Laytons Solicitors

& Legal digital dictation

Ranked among the 200 largest law firms in the United Kingdom, Laytons is a commercial law firm with offices in Guildford, London and Manchester, employing over 90 fee earners.

“At Laytons we don’t change for the sake of change. When we looked at the whole legal  digital dictation ‘trend’ we needed to not only ensure that it was the right thing to do but also that we chose the correct product.” explains Andrew Corbett – IT Director.

DigiScribe-XL (Crescendo’s legal digital dictation product) was not the firm’s first trial, however “when we were introduced to it we liked it immediately. It was very subtly marketed to us with a soft approach and a competitive price. Even though we didn’t buy into the marketing hype and ROI figures pushed by other suppliers, we did see that digital dictation was a sensible move forward from our old tape dictation system. An electronic system would allow better resource sharing, job management and reporting.” states Corbett.

Excellent Support

“Thanks to DigiScribe-XL, superior sound quality soon became the norm within our firm.  Support from the Crescendo staff was excellent from the start and although we were happy to run calls throughout our helpdesk, Crescendo was also happy to field these. As with any new system, there were initial conflicts and the new system would always get the blame. However, working closely with Crescendo on updates and configuration adjustments, these were soon ironed out.”

Another Successful Rollout

“The initial pilot was challenging as several users were reluctant to change, but by the end of the pilot phase those same users were the very ones who wouldn’t let go. That’s when we knew the system was in and we soon rolled it out over our UK based offices consisting of almost 200 users.” comments Corbett. Two years later everyone at Laytons uses DigiScribe –XL on a daily basis. “Support from Crescendo is as strong now as it ever was, although the only time we seem to contact them nowadays is for more user licences and equipment. We receive a handful of calls a week on the application and that’s normally due to user error (i.e job rerouted back to someone).”

“You can tell a product is a success when your dictation throughput increases so rapidly. If you like it, you use it more and more! Our secretaries now handle over 200 dictations a day. The system configuration enables any dictation to be processed from any of our offices and thus facilitates our working as a single team with complete inter-office flexibility.”

A Reliable System

New users picked up DigiScribe-XL almost immediately and got on with it. “It is reliable and as a real-time application it is important to ensure solid connections to support it properly” insists Corbett. The firm used an enterprise-based configuration: all users are connected through the London central servers where voice files are streamed directly over 3Mb data connection. In case of connection failure the DigiDictate-IP client application automatically switches to backup – offline – mode. “Although this might sometime get our users confused, the critical factor here is that they can continue to work and dictations never get lost.” concludes Corbett.

Interested in Digital Dictation for your Legal Firm? Call us on 01932 789433 or email us info@crescendosystems.co.uk.