Private Lives

By Derwent Campbell, senior partner, Mogers

For solicitors, protecting a client’s interests through complete confidentiality is holy writ. Whether one is dealing with due diligence ahead of a company takeover or preparing documents for a sensitive divorce case, professional standards demand we take steps to prevent this information being inappropriately disclosed.
As a practice with a large base of high-net-worth private clients, confidentiality is absolute at Mogers. It is in both our interests to ensure as few eyes as possible see sensitive documents, but we also realise that wealthy individuals (i.e. our clients) expect a high standard of service and communication, which law firms have traditionally struggled to achieve during unexpected busy periods. How many times, for example, has an important letter been issued to a client after a delay caused by a glut of work?
For Mogers, it was clear that the balance between ensuring client confidentiality and embracing a fast-moving client-service culture was a delicate one. It also involved us looking in depth at the way we administered our business. While the fundamental ‘unit’ of legal business remains largely unchanged – we trade in the expertise of our lawyers – the way this is physically delivered to our clients has changed markedly. The world of instant communication means that it is no longer enough to say ‘the letter is in the post’ or ?it will be with you next week’. For a great many end-users, the law is seen as a high-value service and should be delivered as such. This means letters of instruction the next working day and no excuses.
The practicalities of running a firm with finite resources dictate, however, that there will be occasions where even the most efficient operations find themselves stretched. The installation of a BigHand digital-dictation system in our offices, for example, allowed us to share typing work among support staff more equitably and prioritise jobs in terms of urgency. This had a streamlining effect during periods of normal activity, but the fact remained that when we were very busy or short-staffed, we were still reliant on expensive and unpredictable temporary cover. Our next challenge, therefore, was to find some way of finding extra resource as and when we needed it, which led us to outsourcing our transcription.

Never offshore
The chief reason Mogers did not begin outsourcing transcription before 2007 is that we were not satisfied with the majority of services available on the market. A great many of these are based overseas in countries such as South Africa and India and concentrate on providing low-cost transcription to cost-conscious law firms. On closer examination we found, however, that these prices masked a higher potential cost.
Law Society guidance dictates that if “you [the law firm] outsource services such as word processing, telephone call handling or photocopying you must be satisfied that the provider of those services is able to ensure the confidentiality of any information concerning your clients. These would normally require confidentiality undertaking and checks to ensure that the terms of the arrangements regarding confidentiality are being complied with.” [Law Society Confidentiality and Disclosure Guidance, November 2007]. We are conscious UK Data Protection legislation places restrictions on the personal data that can be sent outside the European Economic Area. Ultimately, however, we do not want to export jobs.

The onshore alternative
Our interest in using outsourcing as a way to improve service levels without compromising client information led to the beginning of a relationship with Voicepath — a UK-based service specialising in legal transcription. The company was able to provide us with sufficient assurance to enter into a confidentiality agreement with them. There was also the added advantage that all transcriptions would be completed by native English speakers living in the UK, who were experienced legal secretaries in their own right. Furthermore, the agreement promised a dedicated team of transcriptionists selected from the company’s nationwide pool of teleworkers, who would deal with all Mogers’ correspondence.
It is a remote service that works by fee-earners electing to send work to Voicepath, rather than an internal secretary, via the firm’s digital-dictation system. The dictation is sent to a server via a secure internet connection. From here, the files are securely relayed to individual typists for transcription and returned to the firm via Voicepath, where each document undergoes a three-stage quality check.
It is also essential to control speed of response. Complete transcriptions could be provided in between two and 24 hours, depending on the urgency of the job. The fact the company worked to UK time also worked to our advantage, in that it would allow us to provide clients with the high-speed, high-quality service we desired.

