How Real Estate AI Reshaped Vinson & Elkins’ Workflow

“Orbital Copilot has introduced a heightened level of structure that helps our team work more efficiently. It’s helped us stay aligned and manage the flow of high-volume, complex real estate matters with greater consistency."

— Wallace Schwartz, Real Estate Partner, Vinson & Elkins

About Vinson & Elkins

With over a century in full-service law practice and a dedicated real estate industry group, Am Law 100 law firm Vinson & Elkins leads some of the most high-profile commercial property deals in the US. When the stakes are high and the timelines are tight, developers, investors and institutions turn to the Vinson & Elkins team for their legal acumen across complex real estate transactions. 

The Opportunity   

With the evolution of legal-focused, AI-enabled technology, the commercial real estate team at Vinson & Elkins saw an opportunity to scale their impact further. They wanted to streamline time-intensive tasks like title reviews and lease abstractions, and boost efficiency on high-volume deals.

Before they could scale their impact, a few hurdles had to be cleared: 

• Manual, time-intensive due diligence: Title & survey reviews and lease abstractions were disproportionately consuming resources, particularly among junior lawyers and paralegals, limiting the team's ability to focus their time on the substantive review, analysis, and legal judgment where it matters most for clients.
• Inconsistent reporting formats: Reporting formats varied across projects, presenting the need for standardized outputs to enhance overall workflow efficiency and ensure clients receive clear, actionable information.‍
• Fee pressure and budget constraints: Mid-project client requests often required absorbing out-of-scope work, such as hours of due diligence, which made it harder to maintain accurate pricing estimates and manage client expectations.‍
• Limited internal visibility: It was difficult to track how many provisions had been reviewed or how much work had been completed—challenging the ability to reallocate resources effectively.

Aubrey Bishai, Vinson & Elkins’ Chief Innovation Officer, has a passion for using emerging technologies to drive greater efficiency and exceptional client service.

Bishai identified a clear opportunity to bring real estate-specific AI into the firm to deliver consistency, speed, and insight at scale, while also giving junior attorneys a clearer framework for understanding the real estate due diligence process.

“Given the firm's collective experience with AI technologies, we looked to Orbital to deliver a more streamlined approach that supported quality and speed, while helping us better plan and scale our work. We wanted a system that would free up our lawyers to focus on the more substantive aspects of legal work.”

— Aubrey Bishai, Chief Innovation Officer, Vinson & Elkins

The Solution: Orbital Copilot 

Known for its thoughtful, people-first approach to innovation, Vinson & Elkins only adopts new tools when they directly support the firm’s mission to deliver exceptional client service and empower its lawyers to work more efficiently at scale.

So when it came to streamlining high-volume real estate work, particularly complex, multi-property deals (where precision, speed, and consistency are essential), Vinson & Elkins needed a solution purpose-built for the realities of real estate law.

The Result

With Orbital Copilot, the Vinson & Elkins team has streamlined real estate diligence workflows, improved strategic focus on substantive review, and enhanced overall service delivery. 

‍Optimizing and standardizing workflows 

What stood out about Orbital Copilot was its ability to produce consistent, high-quality outputs in formats tailored to the team’s needs. For workflows such as title reviews and lease abstractions, Orbital Copilot has brought new structure to work that had historically varied from case to case. This has reduced time spent aligning internal deliverables and increased collaboration for the benefit of clients.

Enhancing visibility to improve planning

The platform has also introduced much-needed visibility. Real estate attorneys can now track completed work, review provisions, and monitor capacity across the team. That transparency allows them to better plan resources, handle urgent requests, and reduce the risk of scope creep on multi-faceted matters.

Turning automation into education

Instead of getting stuck in manual, repetitive tasks, junior associates are prompted to engage critically with the work, reviewing and approving AI-generated reports section by section. This improves both output quality, whilst creating a more substantive, educational experience.

On budget, on time

Ultimately, Orbital Copilot is enabling the Vinson & Elkins team to deliver faster turnarounds, keep projects on budget, and take on more work without compromising the standard of service clients expect.

“Orbital Copilot supports the way we work. It’s not replacing legal judgment—it’s helping us apply it more effectively for clients. Across the team, we all benefit because Orbital Copilot is built precisely for the pace and complexity of our work.”

— Paul Martin, Real Estate Partner, Vinson & Elkins