Both sides of the legal market are under pressure. Law firms are navigating pricing pressures and growing margin constraints. In-house teams are expected to deliver more for less, often with fewer resources and higher expectations from the business.

Amid this squeeze, perhaps the most contested area of discussion amongst legal services right now is pricing. AI is introducing new forms of efficiency that promise faster turnaround and lower costs, but it also brings new tension. As technology accelerates certain tasks, it challenges long-standing pricing models and forces all sides of the legal market to rethink what clients are truly paying for, and where legal value really sits.

Against this backdrop, our recent roundtable of real estate partners and in-house legal leaders at real estate businesses explored the central question of how to deliver value in legal services in the age of AI. 

Despite the diversity of perspectives, three clear areas of debate emerged:

1. What do real estate businesses truly value in legal work?
2. How that value should be delivered through a combination of human expertise and AI.
3. How pricing models and client–firm relationships will need to adapt.

What follows summarises the range of views and the points of consensus that surfaced.

1. What Do Real Estate Businesses Truly Value in Legal Work?

A strong consensus emerged that value is holistic, and cannot be reduced to cost alone. Participants described value as an interplay of accuracy, speed, cost, and delivering business outcomes, with AI now adding new possibilities and new expectations on top.

Speed Is Not Enough

AI has radically accelerated tasks like contract review and reporting compared to only a few years ago. But speed alone does not define value. Participants emphasised that real estate businesses want usable, practical, contextual answers, not just outputs. The question clients repeatedly ask is:  “What can we actually do with this?” Legal advice becomes valuable when it directly enables a business outcome.

Business executives rarely engage with the details. They want clarity, confidence, and a clear “go/no-go” decision. As one participant summarised: “Did we get the deal done by the deadline?” 

The 80/20 Split

A recurring theme was a view that roughly 80% of legal work is factual, and increasingly capable of being automated. But the remaining 20% - interpretation, judgement, and context is where human lawyers add the most value.

Several attendees stressed that legal value also includes:

• Memory of past negotiations
• Understanding of personalities and counterparties
• Strategic framing
• Lateral thinking
• Emotional intelligence

These capabilities remain firmly human, at least for now, and clients are still prepared to pay for them.

Accuracy and Risk

AI is very strong, but not perfect. The “last 20%” of review still contains the highest risk, and subtle errors can carry major consequences. Participants repeatedly noted that the deepest value lies not in producing information, but in ensuring its reliability and interpreting it to deliver business outcomes.

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2. How Should That Value Be Delivered: Human and Machine Together?

The group discussed how AI and humans can work together to deliver legal value more efficiently and effectively. Rather than substitution, the emerging model is one of augmentation.

Where AI Adds Clear Value

Participants agreed that AI excels at:

• Rapid document review and summarisation
• Ingesting and analysing large datasets
• Increasing consistency across tasks
• Producing first-draft outputs
• Reducing the cost of labour-intensive steps

AI, in other words, supports the mechanics of legal work.

Where Humans Remain Irreplaceable

The enduring value of human lawyers lies in:

• Interpreting context
• Communicating nuance
• Making commercial judgements
• Managing relationships
• Applying emotional intelligence
• Turning analysis into strategic decisions and business outcomes

Key Challenges Identified

Participants raised several practical challenges:

1. Liability clarity
Law firms are increasingly expected to take responsibility even when AI produces elements of the work raising difficult questions about risk allocation.

2. Context feeding
AI is only as good as the information it receives, and legal context is often fragmented or tacit. This makes full automation unrealistic.

3. Orchestration
Firms and clients must jointly determine where AI is appropriate, how it should be supervised, and where human intervention is required.

Overall, participants agreed the goal is a human–machine delivery model where each plays to its strengths.

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3. What Impact Will This Have on Pricing and the Client–Firm Relationship?

Perhaps the most contested area of discussion was pricing. AI introduces new forms of efficiency, but also new tension.

The Expectation Gap

A significant gap is emerging:

• Clients increasingly believe AI should reduce the price of legal work.
• Firms often see AI as enhancing the value and quality of their service.

Fixed fees and retainer models are already under strain as clients question why prices remain the same if work is being automated.

Hourly Rates Lose Further Relevance

Many argued that hourly billing has long been a proxy for value, not a measure of it. AI simply exposes this mismatch more clearly. A short, high-value answer that unlocks a decision can be worth far more than a lengthy written report. This pushes the market toward outcome-based and value-based pricing.

AI Is Not a Pure Cost Saver

Participants warned that generative AI requires upfront investment, new frameworks, staff training and reliable oversight processes. AI may reduce marginal costs but increase fixed investment. That nuance is often invisible to clients.

Firms Are Still Early in the Journey

Many firms have not yet embedded AI deeply enough to realise meaningful cost savings. Expectations of lower pricing may develop faster than operational change.

The Future Relationship Model

The discussion suggested a more collaborative model is emerging, where:

• Firms and clients jointly agree how AI will be used
• Risk and oversight responsibilities are shared
• Transparency becomes a differentiator
• Strategic value, not volume of work, anchors the commercial relationship

AI, in this view, is not simply a tool but a catalyst for a new partnership model between real estate clients and law firms.

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Conclusion

The roundtable made clear that AI is fundamentally reshaping expectations of legal value in real estate but not by replacing human lawyers. Instead, AI is changing how value is defined, who delivers which parts, and how it should be priced.

Real estate businesses expect:

• Speed, but also quality
• Insight, not just information
• Confident decision-making that delivers business outcomes, not just reports

The most compelling opportunity lies in combining AI’s efficiency with human judgement to deliver better outcomes not just faster, but of a higher quality than ever before.

The legal teams that succeed will not be those that automate everything, nor those that resist automation, but those that redesign delivery around human–AI collaboration and build pricing models that reflect the true value delivered: clarity, confidence, and commercial outcomes.

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‍About the Orbital Executive Forum

The Orbital Executive Forum brings together senior leadership in real estate practices within law firms and corporations.

Its aim is to foster open and collaborative dialogue on some of the most pressing opportunities and challenges relating to AI in real estate legal services.

The emphasis is on shared learning, peer-to-peer exchange and diverse viewpoints. Everyone is encouraged to contribute, ask questions and share real-world experiences.

If you would like to be part of the next Forum, please contact alex.lennox@orbital.tech.

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