Latest / Propertyshe Podcast / Will Pearce

Transcript

Will Pearce · Propertyshe Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: We are dealing with the most important technical paradigm shift of our lives.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: We're dealing with technology that is, in my view, more important than any technology that we have ever lived through.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: And investors get that.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: So, really, one of the key risks we had as a business, I believe, has been completely removed.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: The other reason why investors have got very excited is the size of real estate as an asset class.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: And this rise of legal AI or AI applied to legal services that we have been able to demonstrate incredibly successful results with.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Susan Freeman.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to our Property She podcast series brought to you by Mish Condorea in association with the London Real Estate Forum, where I get to interview some of the key influencers in the world of real estate and the built environment.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Today I'm delighted to welcome Will Pearce.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Will is the co-founder and CEO of Orbital, a legal AI platform built for the real estate industry.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Founded in 2018, Orbital sits at the center of property transactions, automating the legal work that has traditionally been slow and manual and connecting the parties who depend on it.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: It now handles over 250,000 transactions a year for some of the UK's top law firms, including Mishgonderarea, and works directly with the real estate businesses behind those deals.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: The developers, owner operators, investors, and REITs are shaping the built environment.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: By bringing law firms and their clients onto a single platform, Orbital is building the infrastructure for how real estate gets bought, sold, and financed.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: It opened a New York office in 2025, and in January this year raised a$60 million Series B to scale further across the US.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: So now I'm very much looking forward to talking to Will about the vision behind Orbital, how he went about building the business, and how his technology is changing the way real estate is transacted.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Will, welcome to the Property Sheet Podcast.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to be talking to you and all the more appreciated because I think it's 5.30 a.m.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: in Chicago at the moment.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Susan.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's lovely to be here.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm on my second coffee of the morning already, so we should be good to go and uh yeah, excited for the conversation.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, brilliant.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: And if the sound quality is not up to standard, it's because there are thousands of miles between us this morning.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's true to say, Will, that you left the space industry to try to update the way property is transacted.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, some people would say that's a move from the future into the past, but most prop tech founders seem to come from property.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: You came from the space industry.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: What was it that you saw in real estate that other people were missing and just caused you to completely pivot your career?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm actually very proud of the fact that I'm not from the real estate industry, Susan.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: It allows me to, I think, ask why.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: It allows me to question and challenge why things are done without a feeling of incumbent knowledge or kind of um acceptance of the way things have worked.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: And as you said, my first job was actually in the space industry.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: I graduated economics from university.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: All of my friends were going into banking and consulting, and I wanted to do something a little bit different.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: I was thinking a lot about the future of technology and the future of humanity.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: And this was at a time when Jeff Bezos was starting Blue Origin and Richard Branson had done Virgin Galactic, and of course, Elon Musk was doing SpaceX.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I got very excited by the future potential of the space industry.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I went to join a UK government-run space organization in Oxford.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it was really there that I got exposed to high-tech enterprise and to startups and to business building.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: I did that for the first couple of years of my life or my career, and then really started having some interesting ideas with my co-founder Ed, who was a lawyer by training, about how we could apply satellite imagery and data from satellites to build a business.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that was where we started this initial idea of orbital.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: And the initial idea was how we could apply images from space to analyze real estate portfolios globally.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: And this was an idea that we took to large real estate businesses.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: We also took to Mishkon Duray, where we first met you, Susan many years ago.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: And we started to think through whether we could start to solve problems in real estate through analyzing high-resolution satellite imagery.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: And candidly, and I said many times on record, this was a bad business idea.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: This was not what the real estate industry was interested in, but it was our first exposure to the way that real estate works.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it was our first exposure to the lengthy, paper-based, time-intensive, complex processes that go into transacting a real estate asset.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it was this eye-opening experience, Susan, walking through the corridors of your firm and others, seeing how real estate legal work got done and seeing the stacks of paper from floor to ceiling and thinking, aha, maybe there's a better way of transacting real estate for the lawyers for the rest of the real estate ecosystem.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that was where we built Orbital.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm really excited about the fact that you started in MDR Lab, now Tech Incubator.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I think just from both sides, it was the real learning experience.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, you learned what a real estate transaction really looked like.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we learned, you know, how actually you could work differently and use technology to really improve what we did.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Was there anything that really surprised you in those first years when you were building the platform?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: So many things.