Don’t stereotype your support staff
Monday 25 January 2010 by Masked IT Man
Tube journeys in London are a wonderfully varied experience. One minute you are chatting to a friendly tourist about where Harrods is, the next you are wondering if the enormous person who has parked themselves next to you has bought two tickets, to cater for the fact that they are taking most of your seat space, along with their own. When I am not wrestling with those variables, I like to see what gadgets people are using. Yesterday a shabby-looking chap whisked out a strange device – a laptop keyboard with a tiny monochrome screen. Turns out it was a portable typewriter, and in the time it took to travel about eight stops, he had written a huge chunk of material.
It struck me that sometimes simple really does work best. Not only was the device much quicker to use than a laptop, the absence of a foldout screen made it more rugged and more portable. Perfect if you have an idea for a blog or report and want to type instantly.
Typing, of course, is a large variable in any law firm. Even with the advent of better dictation and transcription technology, as well as automated routines and document systems that have enabled them to produce typed output much more quickly, law firms still employ vast numbers of secretarial staff. I am not sure what percentage of a secretary’s time is taken up with typing, but it must amount to a substantial sum once you multiply it by the number of them in an organisation.
Digital dictation was really spawned by speech recognition. Or to put it another way, speech recognition back in the late 1990s was appalling, so some bright spark decided that using the bits from it to make dictation more streamlined was the answer. Nowadays most law firms use this technology. As the market gets more saturated, the vendors look to other avenues for additional revenue, and – lo and behold – the spectre of speech recognition has made a return. Digital dictation software can now be linked to speech recognition engines. This means that the person dictating can send the output to a speech recognition engine rather than a secretary, thus reducing the time taken to type. The neat bit of these set-ups is that the secretary can then review and correct the output. The corrections get relayed to the speech recognition engine, which means it will be more accurate for the user next time round.
Other than the cost of installation, I can’t think of a downside to this approach. Most secretaries I speak to think they have too much to do, so moving their role slightly from typist to reviewer not only eases the burden, but also allows them to concentrate on more important elements of their work. Some may argue that it is a step down the slippery slope to the removal of secretaries altogether, but I don’t see that. Most, if not all, legal people need administrative support, and the current atmosphere of cost reduction should point firms in the direction of making better use of their support staff. Surely reviewing work is quicker than typing it, as well as being more interesting.
There are of course other benefits. Travelling lawyers can get material transcribed any time of the day or night, and those fee-earners who do prefer to produce their own output get to produce documents faster.
If there are efficiency gains to be made in terms of secretarial staffing, I would expect the natural attrition rates for these posts to allow this to happen seamlessly. A switched on HR department should be able to provide data on this. What’s not to like?
Comments
This is true in theory but
This is true in theory but not there in practice yet!! We have a number of law firms who outsource their transcription to us and some of them have tried speech recognition software and have returned to outsourcing to provide them with their document production.
One of the main challenges is the training of the system and having to remember all of the short-cut keys for unusual characters, e.g. speech marks. I was with a client yesterday who is trialing this and he said that 'it is like having to remember all of the codes when we started using Microsoft Word back in the 90s'. He said it was fine for file notes, but not for sending completed documents out to clients. However, the Managing Partner of one of our other clients exclusively uses speech recognition software whilst his other fee earners outsource their transcription to us - so it proves that it can work if you persevere with it....but how many fee earners have the time to do this?
What our clients have done by outsourcing is move their secretaries into managers so they control the work as opposed to churn it out.
Speech recognition software will be the future but I am not sure when...
An interesting initial piece
An interesting initial piece by the Masked IT Man and an equally interesting follow-up comment.
During the last 10 years, we have been implementing speech recognition projects. Additionally, we also implement digital dictation software. Many of our clients then use outsourcing as well. I feel the overriding factor is, as has already been suggested, individual choice and preference.
As we witnessed at most pilots, the training for speech recognition always used to irritate. Nobody was able to persevere except the few exceptions. But, as the Masked IT Man points out, training is eradicated by integrating the server-based engine with digital dictation. Lifting away that upfront training is the key to making it accessible to all.
An issue with client side speech is, as mentioned above, the rich functionality resulting in a need for lots of training. Classically, that means it also only suits the minority of users. Knowing how to make it available to the majority is now the real difference.
BigHand is offering firms (clients or prospective clients) the chance to try it. Unless it works for you, for your documents and for your voice then you probably will not believe its potential. Reading some of your actual documents into a new voice file, with no training will tell you whether it’s for you.
Nearly all of the 14 fee earners at a recent client visit got over 95% accurate from their second dictation, and of those 4 got over 98% - in just 15minutes – maybe we’re already at that future?!
Speech recognition will
Speech recognition will undoubtedly replace the transcriptionist at some piont in the future. Clever use of templates and macros will enable formatting to be easier and quicker. I'm certain that there are not many firms who recruit for the role of "audio typist"; the secretary's role has developed into a professional PA and unqualified fee earner. As speech recognition develops it will be far more cost effective to use than outsourcing to subcontractors.
However, we still hold our specialist document production techniques and various house styles close to our heart and it's in this area that speech recognition won't fit the bill. Advanced word processing, complex layouts of documents and rigid corporate house styles will be no easy task to compute with voice recognition.
New technology should be ignored at one's peril. If skills are not kept updated and refreshed, very soon will one can become redundant. This fact alone should keep a workforce motivated to keep ahead of the competition, whether that is from outsourcing companies or technology.
Speech recognition software
It simply amazes me that so few solicitors actually use speech recognition software. Those who were interested seemed to dip their toe in the waters years ago before computer processing speeds caught up with the technology. The software costs just £100 and a good microphone about £175. Add in a little professional training and some serious management support if you want to spread it throughout your firm and you have an instant answer to shaving serious money off the staff budget. Why are so few solicitors using it? [Needless to say this was dictated using speech recognition software]
Speech Recognition
Speech recognition technology has indeed come a long way in the last 10 years! Whilst claims for recognition rates may have been over-egged in the early days, in SRC's experience the latest versions really do delivery recognition accuracies of 99%.
However, one approach does not fit all and whilst using speech recognition in the background to produce drafts for secretaries to correct (server-based or "background" speech recognition) may fit some situations, there will be others where the author would prefer to see the text appearing as he/she dictates - either to aid in their thought process or to correct and complete a piece of work and move on to the next task in hand - and therefore "foreground" or client speech recognition certainly also has its place in a modern law firm. Take for example our deployment at Hugh James, where the SRC client based speech recognition solution is enabling fee-earners to complete tasks that previously took a day and half within a couple of hours.
What is important is not to get too hung up on whether client or server side is best but to have the complete range of options (foreground / background speech recognition, digital dictation and outsourcing) available within a single solution so that it can optimally meet the precise requirements of each individual user.
With a properly designed system the training requirements are identical whether server or client technology is employed - and we can confirm such systems require minimal user input and the system should "self learn" as documents are dictated and subsequently correct by either the author or the secretary. The real differences result from how the system is deployed and setup. For example as Jon Howells, IT Director at Hugh James said: “The background work and training SRC provided has been invaluable and really made the difference between the success and failure of the project. In as little as a 2 hour training session all scepticism had been alleviated and users were maximising productivity and achieving near perfect accuracy levels, even for Welsh place names and words that we’d expected to be problematic.”
With major top 100 law firms now deploying speech recognition the technology may be coming of age at last!