While many lawyers may have been slow to adopt technology in the past, this is not the case with Lighthouse Law. Not only are they delivering top quality legal solutions to their clients in Africa, the UK and Europe, but they have also created their own legal tech offering, LightHub.
Having embraced the use of tech in their own service delivery for a long time, and with a number of their clients highlighting the need for a comprehensive contract management solution, LightHub was the natural next step. LightHub is a comprehensive end-to-end contract management system designed by lawyers, for contracting experts. It is driven by a desire to make contracting quicker and easier, drive more consistency and lower risk in contracting, and its design and content draw from the extensive contract management knowledge of the Lighthouse team.
According to Justin Cornish, CEO of Lighthouse, their clients wanted a tech solution for managing and storing contracts, and because the firm sees itself as being not just a legal advisor but also a business partner to clients, Lighthouse set out to find a solution.
“When we didn’t really find anything in the market to meet the needs of what we were trying to do, we went through a process of creating our own proprietary software,” Posthumus shared. Lighthouse engaged Paul Waugh, an experienced software developer and director of tech solutions, to lead LightHub and develop a product using the latest cloud technology.
“With LightHub, you can automate processes, progress your negotiations quicker, and keep a full document and workflow history. It gives you useful data, increases your contract security and helps you manage your contract landscape as a whole,” explained Posthumus, a commercial attorney who leads the Projects and Innovation team at Lighthouse Law. “The visibility it provides across your entire contract landscape is really valuable for legal and procurement, any other contracting team, and for the decision makers in the company.”
LightHub brings together innovative technology and legal know-how that is tailored to the needs of people managing contracts as advisors or within businesses, and it is customisable to each client. Some of the features that clients find particularly useful with LightHub include full transparency and tracking of the entire contracting process, managing the capacity of their legal resources, the ability to identify and solve for bottlenecks in the workflow and managing legal spend. The live data that can be accessed through LightHub is empowering for legal teams as it enables better resource deployment and ultimately better risk management.
LightHub has been rolled out successfully to multiple multinational clients in various sectors and is used by Lighthouse Law itself. Its intuitive and useful design is finding favour with clients.
“In designing and refining LightHub over the years, we’ve endeavoured to ensure that it provides easy use and efficiency for both legal and procurement teams – and its features reflect this. For example a lot of technologies out there are contract centric or document based, which is different to the way we’ve approached it,” explained Waugh. “LightHub allows the users to organise the documents according to matters, deals, service acquisitions etc. It groups together everything that’s being done in a particular matter with however many documents are involved.”
In this way LightHub is designed to model the reality of how contracts arise and are negotiated. LightHub also makes available features like My Learned Friend, which is a rich legal knowledge repository as well as a suite of fall-back positions that legal teams can have at their fingertips during contract negotiations.
Posthumus notes that LightHub allows clients to introduce the nuances and the necessary fluidity to meet their specific requirements within the structure of the technology.
As an example, Lighthouse was approached by a major financial services provider in South Africa to provide them with a technology solution to meet their contract storage, security and workflow process needs. Putting LightHub in place has completely transformed their entire contracting process, said Posthumus and Waugh. It has streamlined the client’s intake process and automated drafting and templates. Negotiations now have step-by-step timelines and extensive reporting so users can effectively track each step of the process including knowing whether and where they are experiencing delays, and how to fix them.
LightHub also integrates an electronic signature platform for the client, and delivered a contract storage solution that meets security requirements.
Waugh and his team prioritise making sure LightHub is user-friendly so that clients can readily reap the benefits from its easy setup and customisation, ability to integrate with other solutions, and ensure maximum collaboration between teams in an organisation. Clients can choose to use LightHub to manage their contracts entirely on their own, only reaching out when other legal advice is needed, or to interface directly with Lighthouse Law. This client-centric ethos is certainly showing results in LightHub’s rapidly growing popularity.
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