Productivity tools you already have

Productivity tools you already have

23 Mar 2021 | Insights

Productivity tools you already have – ten fingers and a voice

In a world where productivity really matters, whether for business profitability or simply helping your mental health by removing frustrations, one of the quickest ways to convey information is to speak with one another.

We might not like receiving or making cold calls let alone a straightforward telephone call, and a lot of us tend to hide behind the keyboard and use text as a preferred method of communication. 

We have certainly evolved into a type of keyboard warrior (pun intended).  Even as I write this, I’m conscious that at a typing speed of 96 words per minute, my text will reach a wider audience than dozens of calls.  And to be honest, I hate the idea of video!

In a world where typing is usually by 2 thumbs than 10 fingers, typing is now becoming a chore, a bore and causing frustration. 

If you want to learn how to type with 10 fingers, then check out Mavis Beacon Free who has been teaching typing since the 1980s!  

Or have you thought about simply using your voice? 

The simple fact is, we generally speak at a comfortable 150 words per minute.  An average typist can type at 60 words per minute but a fast and experienced typist is around 100 words per minute; some of us are even faster!   

Dictating is a skill of itself.  It takes practice, just as it does to learn to type with 10 fingers.  The upside is that you already have a lot of experience in using your voice.

Here are my top tips for learning how to dictate.

  1. Imagine you are preparing to leave a voicemail. By placing ourselves into that state and imagining that we are speaking with someone means we are already thinking about the words we want to say.  We do this unconsciously, but it wasn’t always like that.  Do you remember a time when you hated leaving a voicemail (perhaps you still do)?
  2. Don’t be a perfectionist! If you’re new to dictation then at this stage it really isn’t important to have all of your spoken words arranged in an immaculate way.  A great secretary will understand what you mean, and will punctuate your transcript for you.  If anything, your tone of voice really helps the listener to know where to punctuate, so just imagine you’re telling someone a story.
  3. Background noise does matter but not in the way that you think. Some people are put off dictating because they may be in hearing distance of other people.  If you are uncomfortable making phone calls and leaving voice messages in front of others, then this will likely affect your willingness to learn dictation.  Once you are conscious about your environment, you can do something to change it.
  4. Get your first draft out using your voice. Use dictation as a quick way to get your first draft written.  You can always update it and amend it later but at least it’s out of your head and onto a page where you can see it.  As you practice your dictation, your first drafts will become more perfect over time.
  5. Doesn’t it take longer to have someone else type it? This is a common perception but it usually not the case, particularly once you get used to dictating your drafts.  The reality is that we can return a piece of dictation very quickly – often within the hour.  How does that time compare with your own typing?

Try another free tool to help you practice

There are lots of dictation apps for smart phones and a lot of them are free.  If you would like to give it a try, then get in touch and I can advise on what will work best for you. 

To have your dictation transcribed is cost-effective.  Our costs are £1.35 to have a minute of dictation typed up, so 10 minutes of your voice will cost you £13.50. 

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What Our Customers Think

The work is completed accurately, with a choice of turnaround times and over extended office hours.

DGB Solicitors

They simply get the job done and they work around the clock too. We’ve saved salary and temp costs in our business by outsourcing the typing.

Child Law Partnership

They are the prime outfit for outsourced document
production.
Open Plan Law

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5 times you could outsource your typing

5 times you could outsource your typing

2 Feb 2021 | Insights

When is it a good time to outsource your typing?. 

Typing is necessary – there’s just no getting away from it.  Whether it’s responding to an email, editing a document or writing a file note, you either do it yourself or you pay someone to do it for you. 

Outsourcing can be a word that causes anxiety to some because it hints at structural change, redundancy and cost cutting for survival.  But we can flip that around to positive action and instead rename that word to ‘delegating’. 

From our clients’ experiences, here’s the top reasons why they chose to send their typing outside of their business.

1 Recruiting a new fee-earner

Recruiting new staff in your business is, hopefully, a sign of growth.  You will want your new hire to be as productive as possible, to feel supported, and start making money for your business as soon as possible. 

If you don’t have capacity for your support staff to cope with the extra work to be generated, then it can be a great opportunity to offer external resources to help your new team member work to their strengths. 

New staff means introducing them to new ways of working – your way of working – so introducing a remote support service won’t cause too much change-related-stress.

2 Staff sickness and holiday absence 

Organising a holiday rota and being fair to staff so they can have time off during school holidays can be a managerial nightmare.  Throw in sudden sickness absence, and stress levels in the team increase. 

Having a flexible resource ready to go means you always have a back-up plan and can be assured that work gets done and costs are kept to a minimum.

