The voice of technology

Founded in 1989, Legal Services Agency is a charity and law centre with offices in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Greenock and provides advice and representation in all the relevant courts and tribunals in Scotland.
With a team of over 50 staff spread over three offices, LSA required a reliable and concise IT framework to manage and distribute workloads to ensure speedy document processing and quick response times to clients.

Traditionally using a tape-based dictation system to create audio voice files and transcripted documents, the firm developed additional administrative needs for work sharing amongst clerical staff, which rendered the analogue techniques limiting and cumbersome. The dated technique of handing over analogue tapes for secretarial transcription was physically restricting to fee-earners needing to maximise client visits, and additionally inconvenient to the secretarial team who typically received pending work in bulk with little visual indication of dictation profile or priority level.

Similarly, an influx in document processing created an increasing requirement for flexible clerical support; administrative and transcription tasks needed to be shared from site to site in order to process pending items quickly and effectively.

As fee-earners were spending more hours working outside of the office, often at a client’s site, they also needed a method to dictate and process sound files for transcription whilst remote – enabling a steady stream of work both to maximise their own professional output as well as balance transcription tasks back at the office.

Identifying that a more flexible and IT-sophisticated system was required, LSA contacted Voice Technologies, Scotland’s leading digital dictation provider, to recommend a digital solution.
Considering the firm’s requirements for inter-departmental file sharing and remote working, Voice Technologies recommended a bespoke and flexible solution. Legal Services Agency opted for a series of Olympus leading hardware devices, DS7000 portable recorders and DirectRec desktop microphones – all with enhanced recording capacity and optimised sound clarity.

These devices complimented the Olympus Transcription solution for the secretarial team. The AS-7000 provided clerical assistance with descriptive work profiling – transcriptionists saw radical improvements with the solutions job-lists facility, which gives a concise indication of pending work, profile, dictation length, author and urgency, thus enabling the team to prioritise tasks needing quick turnaround.

To maximise work output further, the Legal Services Agency invested in iPhone-enabled applications to allow a fully automated voice-to-processed-document system – Olympus Dictation Delivery Service (ODDS). Its 256MB AES (advanced encryption standard) software allowed authors to dictate in the renowned .dss format on their Smartphones, providing a concise and reliable method of remote working for LSA fee-earners without them having to return to the office network to process client correspondence. This technological breakthrough created a reliable speech-processing tool that could create, edit and process dictations for transcription without the need to dock the device to a PC – enabling a completely remote workflow solution.

Elizabeth Stewart, office manager for LSA comments: “The ability to dictate remotely was much needed to maximise fee-earners' efficiency, but being able to actually process files for transcription whilst still out of the office is a fantastic concept that will become a standard practice for the firm. The adoption level of the new solution is high; those who see it, want it!”