No option for Law Firm

On Thursday myself and a couple of colleagues attended a breakfast briefing from BigHand at Gordons law firm in Leeds, accompanied by plenty of bacon butties from the Roast! It was one of a number of briefings that they are doing throughout the UK on the back of their recent acquisition of nFlow.

As well realising that it’s not just Herbies that have hot meeting rooms, there was information on the nFlow acquisition. But for the most part we were shown demos of some of the new features being planned for future versions of the BigHand software (I think most were for v3.4). Below are some of the key functions that stood out for me (I was making notes on my touch screen Windows Phone whilst trying to keep up with the demos, so if you’re interested in a specific feature I’d double check my understanding with BigHand!)

• MS Office Integration. This allows a document to be attached to the dictation and passed through the workflow. Also there is the the ability to create and manage profile information to go with the dictation. These combined allow the Fee Earner to provide information to the secretary on the dictation that the system can then use to, for example, launch a template and fill in details such as document name straight from the dictation in the queue.
• Then combine this with the SDK and you could enable integration into the DMS (Document Management System) to transmit the document in the dictation workflow, yet maintain the security and version control of the DMS.
• Escalation function. The ability to set global rules in the system to escalate work. So for example a folder could be given a rule that after a certain time all outstanding dictations are moved to another folder (e.g. out of hours team or the team in the firms Asian offices for example).
• Reporting has been bolstered by the addition of an analytics module. This stores more information than before in the database (no longer limited to last 30 days) and has improved reporting (no longer using Excel). The module allows you to drill down on results obtaining more detail.
• In the mobility clients for BlackBerry and iPhone you now have the ability to attach documents and photos to dictations. Taking the devices further into general workflow than just pure dictation (e.g. you could dictate meeting notes that referred to notes on a whiteboard that you’d photographed on the phones camera)
• Finally the speech recognition module. This was brought in with v3.3 but it’s worth a mention again as it still impresses me. It’s way beyond the old desktop versions, but the addition in the newer version is the ability to chose to either send the transcribed document back to yourself for proofing or send it onto your default workflow for proofing. So the “training” can be done by a secretary checking and correcting your document.

The briefings are still being run, details can be found on their site.

Some recent experiences got me thinking about dictation and whether it was either a dying art or whether it was a crucial technology to help firms beat costs? First the list the things that gave thought to the fact that dictation is dying out:

• Comments from lawyers on the differences in the generations. This was actually a discussion on the quality of the dictations, in that the younger lawyers were “embarrassed about their own voices” and dictated more quietly. This made me think that this behaviour may be leading to the next generation of lawyers actually being happier typing up the draft themselves rather than dictating it.
• Also there does seem to be a number of lawyers now that don’t dictate at all. Again is it easier for them to type up drafts themselves?

But then with digital dictation, especially when the system allows for workflow, I thought there would be a number of added benefits:

• Devices can be used more effectively for just relaying instructions in addition to dictating documents. Using tools like BlackBerry clients or standard phone lines to route these instructions quickly to secretaries makes this much easier. 
• Workflow systems generally can make more efficient use of secretaries and document production units, this can be used to smooth peaks and troughs across secretaries (in some cases I guess it can also facilitate use of external companies, as I presume Eversheds recent deal will utilise such technology).

So will dictation die out or take off?

Well I think analogue dictation will die, the days of the tape surely are numbered! But I don’t think digital dictation will die out. Sure there may be some lawyers who can type up short documents as fast as they could dictate them, but for others and for all but the short documents dictation will be faster.

Also with the added benefits workflow brings it will still be beneficial. Given that, in this year especially, the lawyer-to-secretary staffing ratio has increased, the ability to spread the load using workflow will be a big benefit once the growth returns.

The panacea and key technology to secure the future of dictation is of course speech recognition, as it has been ever since I moved into Legal IT. But this is still a long way off in my opinion!

This article over on “The Greatest American Lawyer” that I found after writing this blog post has a good bullet point list of advantages of digital dictation and is worth a read.