3 Keeping your business continuity plan updated

Just as above, those unexpected turn of events can throw normal operations into disarray.  Being prepared doesn’t cost much in money and can save you tons of time and energy in the long run. 

Believe it or not, hooking up dictation technology and sharing some templates is really easy.  You’ll get a lot of boxes ticked for your compliance because you have your back-up plan.

4 An unexpected large project

 For those occasional times when a piece of work needs more time than your support team have capacity for.  Here are a few examples of how we have helped our clients.

  • An old head lease document, poor quality PDF that can’t be converted to text, needs to be re-typed. It takes 16 hours of typing time. 
  • A 1-hour Zoom video meeting can take 8 hours to transcribe.
  • Police interview tapes are needed in a hurry.  Four hours of interviews could take 30 hours to transcribe.

5 Sick of doing it yourself

New business start-ups rightly do almost everything themselves.  Then comes the time when workload increases and a dawning realisation that time is better spent elsewhere.  Savvy business owners will have figured out where systems can be automated, templates can be created and repetitive work is treated like a process. 

But there are times when a spanner is thrown into the works.  Broken documents, long boring typing jobs or data input and struggles with PDF conversions, are just a few examples. 

None of the above circumstances require redundancy or a sharp reduction in staff numbers.  In most cases, restructuring workflow presents the opportunity to utilise employed staff to produce more and work to their strengths.

You might have your own specific requirements that you need help with.  If so, please get in touch  as I’m sure we can help you. 

 

What Our Customers Think

The work is completed accurately, with a choice of turnaround times and over extended office hours.

DGB Solicitors

They simply get the job done and they work around the clock too. We’ve saved salary and temp costs in our business by outsourcing the typing.

Child Law Partnership

They are the prime outfit for outsourced document
production.
Open Plan Law

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6 Ways To Get The Most From Your Digital Dictation System

6 Ways To Get The Most From Your Digital Dictation System

4 Jan 2021 | Insights

If you have a dictation system already, or perhaps considering an investment, these 6 tips will help you drive efficiency in your practice. 

 

1 Know your turnaround time

Did you know that a slow turnaround time STOPS people using the dictation system because they think it’s faster to do it themselves?

We measure the turnaround time from when a task becomes available to the secretary until it’s completed and the document is returned to you.  This takes into account any time that your work is stuck waiting in a queue.    

Some dictation systems produce a report that measures turnaround from the time a typist picks up a task and completes it.  This is only helpful as a comparison of speed of typing.  It doesn’t take account of the time your task has been sat waiting in a queue. 

Get in touch if you want some help with analysing your reports.

2 Get your notes typed up

The obvious use is audio transcription, but there’s a difference between transcribing notes and completing a form, or creating a report from a precedent.  Speech recognition software can give you a basic transcript (if you don’t mind correcting the errors) but humans can follow complex instructions and can work intuitively to give you what you need.  

If you’ve never used dictation before, think of it as telling a story or leaving a voicemail.  There’s no need to dictate punctuation as experienced secretaries will understand you and will punctuate with accuracy without changing the meaning of your sentences.

3 Send a voice instruction

Sending a voice note with instructions through the dictation system is an efficient way of alerting your support team to a new task in their work queue.  It’s more secure than email as you can quickly pass on explanatory information.    Did you know you can attach a document too?  So why not dictate those amendments you need to update your document?

4 Do you need a memory jogger or an audit trail?

How often do you give instructions then forget about them?  The task list in your dictation workflow system has multiple uses.  It gives you a visual reminder of what work is waiting to be done or has been completed.  It’s also a great way to monitor quality of the work produced.  The fact that every action is logged in a database we can see when the work arrived, who actioned it and when and if there was any query noted in the task. 

5 Analyse your costs and keep control of them!

How do you know if you’ve got a fast or slow typist?  Dictation workflow systems have reports to help you categorise and analyse your tasks and put a cost to them.  Did you know you can find out what the cost per dictated minute is from your reports? You can also analyse your average turnaround time to have work completed. 

6 Assign costs to a client file

Admin support is usually an overhead in a business but there are sometimes cases where the costs of certain tasks can (and should) be passed directly to your client to bear.  Release yourself from your overhead burden and ask for your documents and typing costs to be added to a client or matter file.  The digital dictation workflow system accurately produces reports and costs broken down to a matter reference.

What Our Customers Think

The work is completed accurately, with a choice of turnaround times and over extended office hours.

DGB Solicitors

They simply get the job done and they work around the clock too. We’ve saved salary and temp costs in our business by outsourcing the typing.

