Enabling your legal staff to focus on work that counts

The delivery of services within the UK legal market requires continuous improvements to keep up with increasing client expectations, advances in technology and the need to reduce delivery costs. Firms are looking to improve their fee-earner utilisation and increase working capacity. Technology presents the best solution for devising innovative ways of working, reducing costs and building a trustworthy reputation.

Many firms are yet to revise some of their existing working practices and technologies. These organisations are missing opportunities to sustain and improve profit margins while serving client needs more effectively. One such working practice is the documentation process. Winscribe, a leading document production consultancy firm, has created a consultative process for firms to identify opportunities for improvement.

Winscribe works closely with clients to identify ways of improving resource utilisation, for instance increasing the number of chargeable fee-earning hours and decreasing the number of hours spent on tasks that do not translate to chargeable hours. Winscribe prides itself on the ability to make time for the work that counts for both individual fee earners and organisations that employ them, by combining best-of-breed dedicated dictation devices from Philips with best-in-class software.

Legal professionals need to be able to create and share documentation quickly and effectively. Creating documents represents a significant time investment for fee earners, so although changes to documentation practices can be met with resistance, inevitably economic pressures will trump resistance to change. The future of law firms is dependent on their ability to be flexible and scalable.

There are different technologies or tech mixes that help achieve these objectives. They include the use of speech recognition, mobility, mobile text return, document management system integration and outsourcing. At the forefront of such offerings in many cases stands the requirement for capturing good-quality audio, which is best accomplished through specialist hardware supplied by Philips.

The future of law firms is dependent on their ability to be flexible and scalable
- Vladimir Teodosiev, head of legal and professional sales, Winscribe Europe

The key to real advance though is measuring these improvements with objective statistics. Winscribe business consultants work extensively with clients to define their business objectives and then they build the component elements of the solution which will best suit each individual client.

From here, baselines are created to track key elements which determine success as defined by the organisation. Projects are implemented against key metrics to ensure delivery on those success criteria. While the latest technology and software features are important, in the long run all that matters is enabling clients to be more efficient and cost effective.

The growth of mobile and home working has exploded across all sectors. Legal has been more cautious in its approach, but any firm that does not have a strategy for supporting mobile and home working is falling behind. Winscribe’s mobile offering has received substantial development to accommodate these continuing trends. The software supports all relevant mobile platforms and mobility hardware such as Philips’ SpeechAir.

The ability to work anytime, anywhere can significantly increase the capacity of a firm and is becoming essential to meeting profit-per-equity-partner targets.

Winscribe’s consultative services are tailored to each client and are based on their own strategic road map, vision and core improvement requirements. Free consultations are available throughout England on request.

For more information please visit www.winscribe.com