Forward-thinking Cleaver Fulton Rankin is one of Northern Ireland’s leading corporate law firms combining over 100 years of heritage with an innovative approach. With a total staff of over 100 people, Cleaver Fulton Rankin are committed to client service and providing high quality legal advice.

With this in mind, Cleaver Fulton Rankin introduced BigHand Digital Dictation and BigHand Speech Recognition in April 2016. Prior to digital dictation, like many other firms of this size, they used audio tapes and portable dictation devices.

Paul Rickerby, IT Manager at Cleaver Fulton Rankin, says: “We were looking for a way to introduce efficiencies into the firm. The most obvious place to start was to make the switch from analogue tapes to digital dictation. We had a number of drivers for this, mobility being one of them. Whether it is working from home or just out of the office on business, our lawyers needed to be able to dictate from their phone and get work to their secretary regardless of location.

"Another driver was the need to be able to allocate and prioritise dictations sent to the secretarial team, and to be able to see the progress of these dictations at any given time. BigHand Digital Dictation with Mobility makes all of this possible.”

The introduction of BigHand Mobility means that lawyers no longer have to “dock” their dictation device and download the audio file to send to their Secretary. All they need to do now is click “record” on their iPhone and begin speaking. The dictation is immediately sent to their secretary who can then work on the transcription before the lawyer returns to the office. If the secretary is too busy then the dictation can be delegated to another secretary in the group for processing. All of this is achieved through standard workflow processes that allows the lawyer or secretary to decide how best to manage workloads. This greatly improves the turnaround time for dictations to be typed up.

Cleaver Fulton Rankin have been using BigHand Digital Dictation and BigHand Speech Recognition for eight months now and feedback from users has been really positive. Rickerby says: “Once the BigHand technology was put in front of our staff, they immediately saw the benefits and how easy it is to use. The training received from the BigHand Training team was exceptional, and meant that we were up and running very quickly”.

“Eight months in and BigHand technology has revolutionised the way in which both our lawyers and support teams manage their workload. Everything runs a lot smoother. The turnaround time for dictations to be transcribed has greatly reduced. BigHand Speech Recognition means there is less time spent on transcribing and more time can be spent on other support tasks. We have already seen cost-saving benefits, in not having to recruit to back-fill some Secretarial roles.”

Next up for Cleaver Fulton Rankin in 2017 is the roll-out of BigHand’s task delegation software, BigHand Workflow Management. This will bring huge time-saving efficiencies to the delegation and completion of tasks such as archiving, room booking, amendments to room bookings and photocopying requests.