Child Law Partnership

They are the prime outfit for outsourced document
production.
Open Plan Law

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Zoom Meetings Transcription

Zoom Meetings Transcription

15 Nov 2020 | Insights

Zoom meeting transcription

Our cost-effective pay-per-minute transcription of Zoom meetings also has a certificate of accuracy.  Your Zoom meeting can be recorded either to cloud or directly to your PC (cloud is recommended).  Once recorded you have two versions available to download: video and audio.  But don’t worry if you only have the video available.  To have your Zoom meeting transcribed we have a facility to convert video to an audio format. 

We need the audio format so that our transcribers can use their footpedals to control the playback of the audio, leaving their hands free for fast typing.  That’s right, humans listen and transcribe your recording.  We don’t rely on voice recognition software.  You will receive a verbatim transcript with a layout similar to a script. 

Other video conference platforms most likely have the same facility.  Certainly, Microsoft Teams has caught up to Zoom and now offers the same recording feature.

Skim-reading a transcript is a lot quicker than re-watching a Zoom meeting video

As you’re reading this text you will no doubt be skim-reading.  Reading a script is a lot faster than watching a video.  That said, transcribing a video takes time to do.  At Bluebird we can type an average of 85 words per minute which is usually twice as fast as the average ‘touch typist’ and we have specialist transcription kits to help us.

As many of our clients can testify, we’ve saved them hours of their time as they tried transcribing a client testimonial video themselves.  We’ve also saved a business 10 hours of typing time for transcribing a disciplinary meeting – something that needed to be kept confidential and away from internal prying ears.

A certificate to say it’s true and accurate

Do you need your transcript to be verified as true and accurate?  We proof-read all Zoom meeting recordings and are confident to give you a certification of accuracy to accompany your transcript.

Our prices are based on the length of the recording so you can very quickly calculate the cost of your Zoom meeting transcription.

If you have any questions that aren’t answere here please get in touch.

 

 

Do you need captions?

A time stamped transcription can help you with that.

For you to refer to, we’ve created a helpful guide for you to refer to for best practice in recording meetings for transcription. You can download it here

DICTATION TRANSCRIPTION
Download our Multivoice Dictation Best Practice

People notice your poor document formatting

People notice your poor document formatting

15 Nov 2020 | Insights

Is poor formatting of documents a good thing or bad thing?

Have you ever heard a colleague make negative comments about the quality of another law firm’s legal document?  The number of typos or the misaligned paragraphs or inconsistent numbering or giant gaps on the page?  It’s frustrating because when you try and amend it, the paragraphs move around and the numbering seems to get more erratic.

That begs the question as to whether other lawyers are saying it about your documents.  And more importantly, whether clients are saying it … and how does that affect their confidence in your skills.  People notice your formatting, just like you notice other people’s.

Good lawyers train for years in how to be detailed, how to be precise.  They train how to advise clients on very specific areas of law in extremely high value transactions, where an error can cost millions.  So the detail is vital.

Is how you look meeting expectations?

Law is a competitive market, and expectations of the firm of its lawyers, and in turn the clients of the firm, are high.

Lawyers grow up using Word through school, university and law school and, when they join a law firm, they will generally be working in their own documents.  This is often because secretaries are working for a lot of people and there is a need for self-sufficiency.  I can be particularly stressful when a secretary has gone home or when there is a lot going on in the middle of a complex transaction.

Of course, this means that lawyers are expected to not only be great lawyers in providing quality service and valuable advice to clients but also be proficient in preparing and formatting complex documents in Microsoft Word.

Expectation is high among clients too.  And rightly so.  Clients pay substantial fees for their lawyers’ advice, and their expectation is that the work product itself should also be of high quality as well.

So if the document format isn’t up to par or if numbering and cross-references are incorrect, it shows a lack of attention to detail which affects a law firm’s reputation.  Indeed, incorrect clause numbers and “error” cross-references could materially affect the meaning of the agreement.

Creating your house style will ensure your teams are keeping to the rules of documents and keeping you on brand.

Poor document formatting and construction is costing time

When stress levels are high, the hour is late and a deadline is looming, the smallest things in a Word document can distract from the main task in a lawyer’s hands.  That is delivering accurate and detailed legal advice and a quality service to the client.

It could be gap on the page or that the words in a paragraph seem to have a life of their own.  Perhaps the sub-clause numbering insists on starting at (d) instead of (a), or there are a bunch of cross-references which now say “Error”.  Or the font keeps “flipping back” when you keep changing it from Arial to Calibri.  Some of these will no doubt resonate.

