WolfBlock rolls out Crescendo digital dictation across nine US offices

Laval, Quebec, Canada, January 5, 2006 - Crescendo Systems Corporation, a leader in document creation and management systems, today announced that national law firm Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen has decided to implement a firm-wide digital dictation, workflow management and transcription system to replace its analogue equipment. Following a successful pilot and phase 1 implementation in the family law and business litigation departments, the new system will be rolled out to more than 150 users by the end of 2007. According to President Costa Mandilaras, this new signing represents major inroads for Crescendo into the US legal market.

Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen, a multi practice law firm with more than 300 attorneys, previously used tape-based dictation technology in its nine branch offices. In an effort to reduce report turnaround and better protect confidential data, the firm decided to look into digital dictation technology in early 2006. "Damages, losses, lack of security: tape-based dictation is unreliable by nature. We had heard about the benefits of digital dictation technology, so we decided to contact a number of vendors. But thanks to their wealth of routing and reporting functionality, Crescendo clearly raised the bar right from the start," explains John Brooks, Senior Application Specialist.

Major productivity improvements
Each of the firm's nine branch offices used to handle its respective documentation volumes independently. Now thanks to DigiScribe-XL, the firm can pool transcription work and monitor it centrally. "Attorneys in the branch offices have the choice to either route a dictation to their local secretary during work hours or send it to the central pool for the night team in our Philadelphia head office to take over. As a result, completed reports are made available the next morning, sometimes the same night. Our turnaround time is now 24 hours and less, even down to a few minutes for urgent dictations, and the word 'backlog' has disappeared from our vocabulary," says Brooks.

"The system gives us a whole new level of visibility on dictation volumes, workloads, productivity levels, etc., so we always know what is going on in the firm," adds Brooks. Work can be allocated based on each secretary's workload, allowing the firm to leverage its existing resources and ensure optimal productivity.

Outstanding User Feedback
After the pilot phase was over, a questionnaire was sent to both attorneys and secretaries. "The feedback was simply outstanding," says Brooks.

"As of today, we have 23 lawyers using Philips handheld devices and DigiDictate-IP, Crescendo's PC dictation application, which allows them to easily sort, edit and prioritize their dictations on screen. No need to run to their secretary's desk every five minutes to deliver urgent tapes. The new system was so well received that I now see more and more attorneys from other departments asking to upgrade to digital too, based on their colleagues' productivity improvements. I have rarely seen that!" says Brooks.
"On the transcription side, 50 secretaries/document specialists are currently using the DigiPlayer-IP playback application in conjunction with Microsoft® Word. The unique Crescendo technology ensures that no confidential information is ever stored on the local PC. This is just another critical feature, given the highly confidential nature of our data," notes Brooks.

A Smart Investment
"We are very glad we chose Crescendo." Brooks goes on to comment. "Not only does their technology make our users' lives easier, but they also answered all our questions and knew how to adapt to our firm's specific requirements. Their sales and support representatives made all the initial configurations to ensure the system would run smoothly in our IT environment, and we haven't had any problems."

Last but not least, the security headaches of the analogue world are long gone for the IT Department. Since the firm installed DigiScribe-XL, not a single dictation was lost, thanks to both the reliability of the system and the back-up procedure on the Crescendo Wide Area Service server.

The firm now plans to roll out the new system to at least 50% of its attorney staff by the end of 2008. The firm is also looking forward to implementing iDeliver from Crescendo, a web-based interface that will allow attorneys to upload their dictations when working remotely. "In the meantime, we are harvesting the first benefits of DigiScribe-XL and have already recommended it to four other large US law firms," concludes Brooks.

"It is with great pride that we now count WolfBlock as one of our customers," says Costa Mandilaras. "Working with a law firm of this caliber demonstrates major momentum for Crescendo in the US legal market. Our technology delivers tremendous ROI because it turns the investment to replace old hardware into a source of tremendous cost savings through improved productivity and better resource allocation. A prestigious reference like WolfBlock is clearly paving the way for its adoption".

About Crescendo
Crescendo Systems Corporation develops digital dictation, speech recognition (powered by SpeechMagic), transcription, authentication and workflow management systems for the legal, health care, insurance and law enforcement sectors. Since its inception in 1990, Crescendo has provided more than 2,000 installations totaling over 200,000 users worldwide. The company is present in Canada, USA, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Australia, Hong Kong and South Africa. For more information, please visit http://www.crescendo.com/  

About WolfBlock
Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen is a century old, multi-practice law firm with offices in Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC. The firm has more than 300 attorneys and government relations professionals who offer the full complement of legal services to corporate, government, nonprofit and individual clients locally, nationally and internationally. The May 2006 issue of Intellectual Property Today ranked WolfBlock as #71 on this year's list of top trademark firms, which was comprised of 126 law firms and individuals. For more information, please visit http://www.wolfblock.com/   

Press Contact
Claire Betis
Marketing Manager, Crescendo Systems Corp.
1 800 724 2930