Legal Transcription Helps Increase Billing Time and
Income Generation
It is fair to say that law firms, barristers' chambers and legal practices as a whole have started to move with the times and are embracing different ways of working.
Legal practices have always been at the forefront of outsourcing and indeed working as cost-effectively as they can.
One of these is outsourcing their legal transcription and how this helps increase billing time and helps drive income generation.
How does Legal Transcription Help Increase Billing Time & Income Generation?
A Legal Benchmarking Report from the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2019 stated that on average, a full-time solicitor attains 1,000 billable hours per annum. Whilst the average billable hours had not increased year on year, a report in The Guardian, ‘Toxic, cut-throat’: the work culture awaiting junior lawyers", seemed to suggest that solicitors were working increased hours often outside of working hours and increasingly at weekends, to meet billing targets.
In 2022 in MHA Macintyre Hudson’s Legal Benchmarking Report for 2022 they report that income generation can be improved by removing administrative tasks (such as typing) from fee earners.
Therefore there seems to be a correlation between solicitors working increasing hours, billing time and the administrative tasks they undertake.
The question, of course, on the mind of managing partners and practice managers is: how can we increase those elusive billable hours and chargeable time whilst providing better support to enable lawyers to do so?
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Well, the answer is simple. It is one reason why many law firms, barrister's chambers and legal practices, use OutSec Legal for outsourcing their legal transcription: legal transcription helps increase billing time and income generation.
Dictation Is More Cost-Effective Than Typing Your Own Legal Documents & Legal Correspondence: why is that?
It was with the advent of the computer that law firms sought to reduce typing staff believing that this was more cost-effective for their firms. However, many firms realise this is losing their legal practice valuable chargeable or billable time. even when work is being carried out using case management systems. Digital dictation is simply more cost-effective than typing simply for the fact that we can all speak considerably faster than anyone can physically type (see below):
“The average person types between 38 and 40 words per minute”.
A “good rate of speech ranges between 140 -160 words per minute.”
This means therefore that dictation is four times faster than typing your own documents, meaning that two hours of typing could be dictated in only 30 minutes!
A report from The Lawyer: “Microsoft Word in Law Firms” suggested that: “42% of solicitors said ‘their lack of Microsoft Word skills delayed responses to clients’.”
This obviously further affects productivity here. In the above report, David Lee, IT Director at Womble Bond Dickinson states:
“If you have a lawyer typing their own documents, taking longer than necessary, due to an insufficient understanding of the Word environment, it will naturally take longer to produce and therefore delay the time it takes to respond to the client. This can be unhelpful and isn’t the best use of the lawyer’s time.”
This is aside from the fact that typing their own documents in the first place, is not an efficient use of a fee earner’s time.
Can I Increase Billing Time & Income Generation Just By dictating?
Yes you can increase billing time and income generation. Again it is just a matter of following logic.
If you have a fee earner who spends two hours a day typing their own emails, correspondence and documents, they are losing out on up to one and a half hours in billing time.
This is because two hours of typing equates to 30 minutes of dictation (as demonstrated by our statistics).
This time can be put to better use elsewhere. For example to increase efficiency and increase those chargeable hours and billing time.
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Data from Armstrong Watson’s benchmarking survey suggest that the average lock-up in law firms is 187 days. Therefore freeing up valuable time, allows fee earners to release valuable WIP and lock up, thereby improving cash flow into their legal practice. According to the Law Society: "cashflow issues can affect law firms of all sizes, smaller firms in particular, as they do not necessarily have the breadth of resources to call upon when there is not enough cash to pay the bills or wages".
Outsourcing, therefore, frees up time to enable more time to deal with WIP and cash flow issues and improve them for a legal practice. However, at the same time, the cost burden of outsourcing is less as it removes a fixed cost with a flexible one, which is cheaper than employment.
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Calculation
If we an example of a grade A solicitor (using London Court approved rates), we would work this out as:
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(1) Grade A solicitor’s lost time: £512 per hour x 1.5 hours = £768.
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(2) Less OutSec Legal’s cost for transcribing 30 minutes of dictation: £1.30 x 30 = £39 plus VAT (£7.80) = £46.80
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If you subtract (1) from (2) this gives you the cost of the lost chargeable time.
Answer
The amount of money lost by a Grade A solicitor in London by typing his own documents is £721.20.
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If you use the same calculations for grades B, C and D solicitors in London it would be: A
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• grade B solicitor would lose £475,20;
• grade C solicitor would lose £358,20; and
• grade D solicitor would lose £232.20
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In an age where law firms need to be more efficient and cost-effective this, of course, is a big deal, especially if this is occurring daily. Over the course of a year, this can represent huge losses for law firms and legal practices coming from a single fee earner.
