Maxwell Winward deploys BigHand speech recognition technology

Maxwell Winward has integrated BigHand digital dictation and Dragon speech recognition technology, to enable fee earners to create documents and emails more efficiently, and reduce the volume of transcription for secretarie.

BigHand, the market leading voice productivity software vendor in the global legal and professional services sector, has today announced that top-200 ranked UK law firm Maxwell Winward has integrated BigHand v4.2 digital dictation workflow software and advanced Dragon NaturallySpeaking™ speech recognition components to improve the efficiency of document production and to reduce the volume of transcription being sent to secretaries.

The integrated approach enables fee earners to dictate documents, attendance notes and emails via BigHand on their desktop or BlackBerry and send for automated transcription, freeing secretaries to focus on document manipulation and to undertake a broader range of work.

Kay Oliver, HR Manager, Maxwell Winward commented:

‘’Our goal in integrating our BigHand dictation technology with Dragon speech recognition was to enable fee earners to become more self-sufficient and to free up secretarial time by reducing the volume of typing they have to undertake. 

Typically fee earners are dictating either large chunks of text to go into documents or more generally, emails or attendance notes. Sending dictations to Dragon for automatic transcription reduces the time secretaries spend typing; document manipulation rather than straight typing affords our support staff more time to add value to other areas of the business. 

Fee earners that were part of our early adopter group love the speech recognition technology; many now use it as their first port of call for transcription and are also using it via BlackBerry when out and about, increasing their mobile productivity. 

Given our experience to date, we have found integrating our BigHand dictation technology with Dragon speech recognition to be hugely beneficial: document turnaround times have improved and secretaries are no longer pre-occupied with typing, enabling them to take on a broader range of work.’’

BigHand’s commitment to developing innovative new tools to enhance the use of integrated speech recognition is driving adoption of the technology, and BigHand is leading the way in delivering low-risk deployments to increase efficiency and lower costs for legal and professional services firms.