TotalSpeech digital system dictates SCL award

OUTSTANDING APPLICATION: Susskind warns lawyers to identify the personal touch missing from automated services

Digital dictation product TotalSpeech this week won the Society for Computers and Law's (SCL) annual award for the most outstanding application of information technology to the law in the UK and Ireland.

BigHand's TotalSpeech software allows a fee-earner to use a PC-connected microphone to dictate directly onto a sound file that can be instantaneously picked up and re-typed by a secretary - irrespective of location.

Users include City firms Lovells, Ashurst Morris Crisp, Nabarro Nathanson and SJ Berwin.

A survey of the top 100 firms last year named TotalSpeech as the most popular digital dictation system.

Andrew Levison, head of UK and Europe consulting services at Baker Robbins & Co - who chaired the judging panel - described the winning entry as 'easy to use, easy to deploy and the type of application which, in a difficult climate for lawyers, will really make a difference'.

The award was presented by legal IT guru Professor Richard Susskind, who later reflected on the past 15 years of technological development.

He told the ceremony that there is a fundamental distinction between the generation brought up with the Internet, and that which witnessed its development.

He said it almost beggared belief that businessmen in 1989 worked without mobile telephones, e-mail, the Internet, home computers and laptops.

Comparing the dot-com frenzy to a land grab or a gold rush, he asked: 'Which person did not feel in the middle of that frenzy that their fortune might be made through some application of the Internet?'

But he said the Internet was a stage along the technological revolution that started during the Second World War and which might - like the Industrial Revolution - last three generations.

He said a middle ground was emerging between the evangelical Internet exponents, on the one hand, and those who debunk all aspects of the new economy, on the other.

This middle ground would consist of a combination of technology and human contact.

The biggest challenge for lawyers, he warned, is 'honestly to identify those situations in which personalised, human service is genuinely needed and adds relevant value that on-line service cannot simulate or better'.

He also predicted that the biggest areas of technological advance in the next few years would involve e-learning and on-line communities.

Also on the shortlist for the award were: ARTL (Automated Registration of Title to Land) from the Registers of Scotland executive agency; easyconvey.com's electronic conveyancing solution, and Visualfiles, a case management system from Solicitec (see [2003] Gazette, 9 January, 7).

The judges included Paul Berwin, managing partner of Yorkshire firm Berwins, Kevin Connell, director of IT at City firm Masons, Richard Harrison, a partner at Laytons, and Ian McFiggans, IT director at Lovells.

Jeremy Fleming