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think one of the things that I distinctly remember is the vast difference in tech awareness and adoption between different people, different ages, different profiles.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: I distinctly remember one instance walking into a meeting, and a very senior partner was dictating a message to their PA via a recorder or I don't even know what you'd call this machine.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think I know exactly who you mean.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: And this this I imagine is common practice in law firms, especially was common practice in the past.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'd never seen one of these machines before.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: I was 23 years old.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, why are they speaking into this machine for their PA to type up an email?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then on the other hand, talking about the future of legal services and AI with more kind of tech ready partners in the firm.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a real significant variation in awareness to technology and incumbent ways of working.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: This was pre-AI.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: You have to remember that this was 2018, I believe.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: This was pre-Gen AI, pre-Chat GPT.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: So we were solving these problems when legal technology was really in its first wave, its first evolution.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: And even then, we were seeing huge kind of varieties in adoption and excitement in technology.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: No, you're right.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: You were very early adopters.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd like to think that we also started to embrace AI really early and obviously now use it extensively.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: So tell me, how did you go about fundraising at that time?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because as we've highlighted, it was sort of pretty early on in the AI journey, and you were trying to introduce technology to an industry that, you know, was quite happy doing things in the antiquated way that were done.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: What sort of response did you get?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: So we've raised three or four distinct funding rounds at Orbital.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: In total, we've raised over$75 million of venture capital funding.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: But in the very early days, the first seed funding rounds and friends of family funding rounds are always the hardest.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: And the very first amount that we raised actually was an investment round through the CEDAS network involving actually some partners at the Mishgonder ASES and coming out of MDR Lab, graduating from MDR Lab, the firm was very supportive in helping us get off the ground.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: So some partners at MDR Lab were putting in a little bit of personal money and also friends, family, you know, connections, really anyone that we could get to cut a check for us.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that was, I think, in total, I want to say 60,000 pounds.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: That was not a big, exciting ticket for an AI business.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: It was a tiny amount of money.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: I don't even think we paid our own salaries with this amount of money.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: It allowed us to hire a software engineer, and that really was a first exercise in hiring and team building.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: And from there, you win your first customers and you're kind of on the fundraising journey.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: After that, we hired a couple of other engineers and we ended up raising our seed investment round, which I think was 600,000 pounds, from a partner at SeedCamp called Tom Wilson, who was an ex-practicing lawyer.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: One of our strategies when fundraising was trying to find people that understood the problem.
• 8:24
  unknown: Right.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: So the problem, as I've said, is real estate is this vast asset class, but the legal work in real estate is complex and antiquated.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: We wanted to find people that understood that.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: So we pitched every lawyer in London who was now a VC.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: And Tom was a lawyer, so we were pitching him in belief that he understood the problem, and thank goodness he did.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: So Tom wrote our first check from SeedCamp.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then since then, we're on the treadmill, and lots more customers and growth and funding rounds came more easily after that.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this is probably a good moment to ask you to introduce Orbital to our listeners and perhaps explain a little bit how Orbital can speed up or unlock a real estate transaction.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: So Orbital is an AI assistant for real estate legal work.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: Orbital is accelerating and automating the key process of legal work in a real estate transaction.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: And we focused on this problem because we see the legal work as a huge bottleneck to a real estate deal.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we see real estate as this significant asset class transacted globally, impacting the global economy, where speed of transaction and transparency of information facilitates value in the deal, the legal work being a bottleneck to that process.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: So we see orbital as an accelerant to the legal portion, empowering lawyers, freeing up lawyers to spend time on high-value work, and therefore accelerating the underlying transaction of the real estate hazard.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: And to give you a kind of specific example, in the US, which is a key part of our attention at the moment from a market perspective, there is a key part of a transaction called title and survey work, which is the review of the title documents to build the title insurance policy and the review of the survey, which is a visual plan.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: And on a complex transaction, this can take many weeks.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: This can take weeks of work with paralegals and junior associates and backs and forths with the title company.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: And an orbital is reviewing all of the document, is trained on an appreciation of the location of the specific assets, is trained on an appreciation of the historic use of the specific asset, has the ability to interpret the context of how the asset being acquired will be used in future, is not just reviewing text, but is reviewing and interpreting visual issues, is incorporating information that Orbital can scrape and access from county records on environmental risks, on flood risks, and a wide variety of other inputs.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: And we're bringing that process of title and survey work from many, many weeks down to a first output in really a few minutes that the lawyer can then review.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: So that's one case study of accelerating a very, very key portion of real estate legal work that takes place in the United States significantly.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Do you actually have stats on how you've accelerated and to what degree you've managed to accelerate transactions by introducing your technology?
