Lawrence Graham LLP is a leading UK law firm. With over 60 partners and 200 lawyers, we offer clients legal and business solutions based on practical, commercial advice. LG’s clients operate in a variety of business sectors, most notably in real estate, public sector, hospitality and leisure, banking and financial services.

LG introduced digital dictation in February 2005. Prior to digital dictation, like most other firms, we used audio tapes and portable dictation devices to support the lawyers with each secretary having a tape player to listen to the recordings. This presented numerous issues, especially when a lawyer was using several tapes to manage their workload.

Mobility has always been a requirement for a lawyer. Whether he is working from home or just out of the office on business the lawyer always wants to be in contact with his secretary. Even back in the days of using tape, a lawyer was still able to use a mobile dictation device to record dictations. One of the key challenges faced when using tape was the need to return the tape to the office to have the secretary transcribe the dictation. I can recall many times during my career where lawyers have requested couriers to pick up tapes and wait for their secretary to type the document before returning the finished article to them. Not only was this a costly process, but a time consuming one as well!

The advancement of “flash” technologies back in the 80s led to the development of devices that could store audio and data on media other than tape. Mobility had improved during this period as it was possible for lawyers to use the telephone to dial into a recording device and leave dictations for their secretaries, albeit on a centralised system. Flash technology found its way into the dictation world during the 90s when PC-based digital dictation started to materialise.

Digital dictation

At LG we started to use digital dictation in 2005 with the introduction of Bighand. Bighand was chosen ultimately by the users as they preferred the look and feel of the product. We were fairly late adopters considering that back then a lot of firms had already made the transition to digital dictation. With the introduction of Bighand came both the USB handheld recorders and the digital mobile devices that relied upon memory cards for storage.

Digital dictation revolutionised the way in which a lawyer could manage his workload. No longer was there a need to manage tapes. There were still a number of limitations when working remotely as the need to transfer the dictation to the secretary meant that the lawyer had to be logged into the office remotely to send the file to the secretary. Even with this limitation, however, the turnaround time for dictations to be transcribed was greatly reduced.

Only a few years earlier a little known company called RIM released a device called the Blackberry. This totally changed the way a lawyer operated as it offered true mobility in terms of email. Of course, prior to the Blackberry there had been numerous devices that tried to address the issue of mobility. There was the first of its kind, Apple’s Newton PDA, which was followed by the likes of Psion, Palm, Nokia and HP. All of these devices allowed you to synchronise information from a PC or Mac and carry the information with you, but none of them offered seamless wireless connectivity to corporate email in the same way that the Blackberry did.

Due to the heavy dependency on email as a method to communicate and exchange documents with clients, the Blackberry became an extremely important tool for the majority of firms. At the beginning of 2007 I began to develop a strategy around the concept of the mobile office. This “concept” was not new, as many firms, including LG, provide their lawyers with laptops that are extremely capable and provide the lawyer with all of the functionality they have within the office. The strategy I wanted to develop was to remove the reliance on the laptop as the only method of true mobility. With this we started to introduce a number of different applications that were designed to mimic the laptop and allow the lawyer to access information or communicate with clients using the Blackberry. To this end we identified a number of key applications that we wanted the lawyers to have access to. Currently, the lawyers have access to the following applications:

• Dell Message One – email business continuity
• Autonomy iManage Worksite Mobility for accessing their Filesite documents
• IntApp Time Builder – time capture software
• Bighand Mobility – digital dictation
• DTE Axiom – time entry (currently being deployed)
• Financial Times Online
• Microsoft Office Communications Server – internal IM client (currently being deployed)
• SecurEnvoy Two Factor Authentication for remote access

Bighand Mobility

The introduction of Bighand Mobility alongside Worksite Mobility was extremely well received by the majority of lawyers. It allowed them to work seamlessly out of the office and not be tied to a laptop. Whilst a Blackberry will never replace a laptop when working on long documents, it is the perfect device for dictating. No longer does a lawyer have to “dock” their dictation device and download the audio file to send to their secretary. All they need do now is click “record” on their Blackberry and begin speaking. Once they have finished their dictation they click “send” on their Bighand Mobility client and the dictation is immediately sent to their secretary who can then work on the transcription before the lawyer returns to the office. If the secretary is too busy then the dictation can be delegated to another secretary in the group for processing. All of this is achieved through standard workflow processes that allows the lawyer or secretary to decide how best to manage workloads. This greatly improves the turnaround time for dictations to be typed up.

Worksite Mobility

With the addition of Autonomy iManage Worksite Mobility on the Blackberry the lawyer can easily associate dictations with the relevant client/matter information thus making the electronic filing process much simpler. Worksite Mobility also allows the lawyer to retrieve and view Worksite documents on the go which is extremely useful when in the middle of a project.

Deployment

The Bighand Mobility deployment has been so successful that we have had the lawyers return their USB dictation devices in the office as they no longer see a need for them.

Whilst Bighand are not the only company to offer such technology, we felt that their track record for innovation and the level of support they offered was second to none. We did consider alternatives from the likes of nFlow, who incidentally have a great product, but felt that there was nothing strategic to be gained by changing the provider of this technology.

The implementation of Bighand Mobility was extremely easy. Having piloted the technology for a couple of weeks, making one or two tweaks along the way, we went from pilot to production in less than 2 weeks. Due to the simplicity of the Blackberry, client training was not necessary as the client is so intuitive. Since the initial installation of Bighand Mobility we have upgraded to version 3.3 to support our Windows 7 platform and again we found that the upgrade process was very easy.

The future

So, what are we considering next in terms of the Blackberry and our mobility strategy? Well, beginning this May we will be looking to replace all of our Blackberries with the latest models to ensure that we can take advantage of the latest technology in terms of performance, screen quality and storage.

Prior to this we will be releasing another application to all of our users from a company called ProTel. ProTel provide LG with all of its fixed line services and through a joint development strategy we assisted ProTel with the development of a Blackberry application that will allow the lawyers to redirect their DDI numbers to any other number in the world through the click of a button. In terms of mobility a lawyer can now have full control of his calls irrespective of whether they are destined for his desk or Blackberry device. This application will also allow us to redirect all voice calls to a chosen destination in the event of a disaster thus ensuring that our clients and lawyers are not inconvenienced should we experience issues.

And later this year we will be releasing a business intelligence application on the Blackberry to ensure that our lawyers are able to retrieve up-to-date information from our Practice Management System.

We’re always looking at ways to improve productivity or to make the lawyers life easier so I am fairly certain that there will be more to come!

Jason Petrucci is IT Director at Lawrence Graham LLP

Email Jason.petrucci@lg-legal.com.