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Don't Ask Us - Ask Our Clients

Belfast solicitor Ciaran McAteer commented in The Writ, Northern Ireland's Law Society journal that he "knows of no other product that has enhanced (his) company in so many ways, so quickly".

Ciaran's secretary is especially pleased that he now does so much of his own document production that she has time to ensure that the other aspects of the legal process are completed on time and correctly.

Not being a large firm with four fee earners and three support staff when one secretary is out of the office they are suddenly one third down on their valuable resources. Now that Ciaran and another of the fee earners are 'self supporting' there is no need to use emergency temps as before saving a substantial amount of cost and aggravation.

In our experience it is not a symptom of just the smaller firm but at McAteer & Co there was no standard layout for their correspondence templates and no common way of naming and saving files. These are two of the features that Ciaran was referring to in his comment that implementing the LOASys solution had enhanced his company.

Customised templates and assistance with Precedent building enables a firm to take a step back from their normal processes during the implementation of a new system.

Our installations consultants have decades of experience in these fields.

Digital Dictation

In its simplest form, Digital Dictation is the transmission of a voice file from the author fee earner to the recipient via a computer network.

The advantages of Digital Dictation are that the sound is clear, there are no tapes to break stretch mis record etc and that the voice file can be transmitted quickly to anywhere in the world.

There are various methods of making a digital recording. Firstly with a hand held device wired into the fee earner's computer. Secondly a wireless device again with the fee earner close to their computer and thirdly a portable device. This latter option generally requires recordings to be made and downloaded by plugging the device into a computer at some stage but telephones including mobiles are now used for this process. Recordings can essentially be made from anywhere and transmitted to the system via the user's computer, another directly on the network or via the Internet.

LOASys offers support for many input / output devices and easy to use software.

Speech Recognition

Speech Recognition is a variant of Voice Recognition. This technology has been around for some 15 to 20 years. Most potential users want such a system, many have tried such a system but unfortunately few have succeeded.

The LOASys Speech Recognition component works in the background on a network computer completely dedicated to the process. This increases the accuracy of the recognition process, allows multiple users to access, input and retrieve voice files to and from the same system and increases the security of the important voice files and voice training data.

The most important concept however it is that fee earners dictate as if they were dictating to a human being in the traditional way. They therefore only have to think and talk. Voice Recognition had the disadvantage of seeing the text appear on the screen. This occasionally required correcting which slowed the author down and caused them to lose their train of thought.

LOASys returns users to the traditional way of dictating which is far more productive.

LOASys also enables users without the benefit of a secretary / assistant to dictate as if they had.

Document Assembly

Even with the increased accuracy in speech recognition, a large proportion of a document will be formatting and static data such as client name, matter description, references. It is difficult for the dictator to dictate such data and difficult for any software to recognise it.

LOASys therefore employs a powerful database to create and populate the static portion of the professionally formatted document, subsequently inserting the Speech Recognised text into the correct place in the document.

Document Management

Document Management is naming and saving a computer file in a standard, structured way.

LOASys does this automatically based on the matter reference and document type initially specified by the author.

This removes any errors in filing, time taken to save a document and subsequently find it.

LOASys document management is matter orientated enabling the fee earner, manager or in fact any participant to the matter to locate documents extremely quickly. This is not limited to internally produced documents but can also include e-mail messages, forms, scanned images, incoming faxes etc of any file type.