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Our stats are case studies, and our stats here are what customers tell us.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have prescriptive kind of stop clock measurements of when work begins and when it stops, but we regularly hear customers tell us that discrete parts of the process have been reduced in time by 90%, you know, significant savings.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: The issue at the moment is that real estate is a very interdependent asset class.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: The transaction requires multiple parties to interact with each other, to share information, to collaborate, to refer to the same sources of information.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: And if Orbital is just doing that for one part of the transaction, the time savings are going to be limited.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: So a big part of our strategy at the moment is working with all of the parties in the real estate transaction such that these interdependent handoffs and collaboration moments are not limited just to the user of Orbital, but can be distributed across everyone referring to the transaction, referring to the legal component of the transaction, and thereby speeding up the transaction time for everyone involved.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: That does make a lot of sense.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is probably a good moment to say congratulations on your$60 million Series B fundraising, which I think was at the beginning of this year.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: And how has that affected the vision for the company?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because I mean, I know you have now got a New York office.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And how are you going to use the money?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm actually very proud of the fact it hasn't affected the vision at all, Susan.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: The vision has been precisely the same since day one, since we were marching through the corridors of Mish Gondore as two kids, not really uh understanding what they were doing at that point in time.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: The vision has been the same since day one.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: The vision is accelerating real estate transactions by automating real estate legal work.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: And that vision has been the same ever since we first started.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of businesses recently, a lot of AI companies have been formed and founded on the basis of AI as a technology is very powerful.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: How do I use this technology?
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: Orbital has been founded on the basis of real estate transactions needing to be solved and tackling the inefficiencies of legal work and real estate transactions.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: And that vision stays the same, independent of the technology we're using.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that's something I'm proud of.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: So the aim is to expand internationally?
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: A year ago, our big aim was to expand into the United States, which we've now done.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: So we've opened on New York City office, as you've just said.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: We've also opened an office in Los Angeles where I've just flown in from.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: So the US is the world's largest real estate market by far.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's the world's largest legal services market to build a very, very significant business.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: We need to be operating in the US.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: So that was a big component of our latest Sunday round.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: It was how do we use this capital to expand the team in the US?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: We're keeping the product and engineering function centric in London, but sales and go-to-market and customer support and scaling across all corners of the vast market that is the US is a big part of my attention at the moment.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: And how big is the team now?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: We're 150 people and growing very quickly.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: We have lots of open roles.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: So people listening to this are interested in working at an AI business in real estate and law, then please reach out.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: We're 150 people, about 100 based in London, about 50 in New York, and a handful in Los Angeles.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I imagine quite a lot of real estate lawyers within that number.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm very proud of the fact that we have a very large number of real estate lawyers that come to join Orbital.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: And these are real estate lawyers who worked in private practice, they worked in-house, and they want to solve some of the problems that they see on a day-to-day basis, and they want to solve them with technology.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: And they see in Orbital really the only business globally, the only business in the world that is building AI exclusively for real estate law.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm very, very grateful that they come and join us.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: They join us in two capacities.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: They join us to help build the products, they train the AI, they work with our AI engineers to help build Orbital into a solution that can accelerate real estate legal work.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: But they also join Orbital to help our customers get the most out of the product.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: They could speak their language, they can appreciate the nuances in the transaction.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: We even had many instances where we've been working with a customer and one of the orbital team realizes that they worked on a deal with the customer that they're now working with using Orbital, and they're a really important member of our team.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: But how do you spend your day?
