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Technology is transforming the property industry. And the legal sector is no different. Here are some ways that we use technology at Land Law to enhance the legal services we can offer you.
Online Client portals
Commercial property legal work is information driven. Be it title deeds, leases, planning information or property searches – quick and easy access to property information is vital to ensure you have everything you need to manage and transact properties at your fingertips.
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We therefore keep all our clients’ property information digitally, creating knowledge banks that our lawyers can dip into whenever queries arise, or properties need to be transacted. Knowing how much this facility can benefit our clients we have developed information sharing facilities. These ensure they can access all the property information that we hold using online client portals or data rooms.
Over the years this has been done using different systems, but with the emergence of Cloud technology our client portals have ascended to new heights and all our property information is now saved in and readily accessible from the Cloud. This enables us to quickly and easily share all information that we hold with you and your team. All that you need to do is to log into our secure data room system – currently hosted by Box.com.
We use the same client portal facility to provide digital property information packs - thereby streamlining the due diligence process for your property transactions. As an invitation can be sent by email as soon as our counterpart in a transaction is instructed, provided your portal has already been pre-prepared (which we always recommend), we can hit the ground running to get your matter off to the quickest start possible. And as we don’t need to send out printed folders of information this approach is also environmentally friendly and helps us to save some trees along the way!
For more information about how our client portal facility works please visit our client portal page.
The power of Google
A knowledge base is not much use unless you can easily locate the information that you need. Our client portals are therefore all organised using logical ‘waterfall’ folder structures and are also searchable through the Box.com search facility.
We have also worked with software consultants to harness the power of Google to take this up a level. Our lawyers therefore benefit from a facility which enables them to run a Google search across our digital property portals. In addition to “reading” the text of documents, this search function also extends to images, meaning within moments technology can do a job it would take hours for us to do. By way of example, when asked on a deal whether a new building was constructed with a “methane membrane” - the search facility located the relevant references within scans of “as-built” plans of the building providing an instant answer to a question that otherwise would have taken our client hours to discover.
Virtual desktops
On our Azure platform, desktops are standardised, so our fee earners all share shortcuts to LR Direct, Practical Law Company, search providers including biometric id for clients, Companies House, Law Society and so on. Fast broadband in both our offices is a given but the system works just as well when people are at home on their domestic packages. This is because the computing is done in the Cloud and at operator level our users’ machines are just logging their keystrokes and mouse moves while the processing happens above. Being in the Cloud means we have no ‘tin’ in our basement. Everything we use is Cloud based which allows us to adapt quickly to change and stay up to date.
Agile working
Even before the pandemic heralded the advent of hybrid working practices our IT systems meant our fee earners could work from anywhere. (Something that was unexpectedly put to the test when one of our partners ended up stuck abroad when the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 2010 and grounded air travel across Western Europe!)
Nowadays, thanks to our Cloud based file storage and virtual desktops all Land Law staff, including support staff as well as fee earners can access all company information and client files remotely, and work from anywhere without compromise.
Easy communication
Face to face meetings help us to build relationships, whether that is with you or the other professionals we deal with. However, time and cost constraints often do not allow for in person meetings. We therefore promote routine use of video calls using Teams or Zoom. The screen sharing facility makes it easy to collaborate over drafting, review information and plans together and means you can put faces to the names of the Land Law people you are dealing with. It also saves on traveling time and cost and is an environmentally friendly option where an in-person meeting isn’t essential.
Email saving tools
Our clients and contacts may have noticed we have a six/three figure reference on our email subject lines. This is part of the reference system which the firm has used since its inception. One benefit of this is that, as long as it is quoted in our email subjects, it enables our system to auto file all the emails we receive or send in a time stamped chronological order. It keeps our records comprehensive and up to the minute and helps us to work electronically – vast paper files are a thing of past.
The filing system also indicates whether the correspondence has attachments and if there are places them in an attachments folder in the file, ready for our secretaries to manually save them, as appropriate in subfiles for version control. This helps any of our fee earners to always know the latest version of a document – a useful tool as we work in teams and collaborate. And we find the technology works best when paired with clever working practices – with the human input from our administrators enabling them to keep abreast of developments on our clients’ files.
The future
Looking to the future, we anticipate that artificial intelligence (or AI to coin the common abbreviation) is going to have a substantial role to play in both the property and legal services industries.
We have already metaphorically “dipped our toes” in the AI pool. In addition to our ability to “google” search our database, for several years, we have been looking at and trialling intelligent property mapping services to aid our due diligence. Unfortunately, some of the products we have encountered are not currently sufficiently reliable to justify the cost. When conducting due diligence an AI report cannot be ‘almost’ right – they have to be spot on. But as the products advance and costs come down this is something we can see becoming a routine part of the services we offer.
AI can also help by doing some of the drafting “leg work” for us. The automatic report generators can provide useful starting points in transactions. Title reports based on AI précised official copy title registers are coming into their own, but it is a small part of the due diligence and reporting process that we carry out and far from the whole story. We believe that AI works best (and needs to be) partnered with the very best lawyers who are trained not just to read the law, but to interpret, apply, use and advise on it. Then you can harness the labour-saving AI offers while maintaining a high-quality legal service. If we can do more in the time, faster than our competitors, it makes us better value on our hourly rates. So this is also something that we can see in Land Law’s future.
AI is developing in some unimaginable ways and will go far beyond just some labour saving in the future. We will embrace that with enthusiasm as it emerges. We think it will be Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta who will lead the market. Even the largest law firms with vast IT departments are not going to outperform these giants if they choose to turn their focus in the direction of legal services.
We hope we are in a primed position, so we are never left behind. We believe the start point for AI is to have digitised all your data. We have done this from 1998 and have a full history of all matters we have ever dealt with. We will at least be able to analyse our data when the time comes.
We don’t choose to place our skills at the bulk services/volume conveyancing end of the market but instead in the specialist sector. We are excited about AI potential. Our partners and staff are watching and reading about what others are doing. We don’t consider it will ever replace human ingenuity, experience and expertise in commercial property law in England and Wales but we live in interesting times and are ready to embrace the innovations as they come our way.