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Where you have many fee earners typing their own documents and emails, and not using digital dictation to dictate them, the more money your legal practice is losing.
Increase Productivity Using Case Management Systems
Conclusion
Whilst case management systems have improved productivity as these allow fee earners to do some automated or semi-automated tasks, there will always be scenarios when using a transcription resource to do some of these tasks will be more cost-effective than a fee earner doing these themselves.
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There will always be tasks which, at the moment, which unfortunately, automated systems cannot do such as:
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bespoke notes (file notes, telephone attendance notes,attendance notes)
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bespoke letters
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bespoke emails
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Having fee earners type bespoke correspondence or amending lengthy legal documents on case management systems, means that fee earners are losing out on valuable chargeable time. So whilst it may be cost-effective for fee earners to do some of the automated tasks, some of the longer or bespoke tasks should still be done by administrative or secretarial staff.
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So whilst there is no doubt using case management systems increases productivity and efficiency, you still need to think about how fee earners use these to fully maximise the productivity potential of your case management system.
If you are wanting your fee earners to achieve those chargeable hour goals, digital dictation is one area that all legal practices should look at.
Firstly, it is more cost-effective than a fee earner typing their own documents.
Secondly, it may mean your lawyers do not have to stay late (or work at weekends) to meet their chargeable hours’ targets as it is reducing their admin.
Thirdly, it may result in lawyers feeling less stressed and less pressurised at work. It reduces time spent on transcription which can be better used elsewhere.
Fourthly, it allows you to provide administrative support when they are working from home.
Fifthly, it will increase productivity. It means for smaller firms, that lawyers can improve lockup and cash flow management.
This simple change could be an easy win-win scenario for any legal practice.
A Trusted UK Legal Transcription Company
Secure Legal Transcription
OutSec Legal are GDPR compliant. We are Cyber Essentials Certified and independently audited annually. We employ bank-level security so your dictation and transcription data stays safe.
Quality Legal Transcriptions
Our legal transcriptionist team have a minimum of 10 years of experience working in the legal sector together with CILEX or Legal Secretarial qualifications; this enables us to provide the best quality transcriptions OutSec Legal guarantee accurate transcriptions..
Guaranteed Turnaround Times
Fast turnaround times to ensure your legal transcription is returned to your legal practice on time. We also offer urgent transcription services for those who are under time pressures.
Frequently Asked Questions
At OutSec Legal, we are always happy to answer any questions you may have.
That is why we have put together a searchable set of frequently asked questions just for you:
However, if you have any additional questions why not get in touch.
What Makes OutSec Legal The Best Legal Transcription Service & Legal Document Production Service in the UK?
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OutSec Legal has been designed exclusively for the legal sector to offer the best quality remote legal typing and legal document production, formatting and editing services at cost-effective pricing.
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OutSec Legal's services are perfect for sole practitioners, barristers, mediators, law costs draftsmen, law firms, in-house legal departments and barrister's chambers;
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OutSec Legal are GDPR compliant.
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OutSec Legal are Cyber Essentials certified which is audited and assessed independently.
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OutSec Legal only use experienced legal secretaries, legal copy typists, notetakers, minute takers, legal document production and editing specialists, all of whom have signed strict confidentiality agreements with us.
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With OutSec Legal there is no need for expensive dictation equipment.
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OutSec Legal offers a free dictation app to customers. This allows legal dictation files to be recorded on your smartphone or tablet.
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With OutSec Legal there are no contracts, no monthly fees, no minimum spends or hidden fees. The service is on a pay-as-you-go basis, meaning you are in control.
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OutSec Legal offers copy typing, fix and format, file conversion and legal authoring services to name but a few.
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OutSec Legal provides itemised billing each month, so you know what you have spent and when.
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OutSec Legal are able to work with your existing legal precedents, legal templates or lists of standard paragraphs.
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Our document production specialists can even improve upon existing templates or precedents for you to improve productivity.
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OutSec Legal offers multi-voice transcription. We can transcribe recorded remote meetings and provide Zoom transcription., Microsoft Teams transcription & Skype transcription.
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We can also work directly with your existing case management software such as Proclaim, ALB, Ochresoft, Intelliworks, LEAP, Visualfiles and many more.
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OutSec Legal can integrate with leading digital dictation software platforms such as BigHand, Dictamen, Olympus ODMS and Philips Speechwrite.
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OutSec Legal is based in the United Kingdom and is a UK-registered company.