Peer to Peer Magazine

29 WWW.ILTANET.ORG Now Hear This: Adopting Voice Technology for Firmwide Savings CASE STUDIES The firm updated our recording devices to digital handheld recorders from Philips. Replacing legacy technology can initiate pushback from aorneys, but this risk was mitigated because dictation operation on the digital Philips devices is not demonstrably different from the analog recorders. The most substantial workflow change was that instead of handing a tape to an assistant, aorneys docked the recorders at their laptops and uploaded the files, a process they prefer. Aer that effective upgrade, the firm introduced Dragon speech recognition soware from Nuance. One of our main goals with this implementation was to reduce the amount of time that support staff invested in developing lengthy medical chronologies and independent medical evaluation reports. Aer performing due diligence and consulting with our longstanding voice technology vendor and expert, Ken Kloss with DictationProducts.com, we determined that speech recognition soware had greatly improved in both speed and accuracy in the last several years. Beginning with the medical reports, we quickly determined that the speech recognition reduced document creation time without sacrificing detail or quality. Subsequently, legal assistants and aorneys expanded its use for numerous other types of documents. Integrating Workflows for Flexibility and Transparency With digital dictation and speech recognition implemented, the third — and perhaps most meaningful — phase of document creation workflow advancement was to integrate the associated soware across the firm. This essential step has helped standardize processes while offering greater practice flexibility for aorneys working out of our different offices. To ensure seamless compatibility with existing hardware and soware, including speech recognition, our firm chose the Philips SpeechExec Enterprise dictation management platform. Efficiency was immediately improved since the new platform automatically generates metadata from the dictation files, such as author name, date and time, and dictation file format—a feature unavailable with the previous soware. DAN SINGEL Dan Singel is a shareholder at McCollum Crowley representing clients in Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and North Dakota in construction, personal injury, insurance and other civil matters. Transparency was further enhanced by the ability to label files by client or case, another feature lacking in our previous system. Aorneys can now also prioritize uploaded recordings with an intuitive user interface similar to the Microso Outlook email soware used at the firm. With this improved visibility and integration, legal assistants can view and access each other's dictation files, allowing colleagues and administrators to distribute workloads more efficiently. Lastly, the new platform offered Active Directory integration and concurrent licensing, to eliminate the need to purchase individual licenses for aorneys and legal assistants. Time and Cost Savings Our multiphase voice technology upgrade transition at McCollum Crowley has saved time for aorneys and support staff while improving efficiency in several ways. For example, speech recognition has reduced document creation time in some instances by approximately 50 percent, which benefits our clients with faster document creation turnaround. These savings vary greatly depending on the legal team, but many colleagues have reported time savings greater than 1.5 hours per day, allowing them to focus instead on developing their client roster or generating additional casework. From a cost perspective, our annual maintenance agreement support fees are less than those for our previous system soware. The new dictation and transcription management platform's Active Directory integration and concurrent licensing model allowed us to reduce those associated soware costs as well. Part of being an effective lawyer is understanding your clients' budgetary realities. Clients should expect their lawyer not just to accomplish their goals in litigation but to do so at a price and within a timeline that is fair. That is why professionals in our industry need to continually explore new technology that help firms improve efficiency, not just increase billable hours. As McCollum Crowley has discovered, clients will be more satisfied with faster service. However, the firm can also serve more clients in less time, which increases revenue and strengthens our position in a highly competitive marketplace. P2P

• Cover