Voicing value? Assessing Voicepath’s transcription service for law firms

Voicepath is still a relatively young company in the legal-solution-provider space, but it has been working hard to carve itself a niche that is becoming more established by the year. Caroline Poynton talks to Voicepath’s general manager, Richard Bate, about the evolution of the company so far and asks whether it can really deliver the quality service growing law firms need.

When I first heard about Voicepath’s transcription service, I can’t say that I was particularly excited by the prospect of learning more. After all, the process of transforming dictation into documents is neither novel nor complex, and law firms have been doing it successfully for years - or so I thought.

Talking to Voicepath’s general manager Richard Bate, however, made me realise that there’s a lot more to this crucial area of legal service than meets the eye. His career roots lie in manufacturing, where he headed up subsidiaries of large companies from a young age. He says that he enjoyed the multi-faceted nature of the job, where no two days would be the same. But his love of managing people and teams, inspired no doubt by his sporting background, ultimately pushed him away from manufacturing and brought him to Voicepath’s doorstep, with a challenge that would test his management and business-development skills to the full. His remit was to help transform the company from a small but established transcription provider to a fully-fledged major operation in the professional-services sector. His work was cut out from the start.

Bate’s first major challenge was Voicepath’s message to market. The advent of digital dictation enabled firms to unblock workflow, which also opened the door to overhaul the transcription process. With this in mind, Voicepath was founded in 1998 to supply digital dictation and transcription services to law firms. It soon realised, however, that success would lie in its transcription offering and decided to partner with digital-dictation suppliers to achieve that end, rather than struggle to compete in an already cut-throat digital-dictation market. It was a commonsense strategy, playing to what Voicepath saw as a genuine gap in the market for fast and accurate transcription services. The difficulty lay, of course, in changing a now ingrained public perception of Voicepath’s offerings. Indeed, for a long time following its decision to refine its strategy, Voicepath would continue to be described as a digital-dictation supplier, a confusion that Bate has had to address as a priority. “I have had to work hard to develop and confirm internally and externally our business strategy: we are a service provider, not an IT company that sells digital dictation,” says Bate. He thinks, however, that they have turned a corner. “Our strategy is now clear and I think we’re much further on in people understanding our message – that is, that we provide a service that allows clients to get more out of their digital-dictation system,” he says.

The long-term goal to fulfilling this key message lies in providing what Bate describes as a plug-in-and-go service. What this means is partnering with digital-dictation suppliers to provide end users with digital-dictation and transcription services in one easy press of a button. Once a client has invested in a digital-dictation system integrated with Voicepath, the only remaining requirement will be to provide Voicepath with information on dictation authors, document templates and personal styles. Bate says that clients will not have to face any complex technical integration issues or major costs for investing in both services. “I think we have progressed significantly in smoothing out integration with the digital-dictation people to provide a plug-in-and-go service, but it would be fair to say that some issues still need to be ironed out. It is one of my key targets for the coming year – to provide an easy-to-use project-implementation plan for every end client,” he says.

Such goals clarify the relationship between Voicepath and digital dictation, but do little to explain Voicepath’s core service in transcription. It may at first seem strange to focus the company’s strategy on an area that law firms have surely managed quite effectively for years? After all, dictating a client letter is hardly a new characteristic of the lawyer’s working life. It may also be wondered why a firm would need to outsource its dictation when secretaries have always been on hand to help with the typing.

Voicepath is right, however, in recognising a very different legal landscape to one of just a few years ago. Firms in areas such as personal injury and conveyancing are handling more clients than ever as the work becomes increasingly commoditised and managed in bulk. Secretaries that once handled all the administration of an office now struggle to cope, with many welcoming investments that clear backlogs and allow them to do more rewarding revenue-generating activities.

And many firms, looking to free up existing resources, improve productivity and gain cost benefits, are considering outsourcing solutions that can take over their additional transcription needs. It is unsurprising that India and South Africa have so far proved popular destinations, where documents can be transcribed both cheaply and/or overnight.

Scott Rees provides a good example of such a strategy. The firm’s chief executive Michael Lough joined the firm from a manufacturing background, which encouraged him to see the business in terms of its profit potential. As such, Lough wanted to look at new ways of working with a strong focus on efficiency. Outsourcing the firm’s transcriptions to India seemed an obvious way to improve productivity and make cost reductions.

