AI-enabled app removes property pain
It takes a lawyer five to six hours to review just one lease thoroughly – which can mean hundreds of hours on complex transactions. But an AI-enabled app developed by Allens is changing all that.
Allens’ Real Estate Due Diligence App, or REDDA for short, took home the Equiem Award for Best Project Innovation at the prestigious Property Council of Australia / Rider Levett Bucknall Innovation and Excellence Awards in May.
“REDDA addresses a pain point identified by our clients – too much professional time spent on reviewing large volumes of data,” says Victoria Holthouse (pictured), partner in real estate and development at Allens.
“It takes a lawyer an average five to six hours to review one lease thoroughly and identify material issues that require further investigation. On a complex real estate transaction, there can be 200 or more leases for review. Traditionally, this work is done by junior lawyers and is a time-consuming process.”
Holthouse says her team recognised the old “manual” way of conducting real estate due diligence was no longer working, and put their heads together to find a solution.
The result is a guided app which recreates the logic of a human lease review, automatically detects key risks in leases and sends information to a collaboration platform which both Allens and its clients can use for data analysis and reporting.
The project demanded a multidisciplinary team of real estate lawyers, technologists, project managers, analysts and artificial intelligence provider Neota, to embed more than 20 years of legal knowledge into one tool.
“It sounds simple now, but it was quite a technological challenge,” she says.
Underpinning REDDA are three discreet programs: Kira Systems, a machine learning contract analysis program; Neota Logic, an artificial intelligence expert system software platform that enables subject matter experts to automate their expertise and judgment at internet scale; and HighQ Collaborate, a cloud collaboration platform.
By harnessing the power of these three technologies, Allens has developed a process that streamlines an otherwise detailed, work-intensive process.
“REDDA removes much of the manual burden from our lawyers, leaving them to focus on the flagged issues that require time and expertise,” Holthouse says.
According to Beth Patterson, Allens’ chief legal and technology services officer, REDDA is “the perfect fusion between complex legal knowledge, decision making and artificial intelligence”.