System integration
Having made the decision to outsource, then came the challenge of ensuring the service could interface with our existing systems. Here we benefited from the fact that BigHand was already in the process of developing an ‘Outsourcing Module’, which would allow its clients to send work to external services securely.
These were in development after BigHand experienced increased demand from law firms interested in using outsourcing as a means of improving internal efficiency and reducing fixed costs. Mindful, however, that in order to work effectively outsourcing a dictation had to be as easy as sending it to a secretary in the same office, BigHand was committed to assembling a panel of approved agencies, along with software extensions, which could make outsourcing a one-click process.
As Mogers was an existing BigHand user, and keen to test outsourcing as soon as possible, we became a beta-test site for the outsourcing module. This allowed our fee-earners to send audio files to an external agency (Voicepath) via an additional send option that appears within the recording screen each time they begin a dictation. This can then be configured with priority options – selecting, for example, whether a dictation should be completed using the two-hour or 24-hour service and containing details of what type of document is to be typed.
Once the fee-earner has completed a dictation and selected the option to outsource, the audio file is exported to a local folder on the network with an .XML file containing associated data. This is then ‘picked up’ by the Outsourcing Module, which scans the folder for new files and exports them to Voicepath via a secure connection to an HTTPS server.
From here, the audio files can be downloaded, and the XML files read, for further instruction – before putting it into the company’s workflow management for timely completion. Transcribed documents are returned to the author directly by e-mail. At the same time Voicepath also sends an .XML file back to the BigHand system, which instructs it to close the job associated with the relevant audio file. All this means that not only is outsourcing work simple to accomplish, but it also requires no additional work or intervention from fee-earners or support staff to keep systems fully up to date.

Benefits
While we primarily conceived this project as a way of smoothing and speeding the flow of work through the firm, we have since discovered that a more streamlined system brings added benefits. The ability to receive completed transcriptions within an agreed timescale is the most immediately tangible, but it has also changed the way the firm works in a more fundamental way.
It is a cliché to say the secret of success is not working harder but ‘smarter’. However, with a pool of external expertise to call on for the typing work – which used to take up a lot of our support staff’s time – we have begun to use our internal resource far more effectively. It is clear that by using the outsourcing module our secretaries are able to use their experience and time to address real value-added issues. This not only makes our process more efficient, but also makes the day-to-day work of our secretaries more rewarding and interesting.
Outsourcing allowed the firm to put into practice the belief that a law firm’s support staff are far more than a typing pool, whose contribution to the business is quantified by how much work they clear from a task list each day. They can prove invaluable in preparing documents for court, or in addressing aspects of due diligence. Here, with reduced pressure to get everything done as well as typing, we have been able to speed up our own administrative processes without losing accuracy or volume. Moreover, as Voicepath’s service operates within the same specified timescales, we can rely on the timely delivery of documents, which is exactly what we and our clients require.
Taking the decision to improve quality of service to clients has had the added advantage of bringing cost benefits to the firm. Prior to outsourcing, we found that covering staff holidays and sickness meant we were employing a succession of temporary staff, which proved a costly, and at times unreliable, way of plugging gaps in our resource. To counteract this, we decided to employ an ‘extra’ secretary for cover purposes.
With Voicepath in place, however, we have been able to manage workloads during busy periods without having to call on further help within the office. This has allowed us to redeploy our cover secretary within the firm and carry on as normal. Rolling out the service also permitted us to reorganise office support, so that when another secretary recently left the firm, we were able to absorb her workload among existing remaining support staff and outsource additional work when the need arose.
Effectively, this means that while outsourcing was always intended to be a case of using our internal resource more intelligently rather than reducing our workforce, we have still succeeded in reducing our costs.
In the first six months of service we saved the equivalent of the cost of replacing two secretaries. Furthermore, when the time comes for other support staff to move on, we are confident we can use it as an opportunity to reorganise rather than replace, getting better value out of our internal staff and outsourced service.

Satisfaction - for staff and clients
As the profession comes under increasing pressure to keep step with a customer-focused business culture, it is vital we learn to use all the tools in our possession to keep clients satisfied and business steady.
Even where clients expect a highly personal service, there is often room for improvement. What’s more, it is important to remember that in the majority of cases, new systems and IT innovations are best used as a tool for helping people in law firms do their jobs better.
Enabling and empowering lawyers and support staff alike to work more intelligently and make the best use of their skills, rather than struggle with inefficient business practices, can be hugely beneficial. Not only does it save time and money, but it can also be rewarded in increases in productivity and job satisfaction. Everyone likes to feel they are performing to the best of their abilities. Taking an integrated approach to the way we produce documents at Mogers has allowed us to strike the right balance between systems and those who use them, to the ultimate benefit of our clients.

Derwent Campbell is senior partner at Mogers. He can be contacted at derwentcampbell@mogers.co.uk.