Who's buying what

The largest government legal team, the Treasury Solicitors Department, has awarded its practice and case management system contract to Solicitec.

The five-year, 2.5 million contract for the implementation of a Visualfiles-based system for around 340 users was awarded following an exhaustive tendering process, which included innovative elements such as exercises that saw both parties working together in a prototype work area.

Lovells has become what is claimed to be the first top-ten firm to implement a workflow digital dictation system after selecting BigHand's TotalSpeech 2 system.

Lovells will initially implement it in the London part of its international property practice.

The team of nearly 150 users will be able to use TotalSpeech 2 for all dictations, currently done using analogue dictation devices, whether fee earners are in or out of the office.

It is envisaged that the system will be rolled out worldwide.

National firm Irwin Mitchell has announced an extended roll out of SRC's WinScribe-based digital dictation system to a further 195 users in the corporate services division in the next two months, doubling the number who use it.

Richard Hodkinson, the firm's IT director, said that in the first month of implementing the system last May in the personal injury department, 12,000 dictations were created and the backlog of documents was cut from seven to two days, with almost no support calls to IT.

City firm Bird & Bird has become the first UK practice to implement Net Results, Solution 6's new reporting and forecasting tool.

The 'On Budget' module of Net Results is being installed this month across the firm's seven offices to facilitate the planning and budgeting process.

The module extracts data from general ledger, time and billing, human resources, and payroll systems, and loads all historical budget information into a data warehouse.

It offers a suite of more than 100 management reports, which are delivered either individually or in a standard report format via the firm's intranet or reporting portal.

Cambridgeshire firm Leeds Day has signed up to AIM Professional Systems' Evolution Client/Server practice and case management package for 60 users.

However, AIM has been ousted by Videss at 11-partner Hull firm Williamsons.

The practice has invested in Legal Office for 85 users, and also chosen the Videss Expert personal injury case management software.