It stands to reason that lawyers could gain a great deal from knowing more about Microsoft Word – the software they are using all day every day.

  • Lawyers benefit from the confidence and ease with which they are managing their workload, particularly if they are managing their own documents.
  • Clients will not only get great legal advice, but a well-formatted and consistent work product that reflects the care that the lawyer has taken in giving that advice.
  • Law firm owners and managers will have less non-chargeable time to write off on transactions with capped fees.
  • Family and friends get more time because instead of being in the office at 7pm, the Word-savvy lawyer is having dinner with the family or is in the pub!

Training and learning for self-sufficiency

If all that sounds like a no-brainer, the even better news is that it is very easily achieved.

Training that focuses on the areas that cause the greatest number of issues is where the training should target.  Those made-up Word “hacks” that get passed around may well end up causing much bigger problems further down the line.  We have our very own training “hacks” and online learning courses to put you on the right path.

If you didn’t know it, there are literally hundreds of shortcuts and tricks that Microsoft has save lawyer time, while still using the software correctly.

Self-sufficiency is going to be key in the post-COVID era.  The self-sufficient lawyer is one who is confident, not stressed, earning fees and meeting targets, and always meets their deadlines … which brings very happy clients and law firm managers.

And that’s a scenario that will make everyone happy.

Learn to do it the right way

Novum Learning, professional services solutions provider, and Microsoft Word services specialist Bluebird are running a series of complimentary courses designed for lawyers about legal document best practice.

The series allows practitioners to learn in a focused, industry-specific manner and to put the learnings into practice straight away.

The 30-minute sessions focus on showing lawyers how to make amendments to transactional documents correctly and efficiently, even when the document belongs to another party. The first session of the course covered crucial formatting techniques and shortcuts, which are a great foundation for this coming session. It shows lawyers that managing ongoing transactional documents under a tight deadline can be done efficiently.

The skills from this course will take lawyers another step closer to self-sufficiency, which is becoming an expectation at law firms, especially those looking at continuing to offer flexible working arrangements even when working in the office becomes a usual practice again. Nevertheless, efficient document management is key to shortening the turnaround of matters and reduces the time lawyers spend on non-billable work.

Discover more about our courses

5 essential Word tools to format your documents

5 essential Word tools to format your documents

15 Nov 2020 | Insights

Use these five essential Word tools to format your documents

There are various tools available to assist with document amendments, some of which are more well-known than others.  If you can master the correct way to use these tools you will save a ton of time and headache for your document users.  Check out our Online Learning for Document Formatting for video demonstrations.

  • Format Painter allows you to fix the incorrect formatting of a paragraph by applying the format of a correct paragraph elsewhere in your document.
  • Paste using Keep Text Only is correct but you should always paste into a blank paragraph that has the correct style applied.
  • Clipboard can store pieces of text to insert later.  You can take a piece of text from one document, put it on the Clipboard and insert it later into another document.
  • Ctrl Shift E is a shortcut to toggle Track Changes on and off if you are making live amendments, while the Status Bar will give you a visual cue that Track Changes are turned on.
  • Use Compare Documents in the Review tab for making changes into a clean document, and showing what changes have been made.

It all starts with pasting

When adopting safe pasting practices like using “Keep Text Only”, the text doesn’t always appear in the format you expect.

The reason for this t is that it’s not just about how you paste – and Keep Text Only is definitely the right way to go – but where you paste. If your cursor point is on an empty paragraph mark that does not have the right style applied to it, your insert may still go wrong.

The good news is that this is not difficult to fix if you use the correct technique and follow Word’s rules or – better still – if you learn how to insert the text correctly in the first place.

Learn to do it the right way

Novum Learning, professional services solutions provider, and Microsoft Word services specialist Bluebird are running a series of complimentary courses designed for lawyers about legal document best practice.

The series allows practitioners to learn in a focused, industry-specific manner and to put the learnings into practice straight away.

The 30-minute sessions focus on showing lawyers how to make amendments to transactional documents correctly and efficiently, even when the document belongs to another party. The first session of the course covered crucial formatting techniques and shortcuts, which are a great foundation for this coming session. It shows lawyers that managing ongoing transactional documents under a tight deadline can be done efficiently.

The skills from this course will take lawyers another step closer to self-sufficiency, which is becoming an expectation at law firms, especially those looking at continuing to offer flexible working arrangements even when working in the office becomes a usual practice again. Nevertheless, efficient document management is key to shortening the turnaround of matters and reduces the time lawyers spend on non-billable work.

You can learn more about Advanced Word Mastery here. 

Discover more about our complimentary courses