Ellisons Solicitors has selected BigHand Speech Recognition to drive internal efficiencies and support flexible working for its team.

Ellisons is one of the fastest growing full-service law firms in the East of England, having almost doubled in size over the past four years. The law firm, which has recently merged with Bury St Edmunds-based firm Gross & Co. has expanded its overall team to almost 250 staff across its seven offices.

To accommodate its rapid growth, the firm has undergone a digital transformation project with a focus on providing flexible working for its fee earners. To help fee earners to become more self-sufficient, and to drive internal support efficiencies, the firm selected BigHand Speech Recognition, proving that voice technology remains a vital innovation for the modern law firm.  

Ian Burrell, Director of IT at Ellisons explains, “Previously, our lawyers would use dictation to delegate all types of tasks to the support staff associated with them. This led to backlogs of tasks, especially around peak holiday times, and urgent work would often be lost among the rest of the dictations in a queue. We needed a way to free up our secretarial staff to prioritise high-value work, and for our Fee Earners to become more self-sufficient.”

With BigHand Speech Recognition, fee earners can dictate and transcribe their voice notes on the go, or seamlessly add them into the firm’s digital workflow for support staff to pick up and action.

The firm have so far rolled out the technology to just over half of its fee earning staff and are reaping the benefits. Ian continues, “The time savings have been excellent. With the technology in place, simple documents such as letters and attendance notes – which are often lengthy to manually type up – can now be dictated by the Fee Earners, sent to speech recognition, and the document is returned within minutes. Even better, these dictations can be sent when out and about, from court or from home, so urgent work needn’t be delayed.”

The time savings for the support staff now mean they can focus on billable work that drives revenue for the firm and is more stimulating than repetitive transcription work. 

Ian concludes, “We have been really impressed with the BigHand team, from start to finish they have gone the extra mile to understand our objectives and ensure the project was a success. Having grown exponentially as a firm, it’s reassuring to have reliable and easy-to-use technology in place to underpin our flexible working policy and ensure we continue to deliver first-class client service in the future.”