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Sydney, March 18, 2011 - BigHand, the leading voice productivity vendor in the legal community and ALB Magazine's Dictation & Transcription 'Service Provider of the Year', today announced that one of Queensland's leading independent law firms, MacDonnells Law, has successfully deployed the BigHand digital dictation workflow solution across the entire firm, incorporating three offices and 120 staff. As a result MacDonnells Law has already experienced significant productivity gains right across its network of offices.

As part of a cutting-edge workflow productivity strategy, the MacDonnells Law journey began three years ago, as Alain Martin, ICT Manager, explained:
"Until we brought in BigHand, our journey had been long and tortuous. Our previous software encountered major technical issues when our firm converted to a full Citrix Desktop environment - such as pedal latency, sound quality and application stability. We had no visibility of workloads and it was not an efficient way of distributing work amongst staff. We piloted an enterprise level application in 2008 but the GFC put the project on hold, until 2010, when we selected BigHand for a pilot project across 20 staff in our Insurance teams.

The benefits of the BigHand software became immediately obvious and just a few weeks into the trial staff were keen to see BigHand deployed across the entire firm. Therefore, a decision was made to merge the pilot into a full deployment plan at the end of last year."

The ability of the BigHand for BlackBerry Smartphone Edition to allow remote dictation significantly increased the productivity of MacDonnells Law lawyers and the efficiency of secretaries. In addition, thanks to BigHand's user-friendly and intuitive desktop interface, the firm has been able to train other members of staff, such as temporary receptionists and mailroom juniors, to do basic document production. This use of cutting-edge technology has allowed MacDonnells Law to continue delivering high quality legal services in an increasingly fast-paced environment, turning client requests around in the shortest time frame possible.

MacDonnells Law Human Resources Officer, Lisa Milbourne has also been impressed by BigHand's software and the impact it has had on staff collaboration:
"One of the most impressive outcomes of deploying BigHand has been the improvement in our ability to share work across our three offices, resulting in greater efficiencies within our secretarial pool."

Commenting on their future relationship with BigHand, Alain Martin concluded:
"The service we have received from BigHand has been awesome, from their relationship team through to technical support. We are looking forward to utilising BigHand's server-based speech recognition module to further increase author productivity and integrating the software with our document management processes. MacDonnells Law have also just completed setting up a Disaster Recovery BigHand Server in our dedicated site and it is now operational. BigHand technology benefits the firm on many levels."

Sean Stephens, BigHand's ANZ National Sales Manager, also commented:
"When the call came from MacDonnells Law to step-up from a pilot to a full rollout, we immediately engaged and placed additional resources behind the project to ensure the transition was smooth and seamless for staff on the original pilot as well as new users. We have an exciting relationship with MacDonnells Law, they are as thorough and agile as we are, and are really utilising BigHand to its full potential - BigHand on Blackberry, Advanced Transcription Reporting, Work Overflow between Brisbane, Townsville and Cairns, and Citrix usage to name a few. We're now working with them on their upgrade strategy, which will include BigHand v4.0, the latest release of our software. We are once again pushing the boundaries of voice productivity technology, enabling law firms to get more done in a cost-effective manner, and there is no question that MacDonnells Law will be right there alongside us."

-ENDS-

About BigHand:
The BigHand Group supports over 130,000 professionals globally, across 1,300 organisations, and is based out of Sydney, London, Chicago and Toronto. BigHand is a Microsoft Gold Partner, BlackBerry ISV Partner, and was voted Australasian Legal Business Magazine's Dictation & Transcription 'Service Provider of the Year' for 2010, North American 'Dictation System of the Year' at the 7th Annual Law Technology News (LTN) Awards in 2009, and 'Mobile Product of the Year' at the UK CNet Business Technology Awards 2008. Further info is available at www.bighand.com.au