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Digital Dictation: Speech Therapy(Legal Week Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Steel & Shamash is a 20-lawyer firm that specialises in a wide variety of legal advice, from criminal law, legal aid, and mental health to housing and family law. It recently faced the need to upgrade from its tape-based analogue dictation system to digital dictation and also wanted to improve the transcription workflow for secretarial teams and to increase office efficiency. As most of the lawyers work away from the office, often from home or from police stations, the firm also needed dictation files to be transferred remotely in a flexible and reliable way. Practice manager Melissa Butler is responsible for the supervision and management of the firm. Part of her role is to monitor the secretarial team's workflow, which can ebb and flow - especially when large amounts of transcription are involved. "When key staff were taken ill, the number of tapes earmarked for urgent transcription quickly began to build up," she says. "At other times there was not quite enough work to go round and the workload needed to be re-distributed." As well as workflow issues, the company faced an important logistical challenge. Steel & Shamash's office is arranged over four floors, with the secretarial team situated at the top and visiting lawyers on the remaining floors. Because of the need to physically hand over analogue tapes, secretaries had to run up and down the office staircase in pursuit of lawyers, and in the course of a working week tapes containing vital client information were sometimes lost or damaged. The firm knew a digital solution was the way forward, but kept putting the decision off. "If you are a busy legal practice it is easy to keep using the old technology. You know you want to make the workflow more efficient, but day-today problems and the pressing needs of running a business make it easy to put off important technology upgrades," says Butler. New technology Philips dictation and transcription tools have given the firm the ability to monitor workloads much more effectively. The job status indication offered by the 7277 transcription software shows if a dictation is pending, in progress or finished. The practice now churns through more transcription work without increasing the number of secretarial staff. The secretarial team quickly got used to the 7277 transcription software, with its familiar Windows Outlook-style folder view. However, a combination of time-wasting, variable productivity from the secretarial team and missed deadlines was beginning to affect the way Steel & Shamash did business. Disruption is always a fear when changing any business-related technology. Mini-Dicta Machines allayed these concerns by carrying out full product training (dictation and transcription) with both the lawyers and the secretarial team. The training sessions lasted just one day. "The training was quick and efficient. Ease of use was of particular importance - the new technology has similar functionality to the traditional analogue units so everyone got up to speed fairly quickly," Butler says. Steel & Shamash decided to move all authors and secretaries from analogue to digital in one go. Twenty-one Digital Pocket Memos, complete with docking cradles, were dispatched to the authors, while each secretary was equipped with PC-based Philips SpeechExec Pro Transcription Set 7277 software. Butler was particularly interested in the workflow and workload management benefits offered by the SpeechExec Pro software, especially the ability to prioritise documents for transcription in order of preference and the prospect of secretaries being able to see dictation data, such as length, author name and key words. The SpeechExec Pro Transcription Set 7277 software also offered better value for money when compared with rival offerings. Feedback from the authors included praise for the Digital Pocket Memo's 4-Position Switch, enabling them to record dictations using just one hand. Support for exchangeable Multimedia/ SD cards also guarantees efficient data transfer and unlimited voice recording while on the move, meaning no running out of storage space during important client meetings. Steel & Shamash plans to build on the teleworking advantages offered by Philips' digital dictation technology. The Digital Pocket Memos have given the authors the freedom to work when and where it suits them best, so that location is no longer an issue. Dictations are emailed to the secretarial team from home, police stations and courtrooms. "Our lawyers are always on the move so do not often have time to go to the office," says Butler. "In the old analogue days, lawyers had no alternative but to come in to hand over their tapes for transcription. Now they use email instead and the work gets turned around much quicker." The firm's lawyers are not the only beneficiaries of teleworking. The firm is weighing up the possibility of outsourcing transcription secretarial work when cover is required owing to illness or excessive workloads. "In the past we had to employ temps to physically come into the office. Outsourcing the work looks like being quicker and cheaper," concludes Butler. | Jessica Chaplin is market development manager at Philips Speech Processing. 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