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Don't Ask Us - Ask Our Clients

Denis Stephenson, Managing Partner at Cheshire law firm Rowlinsons has advocated our solution to his colleagues at the Chester Local Law Society as he is convinced that the technology is what they want, they simply have to overcome the bad experiences of the past.

With seven fee earners and six support staff the firm has many times tried to get voice technologies working to ease the loads on its busy conveyancing and family departments with very little success. Also even though the firm is departmentalised often secretaries assist each other. The Digital Dictation component of LOASys facilitated this as users could pick up work from another department without having to wait for partial tapes.

Two fee earners in particular who share one secretary have found the Speech Recognition component particularly useful eliminating any waiting time for urgent work.

The firm does have case management software from another supplier for its standard conveyancing work and we were able to provide a solution for them offering Digital Dictation, Speech Recognition and partial Document Assembly with a neat 'push' into the case management system.

This proves the flexibility of not only the software but also our installation consultants who are able to provide solutions outside our normal working environment.

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.