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: You obviously growing the team, you're expanding into the US.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: How does your day pan out?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's such a tough question.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: My day is spent really focusing on whatever burning fire or massive opportunity there is that only I can solve.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I think as founder and CEO, you need to be diverting your attention, not ever really on the glamorous work or on the work that catches attention, but the work that only you can solve.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's a critical customer meeting.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's an internal decision that only you can make.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's an investor-facing work.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: But the most important part of my day, every morning over my first coffee of the day, is to work out what those things are.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I have an AI agent that trawls through my email, it trails through my Slack.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: I give it the context of all of my previous meetings.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: I talk to it, I give it my voice notes, and it helps me prioritize every morning what those specific activities are that only I can solve for the highest impact, uh, highest leverage for the team.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how I try and prioritize my day.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: But it can sit across product work, it can sit across sales work, it can sit across externally facing work as well.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's very, very varied, very diverse.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: When you had the investor conversations on this round, I imagine they were very different to the uh early conversations with investors before generative AI became something that was mainstream.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: They were.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think when I started Orbital with my co-founder Ed, we used to speak a lot about tech risk.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: We used to speak a lot about if we're trying to build a system that can start to automate bits of the legal journey that impact a real estate transaction.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: How on earth do we build that system?
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: How on earth do we build that technology?
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we'd worked with professors and machine learning at universities, we'd hired kind of old classical machine learning people into the team, but we were bottlenecked by the capabilities of the technology significantly.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: And being a business founded, as I said earlier, with a very clear vision prior to this AI revolution has now allowed us to ride the wave, ride the new wave of the tech unlock of generative AI.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that means that in the investor conversations that you're talking about, that tech risk that we used to be so concerned by is much less prevalent now.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: The kind of technical risk is much less prevalent because investors buy into the fact that we are dealing with the most important technical paradigm shift of our lives.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: We're dealing with technology that is, in my view, more important than any technology that we have ever lived through.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: And investors get that.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, really, one of the key risks we had as a business, I believe, has been completely removed.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: The other reason why investors have got very excited is the size of real estate as an asset class and this rise of legal AI or AI applied to legal services, that we have been able to demonstrate incredibly successful results with applied to real estate.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm not going to say it was easy.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to say it was a process that I relished, but it was a process that we had lots and lots of investors asking to invest in Orbital.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: We had many, many term sheets, and we ended up selecting a very, very strong investment group based on large billion dollar fund based in New York City, as well as capital directly from the real estate industry.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: I was just wondering, when you started the business, did you have any idea what was coming down the road in terms of this new generation of AI?
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: The honest answer is no.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think the longer answer is you have to build a business assuming that problems will be solved.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: Candidly, if you're building a business focus too much on everything that could go wrong, you're just going to be paralyzed with fear.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: There is so much that could go wrong in building any business that I think you have to have a little bit of call it naivety, call it belief, call it overriding self-confidence.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: Call it whatever you want.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: You have to start a business believing that all of the things that could go wrong will be solved or can be solved.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: So whilst I kind of like you in the I season and said that I foresaw the AI revolution and the pace and growth and power of these solutions, I absolutely did assume that things would be okay.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: I absolutely did believe in what we were building.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I think inherent in that belief is an assumption that things would work out and will work out.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I think any founder has that belief, even if they can't articulate that perfectly in terms of the precise technical shifts that will allow that belief to be embodied.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: And just for our listeners, can we just talk a little bit about who the customer is that you're targeting?
