The new way to hire a temp legal secretary

The new way to hire a temp legal secretary

30 May 2022 | Insights

Finding a short-term legal temp

Short-term legal temps are used to cover holidays, sickness or sudden absence, and it’s still very common for law firms to employ temporary legal secretaries.  What’s becoming increasing difficult, however, is finding an agency that manages temps.  Finding a great legal secretary who can immediately jump into your business and be productive can be harder.

Temporary positions are usually offered for longer term cover for, eg maternity leave.  Finding a legal temp to attend your office for a week or two-week assignment isn’t easy.

Why temp legal secretaries are helpful

Nobody likes to return to work after a holiday to a huge backlog of work, neither is it helpful for your clients to have to wait for responses. If matters become urgent then stress just builds up and continuity of service is essential for good customer service.  Having a business continuity plan is also required by the SRA, legal practictioners’ regulator.  Having a temp legal secretarial service gives you both service continuity and a back-up plan.

What’s different about the new way of using temps?

Instead of asking for a legal temp secretary to attend your office to work, it’s now possible to ask for a service to connect to your office systems.

There is a remarkable change in attitude since pandemic to allow external suppliers to connect to office systems.  Where previously, concerns about IT and people security, the ability of workers to be remote and productive, and the naturally cautious mindset of lawyers would prevent the cultural shift that has and is now happening.

Outsourcing could almost be re-defined to insourcing as assigning tasks and projects across teams and departments is easier to do with technology.  An external supplier, connected to your office systems, looks and behaves the same as your internal team.

You have all the benefits of a temp on tap, but without the need to reinvent the wheel with regards to onboarding, training, and supervision.

What you need to do to make the most of a remote temp legal secretary

Each practice varies slight with different technologies, culturally how PAs and secretaries are used and, of course, the workflow. Here are the questions to answer when you’re onboarding a new temp legal secretary service.

  1. Can your secretaries already work from home remotely?
  2. Which digital dictation system do you use?
  3. Can you easily send out dictations, or would it be easier for a secretary to connect to use your system remotely?
  4. Would you like your temp legal secretaries to access your case management system?
  5. Or, would you be happier to receive completed work back as an attachment to email?

Building a knowledge base about you

When you use a service, rather than contract directly with a temp, information is collated, training packs are designed and used to train a team who will work for you.  The service removes the need for you to have to train and supervise each time you have a new joiner in your business.

So when you have a sudden absence, your back up service has you covered.  When you have busy work periods, your back up service can help you meet demands.

Contact us if you would like to learn more about how easy it can be to set up a reliable service.

How does outsourcing digital dictation work

How does outsourcing digital dictation work

11 Feb 2022 | Insights

How to outsource digital dictation

The first question you want to know: how does outsourcing digital dictation work? And the answer to that is very simple.  Digital dictation takes the audio recordings of your voice notes (dictations) and sends them over the internet to the outsourced typist who will then return your completed transcribed document to you.

But that’s not all you want to know, is it? I expect you need to know what to dictate into, which digital dictation devices, if there’s any extra software needed, how does the typist know what to type?  Here’s the answer to the most frequent asked questions and my reasons for them.

Which digital dictation device is best?

Much depend on your style of working, whether you prefer to sit at your computer and if you already have a digital dictation system.

Since most of our work can be available on our mobile phones it will come as no surprise that there are plenty of options for digital dictation apps.  A dictation app will operate in the same way as any stand-alone device with the usual controls to pause, rewind, play and record.  The beauty of the app is it will send your dictations from your mobile so you have the freedom to work anywhere and at any time.

One of the main advantages of using mobile digital dictation apps is the software can sit on your phone and nowhere else.  You don’t need to install on your wider computer network and you can have all of the benefits of outsourced digital dictation within minutes.

That said, some businesses have internal secretaries and want to use outsourcing as a backup.  So there is a need for a more comprehensive system that can route work to different resources.  We recommend the cloud based system Speechwrite360 as it doesn’t touch your existing infrastructure and offers a full workflow solution with lots of automation features and full reporting.

What if we have an existing digital dictation system?

We can integrate with most existing digital dictation systems and the benefit means little or no change to how you’re currently working.  The main change is that instead of your recordings being transferred to your inhouse typist, you have the option of choosing to outsource so you have greater flexibility in how you work.

Producing your dictated documents in your format

Not only are your dictations transcribed into your templates but humans can far more easily understand instructions than any speech recognition.  For example, if you have a standard report template that is many pages long and contains standard text, you can dictate to us to fill in the blanks.

A long 30-page report may therefore only take 5 minutes of dictation to complete and you only pay for the dictation length, not the length of the document.  It’s straight forward to set up as we simply take a copy of any existing precedents and templates you have so you will always receive consistency from us.

Receiving your completed outsourced dictation work

There are a variety of ways to receive your completed work and the one you choose will depend on (a) ease of use (b) security of data (c) efficiency of working practices.

To start with, the easiest to use and which most people are comfortable with, is email.  We will simply attach the completed transcript and send it by email to an address you choose, whether that’s yourself or an administration point.

If security of data is paramount, then you may prefer to download your completed work from a portal.

If you have case management systems then you may decide to grant your outsourced team access so they can work for you just as an inhouse secretary would.  You retain all of the efficiencies of your case management system for template management, filing, time recording and diary management.

The choice for outsourcing is all yours

As you can see, outsourcing digital dictation has quite a few options as to how it works. It is easy to get started and quick to set up.  Contact us if you would like to discuss how you could work with outsourcing digital dictation and please visit our Pricing page for current costs.