CMS builds on CMS by Design innovation platform with new real estate AI tool

CMS UK has adopted Avail, a new AI tool for real estate, as it continues to build on its CMS by Design approach to delivering practical, accessible innovation to identify and solve clients’ legal and business challenges.

Avail supports real estate lawyers conducting title due diligence exercises and assists with identifying key risks across a portfolio instantly. The CMS Real Estate practice throughout the UK uses the tool to analyse key information in Land Registry titles and is able to automate and speed up tasks such as providing an overview of the entire portfolio, estimating disbursements, or producing content for the transaction documents. 

John Cumpson, CMS Partner and Head of Real Estate says: “Implementing Avail across our real estate practice has seen our lawyers harness technology to complement and expedite the service they deliver to our clients.  Avail radically reduces the administrative and manual aspects of a title review.  This enables our lawyers to dedicate their time to reviewing and verifying the output, in order to advise our clients of potential issues much earlier in the transaction process.” 

For a recent client project, the CMS team ran the initial analysis of 215 real estate titles in less than 15 minutes – a task that would have previously taken many paralegal hours.

Dom Conte, Head of Projects at Avail says: “We’re delighted to welcome CMS into the Avail family. As LegalTech explodes in popularity, simple pre-trained AI tools are becoming a staple of any progressive law firm’s arsenal. The real estate team at CMS have adopted Avail with enthusiasm, and we’ve been able to deliver real efficiencies across a wide cross-section of transactions.”

Avail is one of the many smart legal tech tools that CMS has adopted as part of its CMS by Design legal innovation platform. Launched in 2018, CMS by Design is a collaborative collective of tools, teams and services across CMS that bring together the firm’s innovative offerings under one umbrella. These range from the core Innovation team and Legal Operations and Project Management team, Legal Service Designers, CMS Evidence, Legal Technology Tools team, Document Automation team, and to equIP, CMS’s IP start-up programme.

Key recent CMS by Design developments and initiatives:

• Launched 24 “Innovation Hours” projects across the business in the past 12 months.  Innovation Hours are similar to seed funding for ideas: it gives CMS lawyers credit towards their billed hours target and access to guidance and support from the innovation team and other experts across the firm. Projects range from an IP attorney pricing tool to teaching AI contract analysis tool Kira to help analyse Romanian language documents, and the recent launch of Share | Compliance (CMS and ShareReporter launch legal and tax compliance app), a tool to help organisations with compliance issues around global employee incentives plans. 
• Bespoke innovation plans for all strategic clients to ensure that the firm is focused on supporting its most important clients with their own innovation efforts as well as to ensure that CMS continually improves its offer.
• A new “Managed Legal Services” offering, bringing global law firm knowledge and resources to specific workstreams. The firm is already providing this to some of the world’s biggest companies: https://cms.law/en/gbr/innovation/how-we-help-our-clients-innovate/cms-managed-legal-services
• The CMS trainee rotation seats now include a seat in the Innovation and Legal Operations team giving each trainee six months’ experience and exposure to the firm’s innovation projects and efforts to help clients innovate.
• More than 100 Innovation representatives sit across the firm in the different practice areas and sectors to help drive innovation at a team level.