Room for a better view

Fee-earner mobile working options at Freeth Cartwright include the digital dictation of documents from their bank of Blackberry smartphones. Already improving billing efficiency and accuracy, the next step is now to offer access to greater case-related information through a single work environment.

By Chris Nicholson, IT manager, Freeth Cartwright

Freeth Cartwright LLP is one of the UK’s leading regional law firms, serving both commercial and private clients. Its fee-earners work in close partnership with clients, providing positive, practical solutions and clear, comprehensive advice.

By the very nature of their jobs, however, the firm’s fee-earners are frequently out of the office, whether travelling to visit clients or out in meetings. Although each has always had a company mobile to stay in touch with colleagues and clients, they had no means of accessing core business applications while on the move. This lack of access to key systems meant that the fee-earners weren’t able to deliver their work to clients as quickly as they would have liked to. The IT team wanted to find a way of enabling mobile access to these systems that would not only improve the firm’s client service, but also enable them to speed up its billing cycle.

Embracing technology

Freeth Cartwright has a tradition of embracing technology to increase efficiency and drive client service improvements, and one example of this is our award-winning bespoke workflow system called Case Viewer, developed by our applications-development team to provide a comprehensive electronic work environment for lawyers.

Case Viewer is the platform for our Electronic Working Environment Initiative, which was developed in-house. It offers our fee-earners easy access to a single work environment, whether in the office or remotely, including secure access to case-related information. It also vastly reduces the physical storage requirements, contributing to our environmentally friendly paper-reduction initiative. The system provides lawyers with a complete view of all the client and matter information that is stored in the firm’s practice management system. (PMS), but also gives alerts in key quality and risk areas, furnishes the team with comprehensive supervision and reporting tools and offers extensive search facilities.

Mobilising core business applications

When it came to offering our fee-earners a complete mobile solution, we chose the BlackBerry smartphones deployed on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server because of its security credentials and the wide array of third-party applications available for the platform. The success of the BlackBerry solution for e-mail also inspired us to see if it could be used for mobile dictation.

Our fee-earners rely heavily on dictation to get work moving, instructions actioned and letters written. The analogue cassette tape recorders being used were impractically heavy and they made it difficult to edit recordings. Critically, the tapes also had to be physically delivered back to the support team in the office. This led to delays in workflow and billing and meant that the fee-earners sometimes had to travel back to the office unnecessarily. Moreover, if the tapes were lost, anyone could listen to the recordings, which with the amount of confidential client data the firm deals with on a day-to-day basis, was a huge security concern.

We knew what we were looking for: a system that would allow fee-earners to dictate on case matters from their BlackBerry smartphones when working from locations where it was not possible or convenient to use their laptops.

Digitising dictation

After extensive market investigation into the mobile dictation software available we decided to test the nFlow Mobile for BlackBerry digital dictation solution. One of the reasons for this was that our research showed it
would be straightforward for our team to integrate the application into Case Viewer. Moreover, the solution was licensed on a per-device basis, instead of being monthly or subscription-
based, and didn’t require costly consultancy fees or additional infrastructure costs.

Using nFlow Mobile on the BlackBerry smartphone the fee-earner can record multiple dictations when travelling and out of the office. When they’re finished they simply hit the send button. The dictation is instantly sent to the nFlow Gateway installed on the Exchange server, where it is routed to the desired recipient, most often a secretary for transcription and filing in Case Viewer. The BlackBerry application also provides features such as pause recording, playback, rewind, forward, insert, overwrite, save as draft, title and ‘mark as urgent’.

In 2008 we organised a pilot of the solution with a handful of the firm’s fee-earners, which was a resounding success. The feedback was very positive and we found the solution met the expectations of fee-earners and offered them what they wanted from a digital dictation system. Based on the results we then began rolling out the solution across our five sites in Nottingham, Birmingham, Leicester, Derby and Manchester. It was very easy to mobilise the solution using our existing BlackBerry Enterprise Server as a means of rolling out the nFlow application seamlessly.

We also arranged short training sessions for each of our fee-earners to explain the functionality of the application. The feedback following these sessions, and since the roll out, has been that the solution is intuitive and easy to use. As the fee-earners were already used to using their BlackBerry smartphones, adoption of the nFlow application has been very high.

