Nationwide Solicitors Alliance
August 29, 2008
The legal profession’s newest influential organisation, Nationwide Solicitors Alliance (NSA), launches on 1st October. The NSA will provide a framework within which forward thinking small and medium sized law firms can work together to market their practices locally, improve the home buying process and help maintain and improve their share of the increasingly competitive legal services sector.
Benefits to member firms will include:
- agreed and standardised conveyancing documentation within local groups, reducing the transaction times, increasing profit which in turn benefits solicitors, estate agents and homebuyers
- a lead generating system providing enquiries directly from the public to NSA member firms using intelligent telecoms in residential conveyancing, HIPs, wills and probate, family, debt and employment law matters
- free telephone calls to ALL solicitors, licensed conveyancers, barristers, land registries, national and local law societies and courts. Free calls between solicitors and supporting estate agents using the NSA HIP for “local” referrals
- access to a referral network which enables NSA member firms to refer to each other directly, provding real control on the part of the referrer of the destination of the work without the requirement for “panel management” and all that often entails
- an NSA HIP which is designed to encourage estate agents to nominate an NSA member firm to deal with the legal title check, so optimising opportunities for LOCAL law firms,
- NSA Recruitment, providing a cost effective alternative to expensive recruitment agencies.
We’re delighted to announce our sponsorship the Nationwide Solicitors Alliance. All NSA members will receive a 10% introductory discount in addition to their outsource typing free trial.
Click here to apply for membership of NSA
What’s your reason to outsource your typing?
August 14, 2008
Document Direct is here to provide you with the best outsource typing service that you want and need. We’ve found many reasons why businesses and individuals choose to outsource their dictation. Answer our poll and let us know your reason. If you choose “other” then please leave a comment in the box at the bottom of the page.
Loading ...Feasibility of outsource typing
August 2, 2008
A busy lawyer dictates 30 minutes per day. This costs £36 per day to outsource. Over a month (20 days) this equates to £720, that’s less than £9,000 a year. The average cost to employ a secretary is £20,000 a year when on-costs are taken into account. It’s possible to slash the secretarial overhead by 50% yet still have 100% efficiency.
Preparing a cost analysis for a business which is already using a digital dictation system is quite easy. A digital system with workflow management allows reports to be created so it’s easy to see the length of the recording, how long it’s taken to be typed and who by. Document Direct uses the reporting system from its dictation system to calculate the charges on per minute of recording basis so costs comparator between in-house typists and outsourcing can be given almost immediately.
For those businesses still using analogue tapes, it would be useful for the length of the dictation to be recorded manually (for at least a week) as the dictation is being completed. Otherwise, quite often the only comparator will be the number of typed pages and completed documents.
A useful guide will be to “see” how much dictation a busy personal injury lawyer produces each week and how many typed pages that equates to.
In the documents available below it can been seen that a busy personal injury lawyer has produced 3 hours 11 minutes dictation in one week in June, which has produced 142 typed pages of text. The costs for this, at our current charge of £1.30 per minute, equates to £248.30. The length of typing time is irrelevant as the cost is fixed to the dictation time. Needless to say, all deadlines for completion of the work were met in good time. What is interesting to note is that the dictation was received during the working hours of 8.30am and 6.00pm, Monday to Friday, so costs should be compared to the emloyment of a temporary or permanent secretary in-house for those hours.
There are many different reasons to outsource and just as many benefits. Don’t take our word for it - click on the links below to download case studies from Document Direct clients.
- Case Study from Parkin S Booth, Insolvency Practitioners
- Case Study from India Buildings Chambers, Barristers
- Case Study from Brown Turner Solicitors
BigHand systems are helping increase profitability
July 24, 2008
The current economic climate is an opportunity for firms to look at their systems and ways to improve profitability and save costs.
Moving from stage 1 digital dictation, the simple transportation of dictation from fee earner to secretary, and onto stage 2, managing workflow, means firms can allocate their dictation to a larger pool of available secretaries. The “Big Brother” type technology means all work is visible and gone of the days when a secretary would sit and twiddle fingers with nothing to do. The benefit of workflow systems means it is now possible to analyse the type of work being dictated by individual fee earners and how individual secretaries perform.
BigHand’s recent press release gives some amazing statistics from some of their larger clients, for example, Venters Solicitors have saved £50,000 in only 12 months.
You can download BigHand’s press release by clicking here.
Of course, it goes without saying that being able to outsource typing will bring a huge cost benefit to firms. A good legal secretary is an unqualified fee earner and outsourcing the typing not only helps those secretaries be more productive but also improves services to client with faster turnaround times of documents.
Click here to have your own free trial of outsourcing.
Is a recession about to bite you on the bum?
June 26, 2008
There is some debate amongst our local business community that a recession is actually looming ahead of us. Some say that we’re being far too negative and only those who are playing at the top of their game will win the plenty of business that’s out there. Others are more conservative and some have already confirmed that the recession really started in September 2007 and that their predictions are coming true.
Are you worried about the recession that’s looming and costs spiralling out of control? Have you given any thought to how you can keep control of rising costs and possible reduction in income? It’s a sad thing to say, but salary costs are one of the first items to consider cutting and when redundancies are ahead that’s not good for anybody’s business. How can your business survive without its people?
Planning to outsource can give more cost savings than perhaps originally considered. Here’s what can be saved if the typing work of just one secretary was outsourced. You fill in the blanks.
- Salary £ [include bonus scheme, pension, holiday and sick pay]
- Square footage (rent) £
- Insurances £
- Desk, chair, computer £
- Software licences £
- Management Time £ [a difficult one, how much time is spent managing others?]
If you would like a consultation with us to find out how easy outsourcing can be, please click here.
What is the turnaround time for your typing?
June 13, 2008
Audio dictation to your secretary is now much faster with digital dictation systems. But is your typing being produced faster than normal. We want to know what your average turnaround time is for your work. We’ve been amazed to hear that some people can actually wait up to 3 days to get their typing done. Take our poll and leave any comments below - we’d love to hear from you.
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