HomeLight streamlines legal operations and saves money with a central contract repository

HomeLight is a real estate technology company founded in 2012 that empowers people to achieve better outcomes in buying or selling a home, with the mission of simplifying and improving an age-old, complex process. HomeLight needed a contract management solution that would meet the challenges of their exponential growth. With plans for new hires to the legal team, they needed a solution that could both get them organized quickly and scale as their contract volume grew. 

Challenge 
Jobe Danganan joined as General Counsel in 2018 and is now overseeing the continued growth of the legal team. When Danganan joined HomeLight, he became the company’s first in-house lawyer. One of his first priorities was to clean up contracts, which varied from vendor contracts to real estate agent agreements to banking partnerships. Someone from another team would come to them with an issue or a question about terms, and legal would try to find the document in Box, Dropbox, or local folders. For Danganan, it was frustrating. Unless they knew the exact contract and search terms to use, it would take a long time to find the answer. “I had no visibility”, he recounts. “There was no unified process, and contracts were stored in different ways by different department heads.” 

Solution 
“We looked at other vendors, but found that Contract Wrangler [Conga Contract Intelligence] was superior, especially the way they use AI to get us the information we need,” says Danganan. He immediately tasked each department head with gathering their contracts to upload into Conga Contract Intelligence (CCI), with the vision of giving everyone a single place to search and see important contract information. 

As HomeLight began the onboarding process, CCI’s support team helped HomeLight set up each department—marketing, product, engineering, human resources, and others—according to their specific contract management needs.  

Once the company was set up on the platform, HomeLight’s legal team was able to rethink the way they dealt with contract-related requests. Now each department could look up contract data instantly in CCI, answering questions about payment terms, upcoming milestones or obligations, and whether or not a particular clause or stipulation was included.  

Danganan noticed a change right away in the amount of time his team spent responding to requests. With CCI, people coming to them for answers before can now find those answers themselves. Having everything in a central repository meant the amount of hours each week they spent manually searching through contracts plummeted. Once contract management became automated, the legal team also spent less time doing administrative work. 

CCI automatically extracts all date-driven data from contracts, giving Danganan full visibility into their upcoming renewals. This means HomeLight was able to see all of their obligations and important milestones on a single platform for the first time. For Danganan, this was a huge benefit. Instead of being surprised when an agreement auto-renewed, the appropriate internal team members are now alerted of upcoming renewals with time to spare. 

Before Danganan started, HomeLight had instances where contracts were renewed without their knowledge, sticking them with payments for another year or a hefty penalty for cancellation. That no longer happens with CCI. 

For HomeLight, CCI has been key in getting organized and trusting that their contract data is correct. The HomeLight team wasn’t looking for a contract lifecycle management tool, since they already had help drafting agreements and reviewing them among each other. Danganan was drawn to CCI for its ease and simplicity—they needed to focus on building a clean, centralized place for contracts that will scale alongside them as they grow.  

Business outcomes 

• Many hours saved on the legal team 
• No more missed autorenewal opportunities 
• Less time wasted on administrative work 
• Regained trust in their data 
• AI-backed by real attorneys