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Voice tech & the digitally empowered attorney

The facts

The customer
Eastburn and Gray, PC, Pennsylvania, USA
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Philips partner
Graffen Business Systems
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The solution
SpeechExec Pro Dictation and Transcription Software
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With more than 145 years of experience, Eastburn and Gray, PC proudly serves its Pennsylvania community with a well-recognized “tradition of legal excellence.” Starting with a single attorney in 1877, the firm now encompasses more than 30 attorneys and serves local, regional, and national clients across three offices. While the firm has always been committed to providing outstanding service to clients and the community, technological enablement was needed.  See how this law firm adopted solutions designed for the needs of legal professionals to achieve this critical objective.

A petition for (enhanced) productivity

Marc Jonas is a shareholder in the firm, joining the team and establishing its Blue Bell, Montgomery County, PA, location in 2003. A self-proclaimed tech enthusiast and “gadget guy,” he’d already been utilizing various innovations at a previous firm to make the workday smoother and to get more done. Upon arriving at Eastburn and Gray, he immediately noticed opportunities to streamline processes and workflows by harnessing the power of advanced voice solutions. Keeping up with growing volumes of client projects, as well as quickly and accurately recording billable hours (the most critical part of tracking and enhancing an attorney’s productivity), were difficult to achieve with the outdated technologies the firm’s teams had been using. Mini cassettes and similar recording options are dependent on having a specific physical device on-hand and come with additional issues: unreliable audio quality, the scramble for clean tapes, hardware maintenance and replacement, and maintaining organized files among them. 

Jonas knew that there was an easy and very feasible way to get past the challenges associated with outdated technology. He lobbied for the firm to adopt steps toward modernization. Just as the most gifted athletes need the right shoes to win races and the greatest chefs need quality ingredients to cook delicious meals, the talented and hardworking attorneys at Eastburn and Gray needed the right tools to help them optimize their workday in an increasingly digitally driven world.

Search + serendipity = solution

In an effort to lead by example, Jonas began exploring new voice solutions on his own. He knew of the rich heritage and reputation of Philips as a provider of high-quality technologies. Then, at a local American Bar Association (ABA) event, serendipitously he met Brian Ross of Graffen Business Systems, a Philips solution provider that offers expert consultation, installation, training, and support to voice technology users. After Ross demonstrated the robust capabilities of the cloud-based solution Philips SpeechLive (which also works in combination with Philips SpeechExec Pro dictation and transcription software), Jonas began working with Ross to introduce the solution at Eastburn and Gray’s Blue Bell office. 

Linking authors and legal assistants, SpeechExec Pro is an enterprise-grade digital application that facilitates communication, the setup of individual workflow settings, and organizational flexibility to help save time and resources. Offering workflow management and automation for enhanced productivity, alerts, and notifications for new or high-priority tasks, and the highest levels of encryption and backup functionality, it makes monitoring and tracking the many aspects of the legal workflow easy. Eastburn and Gray have complemented SpeechExec Pro with Philips SpeechLive, an innovative cloud-based application that automatically converts voice to text with advanced speech-recognition capabilities and routes recordings for transcription and further processing. 

Having helped many legal professionals optimize their workday during his 36-year career, Ross says, “I don’t know how a productive firm could function without solutions like these,” adding thoughtfully that in a competitive field such as law where service is expected to be both fast and high-quality, “it’s in every one’s [the attorney, the firm, and the client] best interest to harness the capabilities of advanced voice technology.” 

Efficiency and flexibility that “speak” for themselves

The attorneys, legal assistants, and administrative staff at the Blue Bell office saw irrefutable positive impacts in their workflow, led by Jonas, who maximizes every aspect of the Philips solutions implemented at the firm. The resulting efficacy and increased work output did not go unnoticed by Eastburn and Gray’s Doylestown office, which had continued experiencing the issues posed by legacy dictation tools. Soon, they too implemented SpeechExec Pro and SpeechLive, and now about half the attorneys and legal assistants across the firm use some combination of the two solutions.  

Some of the key benefits the firm has realized include:

Flexibility and mobility: Jonas is diligent about optimizing time and keeping track of billable hours. SpeechLive allows him to do so easily and seamlessly throughout his workday. Drafting memos as he’s leaving a client appointment, recording notes from his car after a municipal meeting (which may be late at night), referencing action items from cross-examination of a witness at a public hearing – these are all examples of how he’s removed the boundaries of the traditional office and traditional office hours and can send work to transcription or his assistant anytime, from anywhere. As the legal world evolves, like most business sectors, to include more remote and hybrid work arrangements, it’s important to have tools with all the feature functionality available at a desk…ready to go from any device or platform. 

Resource optimization: Being able to do more with less staff is a challenge faced by many firms today. Philips intuitive applications allow attorneys to be more self-sufficient and allow support teams to do more in less time. At Eastburn and Gray, “floaters” (legal assistants not assigned to specific attorneys) can help when and where needed, so the firm can accommodate for fluctuations in work volume. Because files can be accessed 24/7 from any device, the ebbs and flows of work are absorbed by whichever assistant has the bandwidth and are no cause for panic or confusion.  

Scalability: Burnout is common in a high-pressure, high-stakes field such as law, and it’s an industry that has typically been marked by long hours that encroach upon evenings and weekends. Although the billable hour can be described as the bane of a lawyer’s existence, Jonas emphasizes that speech-to-text technology is of significant help in reducing stress while increasing results. Especially for emerging talent, it’s important to learn how to manage time, use automation where appropriate, and delegate effectively to mitigate the amount of time spent on unnecessary tasks. “As you progress in your legal career, you will take on more clients, have an increasing number of commitments, and so forth,” he points out, “and mastering the art of assigning work to the right support people and using technology to make the most out of every pocket of time is how you can do that – while still protecting your personal time.” 

Recognized by the Best Lawyers in America four times in his practice area, and recently for 2023, Jonas speaks from experience, advising future generations of legal professionals to learn early on how to give themselves an edge. “Being a lawyer is a hard job, and I owe much of my success to how I’ve been able to use technology to my advantage,” he says, adding, “What I hope I’ve illustrated to younger as well as more seasoned (and entrenched) colleagues is that understanding, appreciating, and integrating the right technologies into your professional practice establishes work habits that enable you to grow your career.  Each day, I utilize and appreciate the technical support that my firm colleagues and I receive from Brian Ross and his team at Graffen.”

Being a lawyer is a hard job, and I owe much of my success to how I’ve been able to use technology to my advantage

Marc Jonas
Shareholder and co-chair of the firm’s Land Use and Zoning practice group Eastburn and Gray, PC

The solution

More satisfied customers

“The evolution to SpeechLive has been extremely smooth, and accomplished with very minimal training.“

Gale Kicinski, Records Administrative Supervisor, Port Huron Police Department

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“The SpeechLive mobile app has given some of the therapists who are new to dictation an ease of workflow. It is a skill in itself to talk rather than type.“

Sarah McEntee, Occupational therapist, team leader

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“Keeping my IT systems constantly up to date and reinvesting every three months was simply time-consuming. I wanted a cloud solution that was maintenance-free and easy to use.“

Matthias Kucera, Lawyer, Hard, Austria

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“This mobile way of working can be efficiently handled with the Philips SpeechExec Enterprise solution. The site managers dictate on the construction sites and the documents are transferred online. This makes us much faster than before and makes it easier for us to prioritize customer requests.“

Marco Strittmatter, Master Plasterer and Site Manager, Soyez Stuckateur GmbH

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