Digital Voice Recording

[insurance fan]

I'm hearing things about the ability to capture calls and attach the live call into my agency management system. does anyone have thoughts on this? I like it for e&o....

[InsMgmt]

First, let me just say that I'm not an attorney, never want to be an attorney, and do not want to pretend I'm as informed as an attorney when providing information to clients (though I do want to be able to charge by the minute, have clients pay through the nose for every minor administrative gesture, so that I might drive a new $75,000 car every two years, wear $3500 suits with $1,000 ties and $1500 shoes, live in a 10,000 SqFt house on top of the hill, and thumb my nose at Barack and Nancy.)

However, having said all of that, you had best make sure that 1) You state up front that you are recording the conversation and verbally secure the client's permission to do so (if they say yes and then tell you that they are recording the conversation as well, use the credit card company's tactic - hang up), and 2) make certain that the conversation cannot be altered in any way, shape or electronic form if you ever hope to bring it into court. Even then it might only serve to cause the client to think twice before proceeding with an E&O action. With the new standard for judges being how emotionally connected they can show themselves to be with the complainant in a case, you won't see much in the way of "fairness" when it comes time to "spread the wealth".

[Rochambeau]

Well, I can see using it as a CYA measure to facilitate doing signatureless changes. Someone wants to delete a car, just start the recorder and get the request on tape, then drag the recording to the management system.

What we always do for changes is to do what the insured requests and then send a confirming letter to the insured and scan our copy of that letter into the system. You're gonna end up noting your file of the conversation anyway because listening to those recordings is not something that you want to be doing.

[dafone]

We use this feature a lot. We are on Applied systems. Our phone voice mails come to us as an email and we can attach that to the customer. We also have the ability to record a phone conversation and attach it to a specific customer. One of our principals is also an attorney and he is the one that uses this the most. We use it for changes etc and many other things.
We have not had to tesst it in court but it does come in handy to help recall conversations.

df

[insurance fan]

What product/phone system do you use? When it's emailed to you, what type of file format is it in? wav? mp3? I would just think it would take up a lot of space when you attach it.

[dafone]

We have an Iwatsu phone system. It is a standard telephone system integrated with our computer system. Voice mails come to us as an email with a wav attachment. We can attach the email to the customer or company file as needed. We can also hit a "record" button on the phone whenever we want to record a conversation and when we finish, it comes to us as an email which we can attach.

df

[insurance fan]

We have an Iwatsu phone system. It is a standard telephone system integrated with our computer system. Voice mails come to us as an email with a wav attachment. We can attach the email to the customer or company file as needed. We can also hit a "record" button on the phone whenever we want to record a conversation and when we finish, it comes to us as an email which we can attach.

df

Can you change the file format from wav? I'm worried about space requirements.