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because we talked a lot about the real estate legal community, but your customer is also the property companies, isn't it?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: Correct, absolutely.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: The simplest way of putting this is Orbital's customers is anyone in a real estate transaction who has to review, draft, read, extract information from legal documents.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, the core user in that process is going to be the lawyer.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: The real estate lawyers are our first customers.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: They're the first people that we started working with and really the kind of bread and butter of Orbital's products.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: But when you dive deeper into who interacts with legal work in a real estate transaction, if you dive deeper into who benefits from legal work in a real estate transaction being massively accelerated, this touches people underwriting real estate transactions.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: This touches asset managers, this touches lenders, this touches construction teams, this touches property managers.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: This really touches a very, very broad group of individuals centered around that process of legal work taking place to facilitate a real estate deal.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: And over time, we have, as you correctly say, moved away from law firms and lawyers exclusively being our customers towards in-house teams and wider teams at very, very large real estate organizations and developers, lenders, investment trusts.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that is a large part of our growth story.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: We alluded earlier to orbital growing in the US, but orbital growing into the whole real estate environment is a very large part of our growth story at the moment.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: And how different is it operating in the US?
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're dealing with completely, I mean, you know, all the different states, different ways of working, you know, different ethos.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: Is it very different?
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: And in what way?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's so many ways of answering that, Susan.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's a product angle, there's a the market angle.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: There's also just a cultural angle.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe I'll try and touch on a few of those.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: From a cultural perspective, I do think it's true that in the US, entrepreneurship is celebrated.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: Taking risks is celebrated, more so in the UK, unfortunately.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I'm British, I have at least one proud British bone in my body.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: I wish as a country that the UK was kinder to risk takers.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that can absolutely change.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: But in the US, when you tell someone you're building a business or you're starting a company, the first reaction is wow, how can I help?
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: And in the UK, I don't wish to stereotype, and this isn't true for everyone, but a reaction that is more common is why?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I think culturally the US environment is one of support and one of excitement at a new idea, at a new business.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that is very helpful.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think actually in hindsight, I would have moved to the US far more quickly than I have done.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: From a market perspective, it's true that real estate law and real estate practices do differ on a state-by-state basis.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: But we've been able to move very, very quickly at orbital to bring in the expertise.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned the real estate lawyers that we can hire to onboard the customers across the vast majority of states.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: Orbital is now used right across the country.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: That creates this vast motive intelligence that we have about specific edge cases of real estate transactions across all jurisdictions in the United States.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's actually incredibly powerful for us as a business.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the final point of how I founded it in the US is more cultural for our team.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Moving internationally is incredibly exciting for a kind of young team of people building a business.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's been incredibly empowering for us to be able to sponsor visas of people moving across from London to New York City and to invest in our team growing into the US market.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that has been immensely exciting.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds very exciting.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: And who is your competition in the UK and in the US?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: We think about competition in two different ways.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: We think about competition firstly as incumbent process, the old fashioned way of things working.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: And for us, if we're building AI systems to accelerate real estate legal work, the old fashioned incumbent way of working is a myriad of different providers and sometimes outsource teams, sometimes teams of paralegals.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: Really just incumbent process is inherently a competitive pressure.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: A more relevant competitive pressure is the new and vast and powerful suite of generalist AI solutions that exist in the market.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: Whether this is Microsoft Copilot, whether this is ChatGPT or Claude from Anthropic, there are incredibly powerful AI solutions that everyone is using and should use to do very, very generalist tasks.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: There is also a very large and growing community of legal AI solutions who review documents and are not focused on any single one practice area.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: So everyone listening to this should try and should use all these products.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: But what makes Orbital unique is we're the only solution focused exclusively on real estate law, trained by real estate lawyers with all of the data of real estate that we can access, with all the context, the knowledge of the specific asset that you're dealing with, with an appreciation of market standard for the asset you're dealing with.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: So our pitch really is one of specific focus, is one of context and awareness and knowledge built on top of the power of these sorts of generalist solutions that I mentioned earlier.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for that.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: That makes it clear because there seem to be these platforms that you've mentioned that are building, if you like, sort of horizontal AI for lawyers, but you're building something that is really specialist and just for real estate.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's an interesting analog here in terms of how humans specialize.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, humans specialize because it's generally accepted that specialization leads to improved results.