MOBILE DICTATION INCREASES
EFFICIENCIES
by Donna Ezell of Butler, Snow, O'Mara,
Stevens & Cannada, PLLC
In early 2006, our firm restructured the support
provided to our attorneys by deploying secretarial
teams. The major goal of the teams was to provide
an enhanced level of support to the attorneys and
thus the clients; however, a secondary benefit
realized was increased efficiencies reflected in
our attorney-to-secretary ratios. Building on the
efficiencies realized from creating the secretarial
teams, in 2009, we introduced Team Central, a
model under which our Level 1 through Level 4
associates, as well as other employed attorneys
with little client interaction, would be supported by
a team of highly qualified secretaries at ratios as
great as 14:1 in some instances.
Mobile
Dictation
Increases
Efficiencies
Through this restructuring, we also identified a
significant inefficiency in our process: the amount
of time a secretary spent transcribing dictation
and revising the documents before presenting a
finished product. We were searching for ways to
leverage the expertise of the secretaries in a more
valuable supporting role to attorneys and clients.
After polling secretarial staff, we discovered several
were spending 15 to 25 hours per week transcribing
dictation. We researched various resources that
would enable us to reduce the time spent in
manual transcription in order to meet our goal and
