Ronan Daly Jermyn

Ronan Daly Jermyn is a leading Irish law firm offering specialist legal advice. The firm represents local, national and international clients engaged in a wide range of activities, as well as public sector bodies and governmental agencies. A progressive modern law firm, RDJ offers a partner – led service working closely with our clients to ensure their legal requirements are fulfilled in a proactive commercial fashion.

The Challenge - Banish the tapes to a skip

Until early 2003 Ronan Daly Jermyn, the Irish law firm with some 80 staff, was using a traditional tape-based dictation system to author documents at its Cork office. Although a step forward when introduced in the 1980s, it included the limitations and frustrations of all tape-based systems. Change was inevitable and the firm recognised the need to find a replacement that would stand them in good stead for the next 10-20 years.

Digital dictation, naturally, was the technology the firm wanted to employ, but before leaping to a decision a full assessment of the current system was completed to help with the choice.

“We wanted to be sure we understood the limitations of the old system and the requirements for the new,” said Muriel McCabe, IT Manager at Ronan Daly Jermyn. “We asked the authors and secretaries what they would like to see improved.”

Top of the wish list, of course, was banishing the tapes to a skip. All too often the tapes would break, sometimes literally disintegrating, says McCabe. With the tape would an unknown number of jobs that were, more often that not, impossible to recreate until their absence was realised.

Another inherent weakness with tapes that frustrated staff was their speed. Skipping through jobs on a tape to find priority tasks was slow and further weakened the tape. Once transcribed, the job needed erasing to prevent duplicate completion, again slowing the task.

“We also discovered some human factors that were further reducing efficiency,” said McCabe. “For example, secretaries would not start work on a new tape at 4:30 because they didn’t want to leave the tape ‘open’ overnight, so transcription work effectively ceased long before the office closed.”

Other problems highlighted by the assessment, and which could be overcome with digital dictation, included the inability to prioritise jobs; the necessity to physically move tapes between author and secretary; the inability to nominate the appropriate secretary for each job and the lack of remote working capabilities.

The Solution – Globally connected with WinScribe

The firm examined all the technology offerings and short listed two for closer examination. McCabe explains the selection: “We were immediately impressed with WinScribe. The specialist, DocMan (Ireland), was able to show how simple the management of the system would be, plus it was able to utilise a wide range of dictation methods, including handheld digital recorders, Speech Mikes and PC headsets”.

The firm immediately started a trial with 15 users. Existing PCs were upgraded with sound cards, where necessary and a WinScribe server introduced on the firm’s network.

“The trial was a huge success. Within a couple of days the users were completely comfortable with it and I started to get requests from other departments to speed up the installation right through the company. We had no hesitation.”

The Result - The Results Benefit the Whole Department

Roll-out to the whole office was brought forward, again running smoothly. After introductory training all the users have taken to the technology, recognising all its benefits. Such is the simplicity of operation that McCabe reckons she has had to spend a maximum of five minutes with any employees that wanted to learn more.

In addition to the office installation, the company has several users workingfrom home. One secretary, for example, is a full-time home worker and has a penchant for long transcriptions. This isn’t a problem as WinScribe can allocate such jobs to her automatically. The secretary simply connects to the server via the internet to collect jobs and deliver her work. Several authors also dictate work at home regularly, again submitting them via Internet. This is particularly useful for ad-hoc jobs that no longer require a trip to the office to complete.

And the urgent jobs? No problem. Because the jobs are no longer locked into a tape they can be routed immediately to an available secretary for instant turnaround.

Ronan Daly Jermyn now has 39 authors and 37 secretaries using WinScribe. Efficiency has leapt – McCabe estimates the process to be 20 per cent more productive – and the Friday afternoon rush to complete urgent jobs has been long forgotten. “It’s taken the panic out of the office”

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