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: People specialize as a real estate lawyer or a corporate lawyer or a litigator.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, people develop specialisms, and over time that leads to better results.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it's really no different why AI solutions reaching a generalist level of intelligence or a general level of intelligence shouldn't achieve better results by specialization.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: And we see that in the evaluations that we run.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, one question, I don't know what your thoughts are on this, but obviously it's something, you know, as a real estate lawyer does occupy my thoughts, is you know, how the role of the real estate lawyer is going to change with the advent of high capability AI.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think change is inevitable, and change is the key word there.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think this technology is going to augment the highest performing real estate lawyers.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: This technology still requires the real estate lawyer to have their hands on the steering wheel.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: They are ultimately responsible for the quality of the output.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: They are ultimately, in many instances, indemnifying the output, and that's what the client expects and demands from them.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: But it's true that there is change.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it's true that in a period of change, there is capacity for there to be winners and losers.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think the potential losers are those that fear or those that mistrust these systems.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: And the potential winners, I strongly believe, are those that use these systems and use them to accelerate and increase the performance of their output.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: And also those that take risks.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: This issue of the billable hour really, I believe, satisfies no one.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's not something that the clients like, and it's not something generally that I think is in the law firms' interests.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: And in the world of AI, there's a massive opportunity to shift away from a billable hour, for example.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: And lawyers and law firms that can take some of these risks and embrace these changes and empower their practice with AI are those are those that are going to win.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: I do not think or foresee a world in which lawyers are not needed.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: I think this profession is a high performance, highly regulated, required industry.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's possible that work travels more in-house than to private practice, than has been the case historically.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think I actually think that's quite likely rather than possible.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: So the profession will change.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: The requirement for lawyers will not go away.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: The opportunity for lawyers to accelerate their careers by adopting this technology will exist.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's what a paradigm shift is, right?
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's a change in circumstances, a change in a situation that allows people to flourish.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but you can see that a lot of the work that's now being done by AI that was previously done by junior lawyers, that was the way trained.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: That sort of work won't be there anymore.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: And we will have to think a lot about, you know, how best to train the junior lawyers.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think the work will still be there, Susan.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: I just think it's done in a different way.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's now done with an AI assistant or it's done alongside an AI assistant.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: The work doesn't go away.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: The requirement for the work to take place doesn't go away.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're seeing firms use orbital as part of their training processes, to your point.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: Training is incredibly important.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: The way in which a junior lawyer is supervised and cuts their teeth on transactions at an early stage in their career is an incredibly important part of them becoming, you know, a trusted counsel to large real estate transactions.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: Clients want junior lawyers involved that can be supervised and also can grow to be their counsel of the future.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the the capacity for training to take place with these AI systems, using these AI systems as part of their training, is just a shifted mindset rather than thinking the work won't exist, therefore there will be no training.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: And do you think that AI is going to develop to such a level of sophistication that lawyers won't need to be checking everything and won't need to be concerned about hallucinations and things like that?
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's an inevitability.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: I I really think that that's not a question, though, of the capability of the technology.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's a question of risk tolerance, it's a question of insurance, it's a question of indemnity.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: In many instances, already the technology is perfectly capable of answering, you know, very simple questions to an exceptionally high degree of accuracy.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't suggest that law firms do not check or real estate businesses do not check AI that they're using, but some of that's just the risk tolerance they want to take.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: If they are in turn a startup real estate business, you know, maybe they want to take some risks and rely entirely on the AI.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then again, the capability of this technology is that in a free market, the choice is there for them to take some of these risks.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it's inevitable the performance of the technology will get there and get there quicker than people expect.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think the bottleneck to what you're describing, Susan, is the technology.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's the regulation and perhaps the risk aversion inherent in real estate legal work.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's really interesting, actually, because we have situations where a client will say, look, they just want a broad picture.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: We realize it's not going to be 100%, but they don't need us to check it.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: They just want to know sort of roughly how the land lies at that particular point in a transaction.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: And do you think from the orbital point of view, we talked about real estate generally, and I know you cover commercial and residential, but is it sector agnostic or are there sort of particular asset classes that stand to benefit most, do you think?