There were problems, though. The firm found quality a serious issue, as Indian transcribers often struggled to pick up on dialect or legal jargon, and there was frequently a lack of understanding of the particular phrasing used by the firm. Scott Rees continued to use the Indian outsourcing service for nine months, but then decided to shift to Voicepath. It would cost a little more, but as Lough has since said, it would make a “big difference to people’s confidence in using an outsourced service”.

It is also the differentiator that Bate emphasises when describing Voicepath’s transcription service: “There is offshore outsourcing and upfront it seems very cheap. But the quality is not generally up to the standards required of a law firm. You may be able to send some things overseas, but if you are looking for a quality service, that is still best served onshore.”

Voicepath’s promise to deliver a quality onshore service, albeit at a higher price, is backed up by its exclusive use of UK-trained legal secretaries who understand legal terminology and can put together accurate legal documents quickly. For instance, Bate says that a standard-length dictation will be turned around within 60 minutes, an impressive speed that offshore companies cannot compete with.

Where quality with speed is the differentiator, however, quality control is essential. Bate agrees and explains a comprehensive process by which every document is monitored. “We have a dedicated operations team here that checks all the documents. We also have our own workflow system, which ensures that the document only goes back to the author who dictated it, that it gets back to them within the required time, and not before it has been positively approved and released by our quality-control process,” he says.

Voicepath’s service appears a sensible response to changing market conditions and one that has been carefully implemented to satisfy a law firm’s need for quality. The quick turnaround should also have indirect benefits, enabling lawyers to complete cases and invoice more effectively, thereby improving overall cash flow. I have yet to meet, however, a law firm that is quick to embrace new ideas or change its working processes without an element of internal resistance and scepticism. This is particularly the case in today’s market where the law-firm client is more demanding than ever, and the landscape so competitive that a firm cannot afford to sacrifice quality for a little more speed. In addition, however good an outsourced solution might be, there is security and comfort in knowing that sensitive material is going no further than the trusted secretary working down the corridor.

Bate agrees that scepticism can be an obstacle to winning work from firms. But he also believes that doubts can be overcome. For instance, long-standing law-firm client Howard Kennedy has outsourced its transcription to Voicepath since 2000. Bate remembers some resistance to outsourcing within the firm but believes that gaining support of the managing partner and practice manager was essential to ensuring the benefits of the service permeated the firm. “We also found that getting one or two of the firm’s most prolific users of dictation to outsource to us ensured that other fee earners could see the benefit of the service,” he says. “The firm became a major win for us and we have collaborated closely ever since.”

Collaboration is also a term that Bate comes back to time and again. Voicepath could provide a simple service, which law firms could take or leave as they please. Indeed, the company’s ‘pay as you go’ option implies that this is the intention. However, the work Bate is doing to partner with digital-dictation providers and the ongoing relationships he has already built with clients suggests that Voicepath wants to build ongoing relationships with law firms. Bate’s recollection of working with Scott Rees provides an apt example: “We went in and rather than trying to impose on them something that we do, we worked with them to do what they wanted us to do.” It is a comment that reflects Voicepath’s aims, but it is also a strategy to engender confidence, trust and more rewarding long-term partnerships.

In the future, Voicepath would like to extend its reach into the wider professional-services sector, with surveyors and insurers appearing a likely target market. For the time being, however, Bate still has work to do to reinforce the message that outsourcing is a revenue opportunity for law firms that they can use to improve internal efficiencies and client service. “We also have to get all of our people internally thinking in the same way and working with our digital-dictation partners to make our relationships as effective as they can be, so that the end client has an easy implementation process,” says Bate.

To achieve that, Bate still has work to do, but Voicepath has built itself a good service proposition that has seen some significant success to date. Bate is also rightly proud that Voicepath will soon have transcribed over one million documents, an excellent indicator of how well established the company has become in the legal space. If it can build on that experience and continue to deliver a differentiated service that meets a real need in the market, then it is likely that the company will fulfil its ambitions for the future. And for law firms, such added choice, combined with quality, can only be a good thing.