Legal Case Study - Turner Freeman
Turner Freeman, a leading Australian law firm specialising in litigation and commercial
matters with offices in Sydney, Parramatta, Brisbane, Wollongong, Adelaide, Newcastle
and Cairns, faces a very common problem. The increasing demand for legal advice requires
more and more lawyers but firms try to maintain organisational costs.
From backlog to free time
“It was a waste of time and capabilities to have highly specialized legal secretaries
spending most of their time transcribing documents rather than having the time to support
the lawyers”, says Chris Dawson, representing the Management of Turner Freeman.
“More and more documents were waiting for transcription but with the existing number of
support staff the backlog could not be reduced.” Therefore, the management was looking
for ways to improve the document creation process, while at the same time increase the
level of qualified tasks for the specialised secretaries.
The Challenges
- Improve back-office management
- Optimize workflow without forcing people to change the way they work
- Speeding up the turn-around time of legal documents
- Increase time for secretaries to carry out direct legal support of lawyers
The Result
- Same number of staff can cope with more work
- Easy to use system, in line with current working habits
- Reduction in waiting times
- Secretaries are relieved from typing and take over other projectsImprove back-office management
Flexibility to work all over the continent
Everybody at Turner Freeman is highly satisfied with the improvements in productivity
and the overall efficiency gains. Linda Davino, secretary at Turner Freeman, says:
“I used to do the transcription for one, sometimes two lawyers and was fully
occupied with this task. Today I can handle the dictations for three authors and still
take on other jobs.” She continues: “Some of our lawyers achieve recognition rates of
99 percent, in these cases the correction only takes seconds. It is really brilliant!”
For the near future, the firm plans to equip all the other offices with
SpeechMagic and network all locations,
so lawyers who switch between offices can use speech recognition wherever
they are. “Many of our lawyers have to work from different
locations, depending on where a case is handled. We want to give them the opportunity
to save time and improve their document creation. SpeechMagic
allows for these networked solutions and judging from our experiences with this software,
the implementation will be quite easy”, concludes Chris Dawson.