Secretaries have always been the lifeblood of a law firm and in 2022 that is no different, except now it's harder to hire and retain experienced secretaries than ever.

Transcribing dictations and producing documents promptly is a challenge that all firms face. Needing to balance peaks and troughs in fee earner demand with the provision of staff makes it harder than ever to provide a consistent level of service to clients.

Enter DictateNow

Our 300-strong team of UK-based and experienced legal secretaries support over 1000 UK law firms in making sure that their fee earners dictations get transcribed promptly and to a high standard 24/7.

Whether it is file notes, memos, attendance notes, multi-speaker meetings or general outbound letters to clients, our team are ready and available to support you in the production of your documents.

We know your day doesn’t end at 5 and neither does ours.

We now find that on average 33% of dictations for law firms are recorded outside of 9-5. To match this, our teams work 24/7 to ensure that the production of work never stops and that you start each day without any backlog from the previous day.

Our background

As a partner of a Top 50 UK law firm in 1989, our founder faced many of the same challenges that law firms still face today in the provision of transcription and document production support to her firm: not enough secretaries were available when the support was needed.

We have since spent the last 20+ years building and perfecting what is today the UK’s leading outsourced transcription service to combat this need.

Our low-risk, flexible secretarial solutions are loved by our clients as an extension of their firms and as an on-demand resource, available to help provide continuity and scalability to operations.

How it works

We currently integrate with over 50 dictation platforms allowing clients to seamlessly send our secretarial teams work with no change of process on their part.

For firms who don’t have a dictation system or those looking at their options, we provide our own market-leading cloud dictation software as part of our service to allow fee earners to record audio files, select templates, set turnaround requirements and send them to our team all from their device of choice and within our ISO 27001 accredited secure infrastructure.

Our staff are broken down into teams based on the practice areas and case management systems that they are experienced in. When we receive a dictation, our system uses workflows to route the files to an available secretary in a team of people covering your practice area.

Production of work

When it comes to the production or work this can be done either in or out of your case management system.

We integrate with over 50 different case and document management systems covering over 80% of the main market systems used by UK firms. When we complete a transcript in your case system, you will find this filed away under the relevant matter ready to issue to the client.

Alternatively, for firms who do not use a central case system, we can work on house-style templates hosted on our systems. Documents are then returned as an attachment to an email ready for you to file away.

Create consistency

Our average turnaround time for shorter audio files is just 45 minutes, including being checked by our Quality Assurance team. Longer files average 1-3 hours depending on the length and complexity.

Dictations sent to us can have either due by time/date or a priority level, allowing us to prioritise your work based on importance. Once received, our document queue can be reordered as priorities change and your day progresses.

ISO

Our transcription service, as with all of our back-office support services, is covered by our ISO-integrated management system.

Our ISO 9001 for Quality Management sets a high bar for the level of quality assurance that is applied to the work we do. Quality assurance is not a department that is typical to a law firm but in our quest to go above and beyond the market norm, we put a high degree of focus on the consistency of the documents that we produce.

Our ISO 22301 for Business Continuity Management means that we can guarantee 100% uptime to our service. A combination of advanced technology, multiple servers and a dispersed workforce has helped us to consistently mitigate many of the key risks faced by conventional back-office operations.

Our ISO 27001 for Information Security represents how seriously we take the protection of the identifiable data that we process. As standard, we apply bank-level encryption techniques and authentication methods to ensure that end-to-end our service is secure and compliant.

How we charge

As a starting point, we offer our services on a pay-as-you-go basis with no commitments or monthly minimums. This affords you the most flexibility possible to allow you to tap into our resources as and when required.

As an evolution of our pay-as-you-go service, we offer many different types of contractual commitments. This presents certainty to costs and allows for budget planning. For firms using our services on a subscription basis, we offer economy-of-scale discounts from our standard pay-as-you-go service.

Free trial

Try us out today and find out for yourself how other firms get the balance of support right by using our on-demand transcription services.

Clients can get up and running on a trial with a few clicks, meaning that you are never too far away from the support that your firm needs.

Talk to us

Our team of consultants are experienced in helping firms develop and implement the right support solution for your firm.

Book a call with us here or telephone us at 020 3929 3700 to discuss how we can help or if you have any questions.

We are looking forward to speaking to you.