About Beale & Co

Beale & Co is an International Construction and Insurance Law Specialist founded in 1838. They have 185 employees spread across offices in London, Bristol, Dublin and Dubai.

The firm is well known for being a leader in advising construction, engineering, infrastructure and insurance companies.

Joe Coffey, Head of IT, joins us to share the firm’s experience in swapping over to Philips SpeechLive Dictation…

Finding The Right Fit

Prior to working with VoicePower, Beale & Co was using BigHand for their dictation and transcription needs. However, in 2022 the firm decided that it wanted to move its technology over to the cloud.

Unfortunately, this left them in a tricky situation given that BigHand was hosted on their own servers. This wasn’t the only problem though, as Joe explains:

“We were looking for a web-hosted service and BigHand did not offer a secure web service.” – Joe Coffey, Head of IT

Web hosting is particularly appealing due to the fact no software needs to be installed. Instead, the users can access the software through an internet browser. Not only does this take up fewer IT resources, but it is convenient too.

It was these factors that led to Beale & Co reaching out to speech recognition and dictation experts, VoicePower Ltd.

SpeechLive Dictation Makes The Cut

After discussing their requirements with VoicePower Ltd, Beale & Co was recommended SpeechLive by Philips.

SpeechLive is a cloud-hosted dictation platform that has both digital dictation and live speech recognition capabilities. More importantly for this client, SpeechLive has the option of a desktop app or using it in the web browser.

With all of the boxes ticked, VoicePower started the firm on a 14-day free trial so that they could test all of the legal requirements and see whether it was the right fit.

Following this period, Beale & Co decided that the SpeechLive Dictation system was exactly what they needed and they rolled it out to approximately 60 users.

“It was the easiest transition I have done in 20 years! It was very smooth with no issues at all really.” – Joe Coffey, Head of IT

The simple use of SpeechLive is clear as Joe explains that Beale & Co use SpeechLive for “all kinds of dictation” including notes, reports, emails and more.

However, the most important benefit that the firm has found with its new workflow is:

“Since using SpeechLive we have been able to reduce the amount of infrastructure needed and the associated cost that comes with that.”

“Attentive” Support Set Them up For Success

The key to any successful technology roll-out is support and guidance from industry experts. Beale & Co completely understood this from the offset and invested in VoicePower’s specialist training and technical support package.

The team undertook Author and Typist training with VoicePower’s knowledgeable trainers and they have unlimited access to the support team should they have any queries.

“The VoicePower support team are always available and attentive.” – Joe Coffey, Head of IT