An interview with Briefing Magazine…
Andrew Lloyd, managing director at Search Acumen, explains the launch of the company’s new Real Estate Intelligence (REI) interface — applying machine learning to create more efficient and ultimately valuable lawyer and client journeys through time-pressured property transactions.
Property is an area of law notorious for productivity and efficient delivery getting heavily mired in repetitive manual process. For decades lawyers have had to request information about properties for transactions from hundreds of different local authorities using CON29 forms. Questions can only be asked per property, which invariably produces a long pdf document for the professional to wade through. “You’re really forced to do what’s been done for decades, which is to read them one at a time sequentially,” says Andrew Lloyd, managing director at Search Acumen.
The idea is that this ‘drudge work’ now changes with Search Acumen’s new ‘Real Estate Intelligence’ (REI) proposition, introduced to the market as recently as October 2024. By training a range of AI models over time —through both Microsoft Azure and AWS — he says the business has turned those cumbersome documents into actionable data, which can be served to firms in new ways to (reliably) fast-track this vital aspect of due diligence in transactions. “We’ve taken what’s essentially a completely flat document and turned it into highly usable data,” he says.
The new interface of property data
The efficiency impact for lawyer teams is perhaps clearest with large portfolio projects involving multiple properties —a new spreadsheet grid format replacing those lengthy paper replicas. Firms using Search Acumen in their work can now review an area — such as relevant highways data, for example —across all the properties involved simultaneously. There is search and filtering capability such that you could quickly identify where the same land charges or planning permissions apply.
It was the arrival of the large language models of OpenAI, joining the company’s earlier work behind the scenes, that takes this transformation of a key workflow to the next level — just as it’s doing for firms’ own processes, such as reviewing complex property leases in the real-estate space. And it’s all in the context of an increasingly time-poor profession, feeling the heat on multiple fronts. “Clients are expecting more from their law firms all the time, and they’re expecting it faster” observes Lloyd. “This clearly puts more pressure on individual productivity to deliver those expectations.”
A door also opens to new client opportunities
Another potential upside is improved risk management. The more repetitive, mundane, manual, administrative workload within legal may of course lead to more margin for introducing human error on the road to completion. There’s also notable business development opportunity in the innovation, Lloyd adds, as firms should find they could make the available data go further for clients, perhaps growing and improving relationships in the process.
He explains: “There’s a huge amount of potential locked up around property covenants and restrictions, and so on, related to titles and parties adjacent to titles. Until now there has never been a way of realistically collating, understanding and interpreting all that data to unlock it. A landowner might want to sell restrictions on hundreds of titles back to the titles adjacent, but historically a task like that would really have been too labour-intensive even to attempt.”
With a tool like REI, he says, it’s more feasible for lawyers to review all that potential and give good advice as to whether it’s a course worth the pursuit.
Technology adoption and human adaptation
Once firms grow accustomed to interacting with this key data differently, Lloyd is prepared for them to come forward with suggestions for more iterations of the interface — he’s certain ideas will follow. “We’re a big believer as a business in client-led product development,” he says. “But we’re also very cognisant of not running too far, too fast, for people. The first step is lawyers learning to use it and adopting it.” In part to avoid any perceived barrier here, REI is fully bundled into a firm’s existing service with no additional charge.
Even where a timesaving and efficiency gain is so clear, it’s possible some will initially be wary of working in a different way — somewhat ironically, suggests Lloyd, also viewing that push towards change through the lens of legal risk. Repetition can be reassuring — and removing it has the opposite effect. “It is an innately risk-averse profession,” he agrees, “but the younger lawyers increasingly moving up through the ranks are really looking for opportunities like this — they’ll be the drivers of the change as augmenting work with technology seems so natural in their world.”
With AI, and automation solutions more generally, law firms are also likely to need to shift the mindset — and possibly the business management setup — to “charge for the value of the service” rather than every minute of their lawyers’ time spent on it.
But with the new UK government signalling housing as a big priority for its policy focus and growth plans — alongside other shifts in the market such as a surge in social housing — REI should be a productivity-powering toolset whose time has very much come.
