FAQs

Is Hivelight a practice management system?

Hivelight is a productivity platform (project management, collaboration tools, workflows, reporting, productivity boosting apps).

There are points of overlap, but our focus is on people, productivity, and insights.

While your practice management system keeps your documents and accounting organized, Hivelight helps you manage your work and lead your team.

Hivelight is actively adding integrations with leading practice management systems and other software providers.

Do we need a training day to start using Hivelight?

Our aim is to design Hivelight so well training is almost unnecessary.

We are happy to arrange training for each member of your team. We are here to support you and your team every step of the way.

We encourage new Hivelight customers to meet with us weekly or fortnightly for support and feedback. These sessions help you get the maximum value out of Hivelight for your practice.

We also provide help articles, videos, and 24/7 live chat support.

Can I use Hivelight from anywhere, including home?

Yes! Hivelight is the perfect solution for flexible and asynchronous working.

Hivelight ensures that at every time of the day or night, everyone knows where the work is up to, who is responsible, what needs to be done next, how to do it, and where to find what they need.

With Hivelight your team can coordinate effectively whenever they work. Assigning tasks, writing instructions, marking priorities, posting status updates on matters, leaving comments on tasks, and setting deadlines. Gone are the days of needing manual reports, meetings, emails, interruptions and standard working hours to keep everyone in sync.

With Hivelight you can hire and work with the best team, regardless of where they live, their family commitments, their time zone, or optimal working hours. Have the best, work the best, be the best.

Does Hivelight integrate with my existing practice management software?

Yes, we are actively adding integrations with leading practice management systems and other leading software providers.

Contact us today (sales@hivelight.com). If we don’t yet integrate with your system we’ll get on it.

At Hivelight, we believe that repetition is error. We don’t want you to have to enter data in twice.

Is Hivelight just for litigation practice, or can I use it for other things too?

Hivelight works for any practice area, business function, project, and any type of professional service work.

If you have multiple projects or cases, each involving a number of steps, and requiring coordination between two or more people…Hivelight is for you.

You can even set up multiple private workspaces within Hivelight to manage internal business projects and operations like accounting, marketing, and human resources.

Hivelight provides the tools to quickly document your processes and roll out your processes for any type of work, keep the team in sync, and hit all your deadlines.

We use Hivelight to manage Hivelight, and we’re a SaaS company not a law practice.

We already have practice management software, I’m not sure I can justify paying for another technology product.


When you run the numbers…it is actually expensive not to have Hivelight.

Why? Well, wages are your biggest expense as a law practice, and also your biggest profit lever.

The best way to increase your profits is to increase revenue per fee earner. We’re not talking about getting better at ‘capturing time’. That is small potatoes. We’re talking about increasing the number of cases that you can complete per fee earner. That’s the kind of thing that transforms a firm.

Let’s do some quick math (because lawyers love math…)

Say you achieve $25,000 USD in fees on average per matter. Assume that each lawyer is on average completing 2 cases per month. 

Write off 2 months of the year for vacations and the August dead period. 

So that’s 20 cases a year. Averaged over 12 months, gets you $41,666.67 USD per month per lawyer.

Now, suppose that you can get just 5 more cases per year settled per lawyer….just one extra case every two months (while assuming nil productivity for 2 months of the year). 

So that’s 25 cases per year. Averaged over 12 months, gets you $52,083.33 USD per month per lawyer.

That 5 case per year increase means an additional $10,416.67 USD per month in revenue per lawyer! 

Imagine achieving that without needing to hire any additional staff, and being able to do it sustainably.

This is what Hivelight does.

Hivelight provides you with the modern productivity systems you need to take hold of the biggest profit levers in your practice and drive real results directly

I’m not sure I have the time to implement a new system in my practice?

Hivelight is different to other systems you have experienced.

Onboarding to Hivelight is not one of those 6 month long all consuming projects.

With Hivelight you can go from sign up to ‘go live’ all within the same week.

Can I store my documents in Hivelight?

At present we do not have a built-in document management system.

