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Professor Richard Susskind OBE presented the SCL Award 2003 to BigHand for the TotalSpeech digital dictation product. The SCL Award is made annually for "the most outstanding application of information technology to the law in the UK and Ireland."

Andrew Levison, head of UK and Europe consulting services at Baker Robbins & Co, who chaired the judging panel, described the winning entry as “easy to use, easy to deploy and the type of application which, in a difficult climate for lawyers, will really make a difference”. Andrew expects to see digital dictation ever more widely adopted as it saves firms money.

In his address at the presentation, entitled “Clicks & Mortals”, Professor Susskind expounded his view that the future of legal service lies in the combination of "clicks and mortals", i.e. in the appropriate blending of online and traditional human service. This is a view which sits between the polar extremes of those who are evangelical Internet exponents on the one hand and those who debunk all aspects of the new economy on the other. He believes that the biggest challenge is for lawyers honestly to identify those situations in which personalised, human service is genuinely needed and adds relevant value that online service cannot simulate or better. Richard Susskind claimed that, in the future, high-powered human service will still be in demand but routine and repetitive service will be delivered online (in a variety of ways). In practice, he said, much service will be a blend of clicks and mortals.

The SCL Award judges were Paul Berwin, Managing Partner at Berwins Solicitors, Kevin Connell, Director of Information Technology at Masons, Kieran Flatt, Editor of Legal IT, Richard Harrison, a partner at Laytons, and Ian McFiggans, IT Director at Lovells. Andrew Levison commented “Despite this being a tough year for suppliers, there was no shortage of entries, which made the panel's decision extremely hard”.

TotalSpeech has been implemented in a large number of firms, particularly big firms in the City. Essentially it is a digital dictation workflow system. Fee earners record dictations and create passwords to protect them. They can edit and send dictations to a choice of secretaries. The software enables priorities to be attached to various dictations and also fee earners to check the progress of the work. Indeed, it even allows for the use of an in-built speech recognition feature.

Asked what made TotalSpeech different from other dication systems, Dan Speed of BigHand felt that it was the fact that it was the first product to be designed specifically for UK lawyers and their secretaries - based on feedback direct from the sector. He referred to the feedback from implementing firms such as Nabarro Nathanson. They have recently turned a pilot into a firm-wide rollout. Nick Taylor-Delahoy, their Chief Information Officer, stated “The pilot that took place in June 2002 was an overwhelming success. It led immediately to greater secretarial efficiency, a marked increase in work sharing, and a tangible improvement in the turnaround time of documents in the departments involved. In this way the business case for TotalSpeech proved extremely strong. We aim to continue to use TotalSpeech to engineer the flow of work across the firm and impact the process side of document production, thus maximizing the productivity potential of each fee-earner and secretary”.