Mishcon de Reya and Kira Systems Announce Collaboration in Real Estate Space

UK News

09
Oct
2018

Editor

Mishcon de Reya announced today a collaboration with legal artificial intelligence leader Kira Systems. The two organizations have been working together to enhance Kira System’s software, specifically the machine learning models for real estate transactions.

As part of Mishcon de Reya's commitment to innovation, the firm is adopting a range of technologies to automate certain tasks and processes. The real estate group in particular has been at the forefront of this work – developing tools to automate interactions with Land Registry and HMRC, creating data feeds and visualisation tools for clients and working with a number of new proptech technologies through MDR LAB, including Orbital Witness and Third Fort. In particular, the real estate team is dedicated to the use of new technology that unlocks critical data buried in client documents to enable clients to make better and faster decisions. The firm has also welcomed their first Head of Data Analytics and Machine Learning, Alastair Moore from UCL, who will has been supporting these efforts, amongst other work across the Firm.

Mishcon de Reya has been using Kira software since 2016 to increase the accuracy and efficiency of document review in each of their real estate focused practice areas, including residential, commercial, tax, construction and planning. One example of Kira's use has been in the acquisition of student housing portfolios (Mishcon's de Reya's real estate group acted on £1.5bn of student housing acquisitions for its clients during 2017/2018) , where the firm’s lawyers have been using the technology to deliver valuable insight into tenancy documents faster and more efficiently . The team has used both Kira’s built-in provision models and their own bespoke models. This allows the real estate team to reduce their clients’ transaction risk by reviewing all of the leases in the portfolio, typically between500 – 1,000, instead of choosing a small sample for review in order to manage timelines and costs.

Nick Kirby, Managing Associate and Real Estate Technology Specialist at Mishcon de Reya, said: “We are dedicated to using technology to do our work faster and better to provide more value to clients, to deliver new technology driven services and to drive change in our firm. By collaborating with Kira to enhance their UK real estate offering we have already gained valuable insight into how artificial intelligence works and how we can best leverage AI to better support real estate clients, delivering our services innovatively and more efficiently and we look forward to continuing to working closely with them.”

“We’re thrilled to be working with Mishcon de Reya’s real estate group, who bring both their in-depth expertise and a commitment to real technological transformation to our partnership,” said Anne McNulty, Director of Legal Knowledge Engineering at Kira Systems. “Together we hope to build superior, practical solutions that support real estate clients in new and exciting ways.”