There are however plenty of opportunities out there for those seeking to join forces and take their businesses in a different direction, and if it is by merger, we all know that it may not all be a bed of roses once the ink has dried, but one thing can be made smoother.  Taking the opportunity to merge and upgrade a core technology, such as Microsoft Office, and re-brand templates and precedents needn’t be a painful process. 

Templates in Microsoft Word are one of the most important productivity tools that exist in law firms.  They appear as documents and precedents and they interact with case management and CRM systems.  At a very basic level they provide the layout of faxes, agreements and letters.  More often lawyers rely on long, heavily structured and numbered documents containing codes, headings and styles which are customised for each firm.

In firms that are merging there will be different styles of templates, both in formatting and construction.  The number of documents could run into thousands.  

Templates are at the very core of functionality that makes Word so important and therefore their effective management is a must for every forward-looking legal IT manager. 

Document Direct has the technical know-how, capacity and resource to reformat and rebrand thousands of templates and can provide finished products in tight deadlines. Working in Office 2010 Document Direct can rebuild and rebrand templates, whether as a result of a migration to Word 2010 or a merger of two firms’ styles.

If you want more information contact Jayne Smith on 0151 227 9150/07976 852 359 or visit our contact page.

They’ll each make a donation in return for your hospitality.  Ideas for hosting your own party and how to donate are available here.

The Come Dine @ Mine event is run in partnership with BBC Radio Merseyside on Saturday 5th February 2011 at 6.30pm. To get you into the party spirit there will be a special show on BBC Radio Merseyside and our very own Jayne Smith will be joining Linda Mac and friends and getting the conversation underway and playing some suitable mood music.

There is not a family in the UK who hasn’t, at some point, been touched by cancer.  Clatterbridge, Your Cancer Centre, is one of the largest cancer centres in the UK providing radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatment services. It is the only charity that raises funds to directly benefit the patients of Clatterbridge Centre for Oncology and their families.

Join in the fun and listen live on the radio or internet.

To some clients we are a remote reception desk, answering and routing incoming calls. Others see us as their outsourced call centre, handling their customer support queries 24/7It doesn’t matter what volume of calls you receive, or your call pattern, we can provide a call answering service that is right for you. Using the latest telephony technology, we’ll answer every call personally and professionally in your company name, just as if we were based in your office. We record every single call we take, too, to ensure total transparency.

Some of our clients simply ask us to manage the overflow when their own staff are too busy, while others regard us as their 24-hour reception. We are also happy to provide short-term cover, for a company away day or shut-down period, or while your receptionist is away on holiday.

The flexibility of our call answering service is reflected in the flexibility of our pricing. We recognise that each customer has different requirements, so we will put together a bespoke call answering package based on the specific needs of your business, taking the time to design the most appropriate service and the most cost effective price plan.
There are so many different ways that companies use our call answering service, it is impossible to list them all.  Some popular examples include:

Switchboard service
You can use our switchboard service to answer all of your calls all of the time, or some of your calls some of the time.

Customer service helpdesk
A customer service helpdesk can help you reduce costs while keeping your customers happy.

Lone worker protection / employee absence hotline
Monitor and protect your employees when they are in the field, or provide a 24-hour hotline for employees to notify you when they are sick.

Disaster recovery
Minimise disruption to your business in the event of an emergency by redirecting all your calls to your outsourced receptionist.

Order taking
If you are running an e-commerce, direct sales or mail order business, save time and money by letting us handle your telephone orders and payments for your products.

Media response
Let us handle requests for your sales literature, application forms or information packs. With our media response line, you can maximise your media spend and efficiently collate the data you obtain from your marketing campaigns.

Engineer call out
You can use our engineer call out service to follow your escalation lists, and support your clients on a 24/7 basis.

Call us today to discuss your call answering requirements 0845 056 8450
To learn more about outsourcing your document production and typing call 0845 054 2252.

Whilst access to our servers will remain open at all times, ie can send us dictation and access will not be blocked, we will a skeleton staff working on the bank holidays. We will not, therefore be able to guarantee our usual fast turnaround times.

If you do have an urgent need, however, please call our out of hours telephone number 0845 056 8450 to contact a member of the team for help.

We wish you a very merry Christmas and prosperous and healthy New Year.

Principal, Debbie Black formed DGB in 2003, specialising in the defence of personal injury claims, in particular marine related injury claims.
Since then Debbie has developed a highly competitive business which is fast becoming a market leader in innovative client care and specialist advice. The team she has recruited has helped create a strong market presence and are all delighted to have been nominated in such an important business category.  Debbie said

When I took a step off the ladder of a large corporate firm in 2003 my business vision was to provide a high calibre, competitively priced, flexible legal service to clients. This inevitably involved considering the way in which legal services are delivered, embracing the use of technology and improving our skill set in key areas such as business development.

Over the last 18 months we have tripled our resources and have ensured that we are at the cutting edge in terms of business continuity and flexibility with new IT Cloud systems.

