Lothian Pension Fund Procures Legalesign for E-signature

When lockdown forced the office to close and all staff to work from home, Lothian Pension Fund had to find an alternative way of working to continue delivering its core services and maintaining business as usual. They were used to the traditional lengthy, complicated and paper-intensive document signing process - and were delighted to discover that Legalesign's e-signature provides a much speedier process and has unique features.

In particular, they liked that:

• we can process and store all their legal documents on servers located in the UK, the only e-signature provider in the UK to do so

• our GDPR features gives them control to decide how long we retain their data; in this case for 1 month instead of 7 years, the usual timeframe used by other providers.

Jane McKeown, Senior Legal Counsel at Lothian Pension Fund, which has assets of £8 billion and over 80,000 members, shares her experiences as a new subscriber.

Why use Legalesign?

Legalesign has UK-based data centres which meet our GDPR requirements, and we were also reassured by the fact that Legalesign already has other public sector clients based in Scotland. The ratings/reviews from clients and intuitive use of the platform were added bonuses.

The necessity of working remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic made the procurement of an e-signature platform essential to maintaining business continuity.

We needed this to enter into a whole range of letters, agreements and contracts with suppliers and various counterparties.

Why does Legalesign work so well for you?

It’s easy to use and the customer service throughout has been excellent. Using Legalesign gives confidence in their secure, well-organised process that functions well when working remotely and allows records to be easily located.

The management database is also very useful, especially when there are multiple users. It is beneficial to have oversight of all documents that have been sent to signature to avoid overlap and to track documents in case of someone’s absence. We download the documents from the central database to our own network and have reduced the central database retention period to 1 month.

The signatories using the system are generally very comfortable and supportive of the streamlined process. Users report the e-signature system is intuitive and easy-to-use, and user training to get the benefit of the full suite of features has been helpful.

The Difference Legalesign Has Made

Jane recalls it used to take up to 5 days to complete contracts, with documents 5 – 10 pages long, now it takes less than a day. On average between 20-30 multiple copies of contracts were printed each month. This no longer necessary and using Legalesign has saved 97% of printing. In addition, instead of saving printed copies in storage, they are now stored on the fund’s internal network.

Jane describes how Legalesign has simplified the signing process.

The process we used before was lengthy and could be complicated if multiple signatories involved were based in different geographical locations. It was paper-intensive and we used hot-desking in our office, so keeping good order of what had been signed was more time-consuming.

Our documents can only be signed by authorised signatories per internal governance protocols, so tracking down authorised signatories when they are attending external meetings or working from home could be time-consuming.

We now benefit from Legalesign’s streamlined signing process which has resulted in facilitating much faster document signing and forwarding on of signed documents, with no need to scan.

Improved productivity

Jane has noticed that using Legalesign has certainly improved staff productivity by reducing time spent printing, compiling, posting documents for signature and scanning/saving executed copies.

I would recommend Legalesign without hesitation!

Lothian Pension Fund , which also manages the investment of a large portion of the scheme’s assets internally, completed 149 document exchanges in the first nine weeks after signing up with us on 17 April 2020.