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Dragon Legal Anywhere drives productivity for Family Law Practice
Hawkins Family Law, a Legal 500 listed practice headquartered in Milton Keynes, has deployed Dragon Legal Anywhere (DLA), the cloud-based speech recognition solution from Nuance.
Aiming to improve process efficiency, boost productivity, add more value to clients and diversify the role of the secretarial team, Dragon Legal Anywhere has been deployed by Hawkins Family Law practice to replace digital dictation and time-consuming transcription.
Ben Hawkins, Deputy Practice Manager and Dragon project lead for Hawkins Family Law, explains: “Before DLA was implemented, fee earners dictated documentation for typing by secretaries. With transcription, there could be some backwards and forwards activity as transcriptions and emails would need to be approved or corrected. At any one time, we could have up to three hours of dictation awaiting typing. Our overall goal was to deploy DLA as an entirely new method of working within the practice so our initial users knew that they would be using DLA and that they would not have access to a personal assistant for typing.”
Although the whole team is transitioning to speech recognition, the practice initially deployed DLA predominantly 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 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.”
As the operational lead for the Dragon deployment, Ben is using the Nuance Management Centre (NMC) tool to improve and refine Dragon Legal Anywhere. Typical examples of how NMC can 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 form names can be created as custom phrases to dictate, such as “Form E”.
- Custom commands. For example, Hawkins Family Law has created a simple “New letter to client” command to open a new letter for dictation.
The practice reports that deploying DLA has resulted in increased productivity, increased billable hours, and improved value for clients.
Comments Ben: “DLA is a fantastic tool that will benefit any law firm. It helps to improve productivity and will also bring about improvements in day-to-day working with clients. To maximise efficiencies, it is important to encourage regular feedback from your DLA users as this is how you can implement changes using Nuance Management Center to further speed up administrative tasks."
DLA was supplied by The TalkingPoint Team, developers of expert workflow solutions and a trusted Nuance agent. As for many of TalkingPoint’s users, the support and advice provided by the TalkingPoint team in the early stages of using DLA was essential to ensuring Hawkins Family Law achieved the maximum return on investment and increase in productivity.
Reflecting on their experience working with the TalkingPoint team, Ben added: “All the communication I have had with TalkingPoint has been excellent. Our account manager has been fantastic throughout the whole deployment process, and they’ve always been at the end of the telephone to resolve my queries. This has been particularly helpful to me as I have been taking the lead on deploying DLA in our firm.”
Click here to read the full Hawkins Law DLA case study.
To learn more about Dragon Legal Anywhere or to arrange a free trial, please contact us on (0)1908 565663 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