The Law Society has received a record number of nominations this year and competition has been stronger than ever. I am delighted that we have been shortlisted alongside some major and highly prestigious firms and for the recognition shown to the team for all their hard work and dedication.

The winner will be announced by BBC World News presenter Mishal Husain at the Law Society Awards Dinner on October 21 and we wish our client the best of luck!

There is a saying that necessity is the mother of invention.  Our current economic climate is forcing a lot of people to be more creative on how to get the best from their resources, the most precious of which is time.  Remote working certainly helps us make the most of that and with wireless technology and mobile communications a huge chunk of our precious time is saved just by working at home and not travelling to/from an office. 

We too are making the most of the latest secure internet technology and mobile communications as our own team of secretaries work from their own homes.  We’ve certainly see the benefit through the long hard winter of 2010 when we were delighted to report that every one of our team were able to turn up for work! 

There’s lots of ways to free oneself from an office and remote secretarial services is just part of it.  Consider posting letters from a computer anywhere in the world, online conferencing, intelligent telephone routing and sending dictation while on the move. 

Read about Blackberry dictation
Try remote services for free

Imagine having hundreds of tapes, each containing one letter or one file note and each marked with the file name and order of priority.  Each item is clearly visible to anyone in the firm so it is very easy to prioritise and pick out the urgent work.  Jobs can be assigned to the most appropriate team member and work can be evenly distributed across the firm.

Add an additional team of outsourced secretaries to the structure and the workflow can be reorganised again.   There is no reason to pay employed secretaries an hourly rate of pay on  salary to type up non-urgent (but essential) file notes when they are easily identified, outsourced to an external resource and produced on a totally different cost basis which is far more efficient.  The file notes are produced at a much less cost,  there are no blockages in the dictation workflow, the files are kept updated much faster and all this means that when clients phone the office for information they are being dealt with in a much more responsive manner. 

Throw into the mix Blackberry dictation. This gives solicitors the freedom to dictate while away from their desks.  Dictation can be sent to either in-house or outsourced secretaries at any time of the day.  Once linked to outsourcing they can enjoy the benefit of out of hours and weekend services so they can work from any place at any time.  I can hear the groans now, ’why would anyone want to work at any place and in the middle of the night’.  But spare a thought for those hard working individuals to appreciate their work life balance and want to take time out during the day to go to their kid’s schoon play.  Now they can catch up working in the evening without having to travel to the office.  Of course, there will always be the seriously driven lawyers who    

All this means that solicitors can be more responsive to their clients. 

Read article: Working Harder
Read article: The lasting legacy of the Internet is speed

The problem with this diagram is that it is very difficult for the secretaries to share their workload. You might ask, why would they want to? Each secretary receives their tapes which holds a lot of work, urgent work can’t easily be prioritized and as only one person can work on the tape, the secretary has the burden of churning out as fast as she can all of the documents relating to each set of files on the tape.

It’s not visible what type of work is on the tape either. Not many people take the time to write a dictation list and itemize the documents required. After all, that takes time too. So a tape will quite often have lots of special instructions, “do the usual”, admin tasks as well as correspondence and documents which can suddenly become urgent.

Multiply this scenario for each secretary in each department and multiply again by the number of departments, and it’s easy to see how backlogs of work can occur.

Read article: Working Smarter
Read article: The lasting legacy of the Internet is speed

We can find the information we need with a few clicks of a button, at any time and from any place with the increased usability of mobile technology. Life is certainly moving along at a pace. We can chat with our friends by email, text message and now Facebook. We can access our work systems from our own home PC using the internet. We have greater flexibility of the times that we can be available for work and the places we work.

Changes have been made in the office so that emails can be read on the move on Blackberrys, if the phone isn’t answered within three rings then a message is left with voicemail and solicitors now  type their own emails to provide a faster response to their clients.

In fact, we probably find that we’re forced to keep up, to keep moving with the times because failure to do so results in, well, failure.

But there is a greater impact on our psyche that this fast paced world is having. As we accept the fast flow of information as normal so do we think that a slow response is abnormal.  In fact it’s downright inconvenient and causes disruption.

Think about the last time you were put on hold on a telephone call. Perhaps you were told that you were in a queue and placed third. Did that information ease your anxiety levels? Probably not. After all, the reason for the phone call is usually a personal request for information, to make an appointment or query or pay a bill. We certainly don’t wait on hold to have a chit chat with our friends. So the delay causes an irritation which, if left unattended, then causes a massive inconvenience. That experience is well remembered too. The next time it’s necessary to phone that organization the expectation is to be put on hold. And as that has a detrimental effect on the perception of that company. One that is either far too busy handling lots of complaining phone calls, or not enough staff, or not enough staff working hard enough.

The speed of receiving information, being responsive to requests for information and customer service are all linked together.

How does a firm become more responsive to its clients?

Read article: Working Smarter
Read article: Working Harder