AI-driven real estate platform Orbital has introduced specialized tools tailored to Scottish commercial property transactions. The expansion comes after a collaborative pilot with Pinsent Masons, enabling legal professionals in Scotland to apply Orbital’s services to cases under Scots Law for the first time.
Through this launch, real estate professionals operating across the UK can now undertake legal analysis across jurisdictions in a unified way. This is significant for Scottish commercial real estate professionals, who have faced challenges due to the lack of product specificity in generalist real estate legaltech solutions that only cater for English and Welsh legal practice.
Scottish Real Estate Law Intelligence
Nearly £2 billion of commercial real estate changed hands in Scotland last year, all of it under Scots law. Orbital has launched 22 Scottish workflows covering Scottish title sheets, Sasine deeds, searches, leases, PSG offers, and drafting of PSG Certificates of Title for solicitor review.
These new workflows provide the contextual understanding of Scottish real estate that users in Scotland require, building upon Orbital’s dedication to AI made for the complexity of the world’s largest asset class. The work was led by Orbital’s specialist Scots Law real estate team within its legal engineering division.
Collaboration with Pinsent Masons
The launch was shaped through close collaboration with Pinsent Masons, the lead user in the product pilot. The firm lent its practice expertise and knowledge throughout the process, featuring input from its professional development lawyers and transactional lawyers.
Ruairidh McKillop, legal engineer, Orbital comments: “Scottish property work has its own logic, and an English report cannot simply be patched into it.”
Sinead Hastings, property innovation & change team lead and legal director, Pinsent Masons, comments: “We have advocated for Scottish functionality since we first adopted Orbital. Our pilot team put considerable time into structured testing and feedback, and seeing that reflected in what has been launched is exactly the kind of collaboration we want with the technology we use.”
Orbital plans to extend its Scottish product capabilities further in the near future, targeting lease reporting variants for specific sectors including retail and food and drink; a full report on title for Scotland covering searches, enquiries and Land and Buildings Transaction Tax alongside the title work; Scottish reference material in the query function; and drafting, beginning with lease documents. Orbital is an AI platform purpose-built for real estate work. Co-founded by Will Pearce and Ed Boulle in 2018, it is used by more than 5,000 real estate professionals at Am Law 100 and Magic Circle law firms, title companies, REITs, developers and corporate occupiers, and supports over 250,000 transactions a year.
