Dictation has a silver lining

Raeburn Hope is an experienced law firm providing a series of legal requisites including residential and commercial conveyancing, criminal law, wills and estates and family law, as well as a thriving lettings department specialising in the management of residential properties in Helensburgh and surrounding areas.

Customary to law firms and litigation environments, the firm is an established user of dictation-based workflow practices, with a history of audio recording spanning back to the tape-based era. Although the practice was sound and fit for purpose, Raeburn Hope found that more complex clerical requirements and demanding document deadlines rendered the manual nature of analogue cassettes defunct – tapes were visually anonymous, poorly identifiable and unreliable in terms of wear and breakage.

After a breakthrough move to Voice Technologies’ digital dictation, the firm relished the smooth administrative process of electronic document routing and significant audio clarity that results from digitalised recordings. With tangled tapes and accidental erasing a chore of the past, the Helensburgh law firm had a radically improved document production process.

However, client requirements were ever-advancing and expectations of a legal service were at an all-time high. The firm’s fee-earners were finding that they were spending more and more time away from the office – either travelling or at a client’s site. This meant that the traditional LAN-dependent digital dictation automation was a locational challenge: a fee-earner would have no access to the office network when working remotely, sometimes for several days, resulting in a delay in docking the dictating device to the LAN and causing a subsequent suspension of processing the dictated file to the secretary. As remote working was becoming commonplace for staff, Raeburn Hope sought a recommendation from Voice Technologies for a fully working and automated digital dictation system, with the same handling reliability as previously but with added flexibility of remote document processing.

Voice Technologies, the Paisley-based digital dictation and speech recognition developers, recommended a well-established and industry-renowned system for the firm – Olympus Dictation Delivery Service (ODDS) – a cloud-based solution that allowed the firm’s fee-earners to dictate, and crucially, submit files for processing from any location where there was a phone connection.

Combined with the portable autonomy of the Olympus DS-5000 digital recorder – optimised for crystal-clear sound quality – this pioneering solution enabled Raeburn Hope to continue their precise administrative routing procedure and produce speedy typed documents, even when the author was still out of the office. Important dictation features, such as definable work-types and appointed priority levels, were not compromised with the new technology advancements, which integrated seamlessly with its Windows Terminal Services set-up and existing Windows 7 operating system. Additionally, with client confidentiality still a major consideration, the ODDS solution fulfilled the firm’s privacy requirements by offering an uncompromised 256-bit AES encryption, eliminating unauthorised access.

In addition to the innovative remote-working flexibility, other clerical tools and office resources were available to those working from another site: both home-workers and client-based fee-earners could view and amend company electronic diaries, correspondence and office ledgers to allow maximum work efficiency and continued interaction with the office.

Continuing with the technological advancements, Raeburn Hope recently adopted mobile dictation apps, formulated for use within their existing smartphone devices to further quicken their document production process.

“The new cloud-based system is incredibly easy to use for both solicitors and administrative staff and, importantly, we can all have access to it. We now have the flexibility of multi-accessed files to enable easy work prioritisation, and the functionality of the cloud-based setup means that we no longer need to keep our old server on site.” (Alexandra Hope, SLA, Raeburn Hope, Helensburgh)