Conveyancers are increasingly using Artificial Intelligence to collect data on large property portfolios.
Some one in 10 of the UK’s top 200 law firms are now using AI, according to developer Search Acumen, which is especially helpful when conveyancers are working on portfolios like retail or business parks.
One firm used Search Acumen’s Real Estate Intelligence (REI) to analyse titles across 19 different local authorities for a single portfolio, while another required data on 84 separate titles for a single portfolio.
Andrew Lloyd, managing director and chief technologist at Search Acumen, said: “In today’s hyper-competitive legal market, historic pain points which the profession could previously swallow have become real cost burdens and business risks for 21st century lawyers.
“The strong initial uptake of REI shows law firms are addressing this head on by using co-piloted AI tools to enhance the quality of their work in complex and error-prone processes such as CON29 searches.
“We are hearing from lawyers using REI that it is giving them access to data and insights on a completely new level of sophistication, which in turn helps them unlock new levels of customer service. We are proud to be contributing to the excellence of this new class of tech-empowered legal professionals.”
REI is trained to recognise, extract and categorise property data from local authority CON29 searches.
Since the 1990s, search data has only been available as PDFs or physical documents, requiring legal professionals to sift through hundreds of pages of text.
At the same time, the UK’s 340 local authorities all share search data in different formats.
REI extracts and categorises the relevant information from local authority datasets and standardises it into one format.