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's sector agnostic.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: Real estate as an asset class suffers from a problem of being illiquid and slow moving and complex.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: And that is the problem that we're setting up to solve here at Orbital, regardless of the type of real estate asset that we're dealing with.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: But it is also true that I think there are asset classes and types of transactions where orbital and AI in general can help more.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: So a large, complex development that requires an understanding of lots of interrelated documents, that requires an understanding of the visual component of where rights of way might sit, that requires an understanding of how the site might have changed over time with old-fashioned plans.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: And orbital has spent a lot of energy and time working on mapping technology and AI to visualize plans and kind of physically inspect a layout of a property rather than just analyze the text.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: These kind of complex assessments of land and land use and rights and development, I think, are particularly right for AI, rather than perhaps a pretty vanilla refinancing of a residential asset.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's already quite a simple transaction.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: AI will still help and will still accelerate that, but it's just more simple work.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the proxy is really the more complex work with more documents, with more visual analysis that's required, you're going to see AI accelerate things even more than on the more simple work.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: But it's asset class agnostic.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: I was just wondering whether there's any new technology outside of real estate that you're keeping an eye on that might in time be relevant for real estate.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: So the technology that comes to mind is still AI, Susan, but it's AI applied to software development and coding and AI coding agents.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: Really, software engineering has been the first profession that has been essentially automated by AI.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot find a software engineer now that is not using AI technology.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: And you may think, okay, this is just a software engineer, this is just code.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: How does this impact real estate?
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: But in the digital world that we're moving to, really everything can be represented in code.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: Everything can be optimized with software.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: And in a world where access to building software is an automated process, that impacts real estate and that impacts every single environment and every single asset class and every single industry.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: We are transitioning into a world where the least technical person can build their own software products, and the least technical person can code.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that as a revolution for any knowledge work, for any profession is profound.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's not lost on the real estate industry.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not lost on a real estate business who suddenly has a new particular idea and a senior exec in a real estate business can build that idea themselves in 30 minutes, the coding agent.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: That is going to be fantastically revolutionary.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds really interesting.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: And if you take things to their ultimate conclusion, I mean we've talked about how property transactions are slow.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: Could we reach a stage where a property transaction becomes as instantaneous as a stock trade?
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I also think that's something that's inevitable.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: There are lots of things to think about and consider, you know, access to information and searches and in the US, things like county records and title insurance.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: These are things where third parties have to do work and get involved in a transaction and collect information, documents from different places.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: But the trend is inevitable.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: The trend is towards digitalization, automated intelligence, the trend is towards instant or near instant legal reasoning and reasoning in general.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the logical outcome of this trend is near instant real estate transactions, should they wish to take place.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: There are lots of areas where I think parties may not want near-instant real estate transactions for various reasons.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the promise of that is undeniable.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: And how long do you think that is going to take?
