The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/1065281
40 Preserve budget, improve productivity After moving "the big stones," legal technolo professionals should also help their firms recognize the full cost of unplanned technolo downtime relative to their many workflow "pebbles." There is no way around it: a reactive approach to technolo implementation can be risky when it comes to budget and productivity. Any time that a staff member spends trying to make technolo work is unproductive time. One often-quoted statistic from analyst firm Gartner puts the cost of network downtime at $5,600 per minute, or well over $300,000 per hour. 3 Furthermore, with the clock ticking, firms seldom have the luxury of what the best long-term solution is when technolo unexpectedly fails. This often results in sinking resources into fixing the current solution, rather than advancing to something more productive. In the intensely competitive legal environment, technolo professionals can guide their firms by offering IT strategies focused on how to do more work in less time. Often, for instance, attorneys reject the use of speech recognition because they assume it requires them to essentially do their own transcription. They are unaware that it's possible to use speech recognition on the back-end, which lets them keep their own preferred workflows and still speed up the transcription process. With these technologies, an attorney's audio files are run through speech recognition software and converted to text before a transcriptionist receives it. That means the transcriptionist gets a first draft of the document already completed — which makes it possible for him or her to listen to the audio file at faster speed and simply make corrections. Nothing changes for the attorney except faster transcription turnaround times and a more productive transcription staff. A plan to drive growth As these scenarios demonstrate, planning a holistic 2019 technolo strate can offer several distinct benefits. For starters, it enables a budget-conscious approach to IT purchases and upgrades. It also opens up new opportunities for law firms to create their ideal workflows, instead of merely supporting existing processes. In so doing, it helps reduce downtime and increase productivity. So, plan for growth. Think long-term. With the proper IT strategies in place, legal firms can turn their technolo investments into a source of productivity and profit. ILTA 1 https://www.computerworld.com/article/3199373/win- dows-pcs/windows-by-the-numbers-windows-10-marches- on-but-pace-may-be-a-problem.html 2 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4057281/ windows-7-support-will-end-on-january-14-2020 3 https://blogs.gartner.com/andrew-lerner/2014/07/16/the- cost-of-downtime/ Reid Wolfe is VP and Director of Sales for North America at Speech Processing Solutions, where he is responsible for revenue growth, investigating new opportunities and business models for Philips voice technology products and solutions. He joined the Philips Dictation team in 2016 to help build their SaaS platform and digital dictation service offering. Prior to joining Speech Processing Solutions, Reid worked for nearly 10 years in telecommunications, network infrastructure cloud-based applications and cyber security. Reid graduated from the University of Georgia with a bachelor's degree in Genetics.