Hawkins Family Law Practice - Dragon Legal Anywhere
Headquartered in Milton Keynes, Hawkins Family Law operates four offices and is a Legal 500 listed practice.
Operating exclusively in family law, the practice has a reputation for excellent client service with several solicitors in the team recommended by The Legal 500, Chambers and Partners and Spears.
Hawkins Family Law deployed the Dragon Legal Anywhere (DLA), the cloud-based speech recognition solution from Nuance to improve the practice’s process efficiency, boost productivity, add more value to clients and diversify the role of the secretarial team.
Saving time
Before DLA was implemented, fee earners dictated letters and other documentation into a digital dictation solution which would then be typed by secretaries. Once typed, the documents were returned to fee earners for sign off. Ben Hawkins, Deputy Practice Manager, explains: “We are unusual in the fact that nearly each solicitor has their own legal secretary, so there was historically a lot of liaising between fee earner and secretary to produce documentation. This also meant that there could be some backwards and forwards activity as transcriptions and emails would need to be approved or corrected
Deploying Dragon Legal Anywhere
When Hawkins Family Law deployed Dragon Legal Anywhere, it was deployed as a change in working practice from day one. Comments Ben: “Our overall goal was to deploy DLA as an entirely new method of working within the practice. Therefore, our initial users knew that they would be using DLA and that they would have limited access to a legal secretary for typing.”
Although the whole team is transitioning to speech recognition, the practice initially deployed DLA amongst newly qualified members of the team. Comments Ben: “Our Managing Director has been a strong advocate for deploying speech recognition and we made the decision to filter DLA into the business, primarily, through the newly qualified members of the team. In just 6 months, we have seen how self-sufficient they have become using Dragon Legal Anywhere. We can also clearly see where using DLA delivers real time-saving benefits – for example, drafting file notes from client meetings can be extremely time-consuming for our administrative staff. Dictating a file note using speech recognition saves considerable time and streamlines some of the administrative work associated with family law practice.”
Nuance Management Center
When enabled, Nuance Management Centre (NMC) allows an administrator to manage options such as auto-formatting of text, create custom words, and add commands.
By managing custom words in NMC, the new words are instantly available to all users within the practice.
Nuance Management Centre has enabled Hawkins Law to improve and refine their experience of using Dragon Legal Anywhere.
Since deploying DLA, the practice has held biweekly meetings to gather feedback from the DLA users and to identify if there are any improvements needed. These could be something as simple as adding a word in a particular format, through to creating specific commands.” Typical examples of how NMC has been used to fine-tune DLA include:
- Correcting the spelling of a client name. For example, Philip instead of Phillip.
- Family Law requires the completion of numerous forms, so these have been created as custom phrases so they can be easily referred to in correspondence.
- Custom commands. For example, Hawkins Family Law has created a simple “New letter to client” command to open a new letter for dictation.
Diversifying the role of the secretarial team
Deploying DLA has resulted in an evolution of the Legal Secretary role within the practice. Whereas previously typing would have been a substantial part of their secretarial role, their workload is now predominantly email based with a strong focus on client communication.
Explains Ben:
“The role of the Legal Secretary has become much more client focused since we deployed Dragon Legal Anywhere. Our PAs are essential to maintaining efficient communication and manage all the written documentation dictated by fee earners which is sent to them by email. With DLA, our Legal Secretaries always know if a particular email or letter has been sent out, so they are best placed to respond to client enquiries.”
Maximum return, minimum disruption
Hawkins Family Law services client needs efficiently, with care and empathy. Speech recognition is now supporting the firm to do this as efficiently as possible and is delivering the following benefits:
- Increased billable time as documentation is produced more quickly.
- Secretaries have more time, due to the dramatic decrease in typing, to focus on client care and communication. Secretaries oversee the completion of forms, manage diaries, and assist clients by managing and finalising email correspondence and documents between fee earners and clients.
- Improved value to clients. As all dictated communication is available immediately, clients can see that fee earners are working actively on their behalf.
Comments Ben: “Dragon Legal Anywhere is a fantastic tool that will benefit any law firm. It helps to improve productivity and brings about improvements in your day-to-day working with your clients. However, I would also strongly recommend law firms actively invite and encourage regular feedback from their DLA users as this is how you can continue to implement changes to further speed up administrative tasks.”
About The TalkingPoint Team
The TalkingPoint Team are expert providers of speech recognition solutions and the developer of TalkingPoint workflow solutions for businesses and the public sector. As a trusted Nuance agent, our team is on hand to answer any questions you may have regarding Dragon Legal Anywhere. If you would like to trial DLA free of charge, please contact us on 01908 565663 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