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, Susan.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think, as I said earlier, I think the technical capability is going to come much quicker than people expect and people realise.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: The blocker to adoption is not going to be the technology.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to be people's attitudes, the human nature of adoption, risk exposure, these sorts of things.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: From a technical perspective, I would imagine less than five years.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: These AI systems are doubling in capability every seven months.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: So when you appreciate the exponential that we're riding, the technical capability does not feel like it is far away at all.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's quite soon.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: We started off talking about how real estate is a little bit antiquated and people are used to doing things a particular way because that's how they've always done them.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: You can see that people are going to have to get used to a lot of change.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: I would just stress one more time that the pace of change is not going to be dictated by the capability of the technology.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think the pace of change will be bottlenecked by the humans.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: I get that.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Will, earlier in the conversation, you were talking about real estate as the largest asset class.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: And earlier this week, I was at the inaugural Built World Summit, which has been set up by New London Architecture to show the importance of real estate as an asset class.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: And they produced a report recently showing that the built environment is the UK's largest economic sector if you bring everything together.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: I just wondered if you had any thoughts on why real estate is not sufficiently recognized as this huge asset class that it is.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a really interesting question.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: Whenever I have a new starter in the team, I explain to them real estate is the home you live in.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: It is literally one of Maslow's hierarchy needs shelter.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: Real estate is the transport infrastructure you used to get to work this morning.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: Real estate is the office we're in at the moment.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: Real estate is almost by definition every way we interact with the world around us.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think the average person associates real estate as just their home and maybe an office.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: But when you really dig beneath the surface, it's such a complex and nuanced asset class.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: Even when I speak to technologists and AI people, the thing that is bottlenecking AI at the moment is availability of data centers.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: Development of data centers is a real estate problem.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: The next thing that is hindering development of AI is availability and access to energy.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: Energy infrastructure is a real estate problem.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: You can really boil down just about any situation and appreciate its reliance on the real estate ecosystem and on the real estate industry.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: Again, when I have new starters in the team or when I have these sorts of conversations, it becomes quite apparent to me that solving real estate issues impacts the global economy, impacts society, impacts, impacts life.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that's one of the ways I like to think about orbital.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: If orbital is solving the speed of a real estate transaction by tacking the legal issues, the knock-on impacts of that are significant.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: So it's clear to me that real estate is so broad and so varied, Susan.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: I don't have a good answer for why that's not appreciated.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: I really don't.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe the industry should somehow get together and think about its communication problem.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's got a PR problem somewhere.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: Or maybe it's just so varied and so complex that it's hard to find a narrative that stitches all of these kind of types of real estate asset classes together into one coherent unified narrative.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: I just wondered whether it was the same in from what you've seen in the US.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly the same.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: The same challenges exist, the same problems.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there are different nuances in the US market.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: We spoke about state-based regulation earlier.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: Some states have a moratorium on data center developments, other states are investing significantly in data center developments, for example.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_01: But the same problems and the same reliance on real estate absolutely exists.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: We are trying to have this collaborative voice for real estate in the UK.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: And you should look out for next year's Built World Summit.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think perhaps you should be contributing.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: So if we sat down again in five years' time, what would orbital look like?
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: How would you measure success for orbital?
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: Success for orbital at the most basic level is how quickly we can accelerate real estate transactions.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: If legal work is not a bottleneck to real estate deal, if legal work is swift and transparent and near instant and lawyers are empowered to advise their clients and to conduct high-value strategic work rather than kind of paper-based review and document work, the value that can accrue to the real estate industry with accelerated transactions, increased transparency is significant.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: In five years' time, I would value the success of that truly just as a function of how much more real estate transactions are accelerated, how much liquidity we can induce to this asset class, how much transparency.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: I would assess success as the proportion of the global real estate economy that orbital is tackling.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mentioned that we're currently used on a quarter of a million transactions across the US and the UK, and we see this number growing very, very quickly in five years' time.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: I would expect that number to be astronomical.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: To my earlier point around how real estate touches so much the global economy, I also would like to believe and like to think that there is a wider success story there in changing the way that real estate is transacted that trickles down into how people buy homes, into how large development projects can get approved and take place, into all manner of the global economy.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: Let's hope so.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a good place to stop and time to let you get back to bed.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, Susan.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: I won't be going back to the bed.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna have a third copy and I'm gonna power on for the rest of the day.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's fantastic.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much, Will, for taking the time.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Susan.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much, Will.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: We're so thrilled the MISHON and MDR Lab has been an important part of the orbital story and delighted to see you go from strength to strength.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: It really is fascinating to hear from you just how quickly AI is changing the way we do business in real estate.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that's it for now.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed today's conversation.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: Please join us for the next Property She podcast interview coming shortly.
• 40:11
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• 40:23
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• 40:32
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• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, you can continue to follow me on LinkedIn and on Twitter at PropertyShe for a very regular commentary on all things real estate, prop tech, and the built environment.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: See you again soon.