The Real Estate team has been shortlisted in the Real Collaboration category in the FT Innovative Lawyers Report and Awards for Europe 2018. The FT Innovative Lawyers is a unique programme that assess lawyers on their innovation for clients and in their own businesses. In this category, the FT invite law firms and in-house legal teams to show an example of a new type of collaboration that has helped to create a new solution or result.
The team has been singled out for the innovative solution that it created to capture transactional data and feed it back to clients in a timely manner, avoiding manual data entry, errors and lost or late rent. Working with AEW, our client and MJ Mapp, the client's agent, we collaborated to come up with a unique tool to accelerate and improve this process.
The team identified that the management of transactional data, particularly where multiple leases were concerned, was often delayed sometimes carried out several months after the event (or not carried out at all). This resulted in late or lost rent by clients. Using our expertise in legal technology, the team saw an opportunity to improve this process for lawyers, managing agents and clients, by integrating with the managing agent's Property Management System (PMS) to transfer lease and tenancy data.
The solution was our Data Transfer Tool (DATT) which allows for structured lease data, collected using both AI-based data extraction and document automation software, to be uploaded directly into a managing agent MJ Mapp's PMS once the transaction was complete, avoiding manual data entry and ensuring that the data transferred was fast and accurate.
The Real Estate team have trained an artificial intelligence tool on over a thousand real estate leases and other documents (with a success rate of data capture of up to 95% depending on the provision type), the team worked to map the variables in Mishcon's document automation software with MJ Mapp's PMS.
The entire concept is the first of its kind to use a combination of machine learning, data extraction and document automation software to push data to a managing agent's PMS. This method addresses existing market issues with data accuracy in commercial leases, and ensures that the data on the PMS is accurate, available and complete.
With DATT we are able to save our clients significant time and money on management of their properties and it could not have been achieved if not for the collaborative efforts of Mishcon de Reya and MJ Mapp. The tool was recently used for AEW's acquisition of three multi-let properties, consisting of 45 commercial leases. As soon as the transactions completed, the lease data was transferred to MJ Mapp's PMS and saved their data handlers over 20 hours of manual inputting.
AEW UK Director and Assistant Portfolio Manager of the AEW UK Core Property Fund, Michael Shears said: “We have been impressed with Mishcon de Reya’s creative approach to using technology to streamline the legal work they do for us. They and MJ Mapp have worked in collaboration in order to generate efficiencies and streamline work processes. This new process will save our service providers countless hours in the future and help us manage our assets more efficiently generating additional value for our investors.”
The Real Estate Tech team consists of Nicholas Kirby (Managing Associate), Charlie Rawson (Associate) and Onuralp Cifci (Legal Knowledge Engineer).
The report will be published with the FT newspaper on Friday 5 October 2018 and launched at the awards night on Thursday 4 October 2018.
For more information about our Data Transfer Tool, or our other proptech developments, please contact Nick Kirby (nicholas.kirby@mishcon.com)