BigHand today announced that Top-30 law firm Hill Dickinson has migrated to BigHand digital dictation workflow software and the BlackBerry mobile dictation app. The firm has replaced its incumbent system* with BigHand to significantly improve the availability and uptime of dictation software and as a result, the equivalent of one full time support professional has been reallocated to other projects.
Keith Feeny, Director of IT & Operations at Hill Dickinson, said “Our primary objective in upgrading to BigHand was to improve the availability and uptime of our dictation software. Our technologies are rated on a scale of bronze through to gold based on their performance, reliability and provision for business continuity and disaster recovery – far better than our previous system, BigHand ranks gold, it’s bullet proof.
“We were receiving a staggering 400 calls per week from users requesting help from IT in order to administer work and for the most part, this was simply to recall or reassign work. The upgrade to BigHand has totally eliminated dictation related support calls and this has enabled us to redeploy valuable resource to other projects.
“BigHand has enabled us to reach a level of business continuity and disaster recovery planning previously unattainable. Our infrastructure is virtualised and replicated off-site, authors can dictate anytime, anywhere via their BlackBerry and secretaries can access BigHand at home via Citrix. We have also integrated BigHand with Autonomy iManage to efficiently manage our document production. The increased visibility of work, access to dictations and reliability of the BigHand software and BlackBerry App has resulted in very high levels of user satisfaction.”
Andrew Evans, a partner at Hill Dickinson, added “Our team of fee earners and secretaries recognise the benefit of our new system. BigHand dictation is easy to use, allows our fee earners to use a combination of dictation capture devices and enables us to deliver information to our clients faster. In addition, the BlackBerry capability of BigHand dictation provides greater flexibility for our travelling fee earners. The BlackBerry capability allows authors to dictate between locations without having to return to the office to submit paperwork. It works well, because of the simplicity of use. I feel that BigHand will be a good fit for our long-term goals, and the team have been happy with the system.”
Commenting on the firm’s plans for the year ahead, Feeny said “We will shortly be integrating our BigHand software with Dragon speech recognition technology to further increase productivity. BigHand’s new components for authors and innovative proofreading tools are incredibly impressive, and place them well ahead of the game.”
COMMENT: The press release does not name the incumbent DDS that Bighand was brought in to replace however Legal Technology Insider records reveal it to be Winscribe. Our sources report that Bighand will be reporting another Winscribe swapout at a UK law firm within the next few days.