CASE STUDY : LCF Law enhances their Data Security & Client Experience with Hubshare
Industry
Legal
Locations
Leeds, Bradford, Harrogate & Ilkley
Use Case
Data Room
LCF Law is an award-winning, full-service law firm who specialises in corporate transactions, property law, employment law, dispute resolution, family law, & wills & probate.
After a previous Data Room provider suffered a data breach, LCF Law sought a replacement to re-instil confidence when sharing confidential data. LCF Law’s IT Director, James Hood explained, “Clients wouldn’t use it, vendors wouldn’t use it, buyers wouldn’t use it – so we needed another solution, but at the same time, we thought it prudent to look at something that’s extendable beyond just data room functionality and we found that in Hubshare.”
If you’re a business looking to collaborate electronically with your clients, or simply if you’re looking for a secure online vault, Hubshare’s definitely the way to go.
Smooth implementation
Nikec Solutions led the implementation, roll out & training of the secure file-sharing platform, Hubshare, for LCF Law. Before implementation, LCF Law worked closely with Nikec’s project team to outline a delivery workflow to ensure a smooth on-boarding to their users and clients.
James Hood explained how the data migration from their previous provider to Hubshare was pain-free and users adapted easily. “Our team had already used a similar product, so that helped give them a good grounding in terms of how data rooms work, but nothing quite as extendable as Hubshare. That prior understanding however allowed us to pay more attention to how we designed the portals.”
“Hubshare has great referenceability in the legal sector which is always a big help when on-boarding new users to software. The technical team at Nikec were also very responsive, as was our Account & Project managers who supported us throughout.”
User Training
Hood continued, “The initial training roll-out went really well. But what I like is that Nikec support us for all our user training whenever we on-board new starters to the firm. Rather than us reinventing the wheel with our own internal training.” LCF Law have been using Hubshare since Dec 2021, and it’s now fully embedded into their corporate team.
Features that make a difference
Hubshare’s core features include secure file-sharing, client collaboration, data centralisation and even project management. Every firm that invests in Hubshare has access to all these features, so we asked LCF Law what stood out to them.
James Hood, IT Director at LCF Law answered, “The big one for me, because I’m a bit of a security buff, was the multi-factor authentication, it’s a huge thing at the minute especially when you’re giving your clients access to these portals, who probably have a dozen other usernames and passwords for existing systems that they deal with on a day-to-day basis. The potential for the credentials to become compromised is high risk, so the fact that we had multi factor authentication from the off, gives a lot more confidence.”
It‘s a highly available robust platform that does what we need it to do.
James Hood
IT Director @ LCF Law
Brand Importance
LCF Law values their brand, so another important feature was having the flexibility to design and brand each portal in line with their brand guidelines. Hubshare has many options for custom backgrounds, colours, titles, logos, widgets and more, with the ultimate goal to make each portal feel like you have stepped into the reception of that law firm.
We’re massive on our brand at LCF Law so the fact that we could brand our data rooms with the LCF Law colours, logo and look and feel, was just a bonus really.
James Hood, summarises, “From our perspective, it’s an excellent product and it instils confidence, not just from the solicitors perspective, but also from the clients perspective because obviously in a corporate transaction those data rooms effectively lays bare the entire structure and inner workings of the business and that would be very useful to our clients competition if they got hold of it and so again, it instils confidence that we’ve got an secure online data room service, to keep all that data safe and out of the wrong hands.”
Client Journey
Currently the firm is using Hubshare predominantly for Data Rooms in their corporate department, Hood walks us through their client’s life-cycle with Hubshare, “We generally populate a data room for the client and then they’ll send us lots of disconnected information about a business that we’re assisting them with selling. We’ll put that in an order and populate it in the hub for them.”
He continues, “We actually have some clients that are now self-serving by populating their own data rooms, rather than throwing things through email, and then the people that are going to consume that information as prospective buyers for that business, will be given read only access to the hub to digest what they need in order to help them make a decision.”
Looking Forward
As LCF Law look ahead at their future with Hubshare, they explain they will be expanding their usage to include digital client & matter lifecycle management. James Hood, elaborates, “The starting point is going be a client portal where we can simply get data in an accessible format for our clients, but then also we’re looking to augment that then with digital on-boarding KYC AML, and then also document exchange and document libraries as well.”
He continues, “We have a lot of clients who have massive commercial property portfolios and just for a matter of course we keep an index record of all their lease agreements for example. Because of this, we’d like to make that accessible to our clients, so they have their own LCF Law document library. It helps us keep our clients as that’s not something every firm offers, but then on top of this we’re looking to offer collaboration electronically on documents, and digital signatures on documents, and I think Hubshare is the ideal platform for that.”
Hubshare for Legal
A secure file-sharing client portal that allows users to share, collaborate & manage project progress with your clients and external parties.
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