Ridley & Hall, a local Huddersfield law firm with a national presence, have chosen to run a BigHand Speech Recognition pilot project in their head office. The firm have been a BigHand Digital Dictation client since 2011, and have further invested in BigHand’s latest technology to overcome a backlog of legal work whilst making processes more efficient.

Cheryl Ward, Assistant Practice Manager at Ridley & Hall explains how delivering excellent customer service was the key driver behind the technology project, “Ridley & Hall is a forward-thinking firm with a keen eye on future technologies. Keeping up with new and more effective ways of doing things is how we are going to deliver the best service to our clients, which is our main focus and priority. We want to ‘work smarter not harder’ and BigHand Speech Recognition is certainly helping us to do this.”

Ridley & Hall began the pilot group at the end of April and have already cleared their backlog of legal work. Cheryl comments, “BigHand Speech Recognition has enabled us to catch up with overdue attendance notes we had. The first time we used the technology the text came back with a really high accuracy and since then we have been able to push all the remaining work through Speech Recognition without the need for any major amendments. Now the build-up has cleared Fee Earners are focusing on making their voice profiles as accurate as possible so that they can produce a variety of documents such as client letters and email correspondence.”

As a result of the pilot, Ridley & Hall are already experiencing big benefits. Cheryl explains, “There has been a fantastic uptake of the technology so far and BigHand Speech Recognition is being used in a variety of ways across the pilot group. For example, Fee Earners in the Private Client and Litigation Department are sending their Dictations straight to their secretary via Speech Recognition. This means the Secretaries get a fairly accurate first draft of the document before they even begin working on it. However, we have a few ‘self-typers’ too, so they use Speech Recognition by choosing the ‘send back to me’ option, known as the ‘Author workflow’ and they then edit the document themselves, therefore reducing the overall pressure on the secretarial team and enabling them to spend time completing more valuable tasks.”

Moving forward, Cheryl expects there to be a strong case in rolling out this technology firm-wide. Cheryl explains, “The BigHand Speech Recognition pilot has run smoothly and gained a really positive reaction from all those involved. This is the first project I’ve led of this nature, and we’ve received nothing but excellent training and support from BigHand. We look forward to keeping up this level of productivity and customer service working with BigHand in the future.”