Ricksons Solicitors

Cost-effective expansion is something that every forward-thinking law firm is looking to achieve. Ricksons found that the digital dictation system WinScribe from SRC was just the solution it needed to improve productivity and sustain its rapid growth.

The Challenge - cost-effective expansion

Law firms everywhere are looking at ways to increase their legal staff without incurring additional administrative costs. But for many, employing more fee earners means employing more secretarial staff. And once extra office space and equipment are added into this equation, costs can quickly spiral out of control.

The traditional one-to-one ratio of fee earners to support staff does not promote an environment of productivity or efficiency, so essential in today’s competitive climate.

Outmoded analogue dictation systems create the inefficiencies that make this ratio necessary. Physically transferring tapes can be so cumbersome that it is essential for a fee earner and a dedicated secretary to work in close proximity. As a result, dependencies form which can be hard to break.

What’s more, analogue dictation systems make the efficient managing of workload amongst a team of secretaries extremely difficult. Secretaries have to wait to receive a full tape, which may contain up to eight hours work. This leads to the situation where one secretary is snowed under with work, while another is at almost a complete standstill. This, compounded by the age-old problems of poor audio quality, old and unreliable machinery and the impracticality of locating a specific document in a one hour tape, means workflow management becomes extremely difficult, and almost impossible.

It is clear that while firms continue to rely on analogue systems cost-effective expansion will be difficult to achieve.

For Ricksons, a medium-sized law firm with offices in Preston, Manchester and Leeds, the one to one fee earner to secretary ratio was no longer an option.
With around eight new employees entering the company every month, it was clear that costs had to be kept to a minimum to make continued growth feasible. Changes had to be made, and fast.

Allan Green, the firm’s IT director, says: “Our old dictation system was incredibly limiting and lagged noticeably behind the rest of our technology. It would be impossible to lower our fee earner to secretary ratio with our high turnaround times and work management difficulties.”

The Solution – SRC & WinScribe

The ideal solutionThe implementation of a digital dictation system was seen as the ideal solution. Ricksons chose the WinScribe digital dictation workflow system for its ease of use as well as its advanced functionality - particularly its management reporting and intelligent work management capabilities. Not only this, but the solution would integrate with the company’s existing Citrix servers. Following a tender process, SRC was chosen to supply and manage the process.SRC provided digital dictation tools for 65 secretaries and 85 fee earners to dictate into a PC, dictation devices or even over the telephone. Each dictation is now intelligently sent to the WinScribe system, from which it can be accessed by a secretary straight away. There is no longer any need to assign tasks as jobs are intelligently routed to wherever there is capacity.

As a result, Ricksons has been able to completely clear their growing work backlog. Anthony Hughes, managing partner at Ricksons explains: “As with most law firms, our office space is at a premium and we needed a solution that would allow the firm to grow without requiring extra accommodation.” "The introduction of the SRC WinScribe solution has certainly allowed us to continue our fee earner growth without having a like for like increase in non fee earning staff, which has a knock on effect in terms of overheads and office space.”“The system is even better than we had hoped,” Allan Green adds. “For example, in our personal injury department, we hoped to shave off maybe one day of turnaround time - in fact we have more than halved it.”This puts Ricksons in a better position than ever to expand its workforce in a cost-effective way. With complete visibility of jobs and the ability to streamline workload, every secretary is fully occupied at all times. And they have recently been able to implement a ‘no-temp policy’, a notoriously costly and training intensive drain on resources.

The Result - Maximising the Room to Grow

“Now, every time we take on a fee earner we have a meeting to assess whether we need more support staff”, says Allan Green. “We were never able to even have that discussion before. The ratio was one-to-one at one stage, but it’s nowhere near that now. In just 6 months we even think we have already achieved a full return-on-investment just in terms of salaries saved.” “I would go as far as to say it’s been the success story of the year.”

Only a year since the initial deployment, SRC has provided a further 63 digital devices for fee earners and 30 more secretary licences, which in itself demonstrates the rapid growth and improved fee earner to secretary ratio.
Ricksons has since asked SRC to help with the further integration of their Axxia case management system and WinScribe to help reduce the number of paper files needed and simplify file management and document access.

Anthony Hughes concludes: “The SRC team was first class. Their dedication has allowed us to achieve fantastic results in a very short space of time. The one to one ratio is a thing of the past, the ability to make strategic decisions based on real figures is amazing, and we can now resource ourselves with complete flexibility.”

“It just goes to show how taking advantage of new methods of working and new technologies can dramatically relieve pressures on the business. I’m delighted with the results.”

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