But…

  1. We are working to integrate with other leading document management and cloud storage systems, as well as practice management systems; and
  2. If you use a cloud storage solution (e.g. OneDrive, Dropbox, GoogleDrive) you can save these the links to your Hivelight roadmaps, matters, tasks, and notes for quick access.
Can I collaborate with people in Hivelight who are not Hivelight customers?

You sure can. Simply invite them as a guest to your workspace and add them to the team for any matters that you want to collaborate on. Simple.

Hivelight was designed from the start to make it easy to collaborate with people outside your practice – external counsel, experts, your accountant, and yes, you can even collaborate with your clients.

I’ve signed up for other legal tech products in the past and have struggled to get any support from them once they have my credit card. Is it easy to get support with Hivelight?

Hivelight is designed by lawyers for lawyers…and yes…we’ve been through that too. It’s frustrating. You are busy and you need your technology to work.

We want you to enjoy using Hivelight. Your success is our success, and that means our job isn’t done the moment you enter your credit card details.

At Hivelight we are here to help. If our help options and quick reference guide don’t solve the issue, message us. We care. We need to know if you are having any issues with Hivelight so that we can make it better and easier to use.

Can I contact Hivelight to request features and improvements?

Yes. Please do. One of the most important things we do is listen to our customers. Get in touch. Let us know what you need and why.

What are roadmaps?

Roadmaps are unique to Hivelight.

Think of roadmaps as next generation smart workflows or work plansworkplans.

Just like how you use template or precedent documents to complete common letters, emails, and forms, roadmaps act as a template set of tasks and milestones for completing common projects, services, and stages of work in your cases.

You can use the builtin standard library roadmaps. You can edit the standard roadmaps to make your own. Or you can convert the tasks and milestones of any matter in Hivelight into a roadmap.

This means that when you create a matter or enter the next stage of a case you can simply load the roadmap for that stage of work and the task board will automatically populate with all the necessary milestones and tasks. Once loaded, you can edit, delete, and add tasks and milestones as you please.

But roadmaps are smart. They remember the intervals between all the tasks and milestones. So when you load the roadmap, it will calculate all the due dates for you to ensure that all cases of the same type progress at the same pace.

But roadmaps get smarter than that. Roadmaps store the role and seniority of each team member allocated as an assignee or reviewer on each task. This means that when you load the roadmap it will automatically allocate the assignee and reviewer for each task to the appropriate members of the team who are running that matter.

But roadmaps get even smarter than that. Hivelight understands the hierarchy involved in professional services teams. This means that you can take a roadmap created with one team and apply it to another matter with a completely different team and it will
allocate the roles on each task to the appropriate people.

And yet the smarts in Hivelight go even further. You can take a roadmap created for one team with lots of roles and load it to a matter with a different and smaller team with only a fraction of those roles filled, and Hivelight will go up the chain finding the next most
appropriate person to serve as assignee and reviewer on each task.

Hivelight roadmaps make it easy to document your processes, delegate at scale, and standardise the pace at which your matters progress.

Where will my data be stored?

Your data is stored in Amazon Web Services (AWS) in different availability zones in the same region to reduce the risk of being exposed to natural disasters or attacks.

How secure is Hivelight?

Hivelight uses the highest security standards with end to end HTTPS encryption. Our customer data is encrypted at rest and we use monitoring tools to ensure no data is being leaked.

Can I get a backup of my data? Can I import data from my existing system?

Your data is and will always remain your data. You can use the future API to pull and push your data into Hivelight. You can also get a copy of all your data upon request for free. Contact support for more information.

Does Hivelight run on a Mac?

Hivelight runs on any devices. All you need is a modern browser running on Window, Mac, Linux or a Chromebook.

Does Hivelight work on tablets and smartphones?

Hivelight works on any device. However, our user experience is best lived on a desktop.

Do I need a server?

Nope, our software runs 100% in the cloud, you don’t have to worry about updates and security patches.

What happens if the Internet is down?

At this point in time, we don’t provide an offline experience. However, this is something we may explore in the future.

What happens if I want to leave Hivelight?

Your data, is your data and available at no cost. Feel free to try and use other practice management systems, we will never lock you in.

Still have a question?