Better billing

At Freeth Cartwright we are committed to excellence in client service and the efficient business processes that optimise the necessary productivity. The nFlow Mobile for BlackBerry smartphones solution has helped us with these commitments as it has sped up and secured the dictation workflow, which has also greatly improved the time efficiency of fee-earners.

Now, within a minute of a fee-earner completing a transcription – on the train, for example, or at the end of a meeting – the secretary can have it on the screen, ready to transcribe. It’s just as immediate as if the fee-earner was sitting next to him or her in the office. With analogue cassettes it would take an average 24 hours for a dictation to arrive back in the office and be transcribed, therefore delaying the work to be done and affecting our client service.

The new solution means a better service for our clients because we’re turning these dictations around much faster. In turn this also leads to timelier billing. The nFlow Mobile for BlackBerry application pays for itself with the first dictation. The one-time fee for nFlow is the equivalent of just a few minutes of a fee-earner’s time. One hour of a standard partner’s charge-out rate buys around ten one-time licences. As we had already made the original investment in the BlackBerry solution, the addition of nFlow was a small incremental cost compared to the time it would save the fee-earners.

The sound quality on the nFlow solution is also good, and the feedback from the secretaries who do the transcription has been excellent. The sound files are compressed, so they don’t put pressure on the Exchange server. The average file size is around 2MB, which is very manageable. In addition, when we were using analogue recorders, if a tape went missing there was no way of getting that dictation back. With nFlow on BlackBerry we can pick up any files that have been corrupted and restore those dictations for the fee-earner.

In addition, if a BlackBerry smartphone goes missing, there’s no risk that someone will be able to listen to the recordings. Like the rest of the data stored on the smartphones, draft dictations are protected by the smartphone’s built in password authentication and encryption. Completed dictations are encrypted during transmission, between the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and the BlackBerry smartphone, before being erased from the smartphone’s memory. Moreover, if a BlackBerry smartphone is lost or stolen, the IT team can remotely wipe the device of all its information to prevent it falling into the wrong hands. Given the amount of confidential client information we deal with, this aspect of the BlackBerry solution has been absolutely fundamental to our adoption. The dictations can also be backed up and archived – something that is impossible with analogue handsets.

An additional benefit of the new solution is that it provides fee-earners with more flexibility, which ties in with the firm’s family-friendly approach, enabling employees to work from home or around other commitments. For instance, a number of our employees are working mums. Some have cited examples such as when they have been able to dictate letters or notes at the school gate, while waiting to pick up their child from school. This provides them with more choice about where they do their work and the reassurance that if they arrive in the office having left early the day before, their transcription will have been completed and ready for them to check as soon as they get in.

The convenience of the BlackBerry solution means that our client service is enhanced, as our lawyers can keep on top of their work and meet deadlines no matter where they are in the world. One of our partners was abroad when she had to advise a client on a settlement offer, which had a 21-day expiry period. Using her BlackBerry smartphone she received all the details from her secretary by e-mail, dictated the letter, sent the dictation to her secretary, and then checked the letter before it was sent. The client received the letter that day, ensuring that he had the maximum time to consider the offer. This would have been simply impossible without the BlackBerry solution.

Taking time

Finally, the BlackBerry solution with nFlow Mobile has also improved time recording. Effectively, a digital dictation is time captured as a file, so if the recording is 20 minutes long, that can be apportioned against the fee-earner charge-out rate. When you have an analogue tape, you can’t really make an accurate judgement about how long that recording is – unless you time it with a stopwatch, which is unfeasible for the number of dictations our fee-earners do. Therefore this has also really helped to improve the accuracy of our billing.

Within just a few months of the pilot, the nFlow Mobile for BlackBerry solution has proved to be a simple to implement solution, with a rapid return on investment, which has also provided value-added functionality and increased the productivity of our fee-earners. As to the future, Freeth Cartwright LLP’s long-term aim is to utilise their BlackBerry smartphones as complete toolkits for remote working, allowing the fee-earner to work on the move or out of the office as if they were sat at their desk.

A key objective now is to provide access into CaseViewer so that fee-earners are able to view documents in an electronic file or retrieve specific information, such as client bills. Taking it further, we are exploring how it may be possible to create new documents within pre-defined templates and then save them back into the electronic file. We are also exploring other initiatives, including speech recognition, e-billing and time recording – all of which are fully secure on the BlackBerry solution.

Chris Nicholson is IT manager at Freeth Cartwright. He can be contacted at: chris.nicholson@freethcartwright.com