destination is assigned according to which secretary has the administrative capacity to provide a transcription service most efficiently, regardless of the location. Any routing decision considers all organisational elements, such as staff availability during holiday periods and sickness leave.
SpeechWrite supported Salehs throughout the whole journey from software deployment, training, installation, and ongoing technical support.
“The specialist knowledge of the SpeechWrite staff impressed the team from the start. The deployment was seamless from start to finish and the SpeechWrite solution has completely
re-modelled the way we work.”
“The SpeechWrite solution has made Salehs more efficient, flexible and ultimately more profitable.”
– Alan Hawkes (Practice Manager)
