WinScribe Helps Law Firm Spend More Time With Clients

Colin Biggers & Paisley is a Sydney based law firm with a well-established reputation for providing quality legal and commercial guidance through practical and timely service.

The firm prides itself on its close-knit team of loyal professionals and staff whose extensive body of legal knowledge and experience has helped it to achieve impressive growth.

The Challenge - Lowering Maintenance Costs and Minimising Downtime

“When we began looking for a digital dictation solution, our primary objective was to reduce the ongoing maintenance costs associated with our analog tape system”, says Julian McEvoy, IT Manager at Colin Biggers & Paisley. “It was cost equivalent for us to replace the analog units with digital dictation technology but the ongoing maintenance was less.”

What the firm hadn’t counted on was the significant incremental benefits the WinScribe solution would deliver to both its lawyers and secretarial staff.

The Solution - WinScribe

Colin Biggers & Paisley (CBP) has over 170 staff, almost all of which are now using the WinScribe Digital Dictation solution.

“WinScribe was chosen from the three digital dictation solutions we evaluated and was rolled out in stages over a 6 month period”, confirms Julian. “The firm currently has 50 authors on the system and 70 transcription staff”.

CBP averages 180 dictations a day on WinScribe but volumes can fluctuate between 100 and 500 dictations on any one day.

Dictation in the office is carried out using USB handheld devices and around 30 Olympus digital portables for dictation on the move.

Initially it was a challenge to change habits that had formed during the firm’s many years of using analog tapes. “The concept of sending work to pools of typists was foreign to us at first, but now we have 5 transcriptionist groups: one for handling high security documents, a HR group, a general group and two other groups that perform specialist types of work.”

The Results - Better Productivity, Control and Reliability

While implementing the WinScribe Digital Dictation solution achieved the firm’s goal of reducing its maintenance costs, portability has been a big benefit to the organisation.

“Our lawyers spend a lot of time out on clients’ sites”, explains Julian. “The WinScribe solution allows them to dictate from anywhere and not have to return back to the office to drop off a tape for transcription. This is a big time-saver, which means more time spent out in the field working with clients.”

Lawyers have the ability to upload jobs anytime, anywhere and often send jobs from home at all hours of the night, knowing that the job will be typed and ready when they come in the next day. They like having the flexibility to insert additional dictation into an existing job and appreciate the improved voice quality of WinScribe when playing jobs back.

Secretarial staff have also experienced increased productivity using WinScribe as it gives them better information and control. Now they can see exactly how many jobs are waiting to be transcribed and can pick up new jobs at any time. They can also see how long a dictation is and give the author immediate feedback on when their job will be ready.

Colin Biggers & Paisley has a single office location so its transcriptionists are not currently required to access jobs remotely. However the firm considers WinScribe’s remote transcription capabilities to be a potential tool for managing a disaster situation.

Julian conservatively estimates that the firm achieved a 12-month return on its investment in the WinScribe solution. “That’s just taking into consideration the reduction in maintenance costs and the time savings associated with having our lawyers out in the field rather than coming back to the office to drop off tapes.”

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