Rethinking Legal AI: Why Real Estate Demands a Specialized Approach

Whether you walked the halls at Legalweek like us this Spring, or kept up with the coverage online, discussions around AI continue to dominate the legal world—and for good reason. From litigation support to contract review, AI is widely considered game-changing across the legal industry, both in the efficiencies delivered and headcount saved. For law firms feeling the pressure to innovate, it’s tempting to assume these tools can have firm-wide impact, plugging into any legal task to save time and stave off the competition.  

At first glance, it’s an appealing idea. After all, these tools are trained on a plethora of legal material; court opinions, regulations, contracts and even textbooks. That breadth gives the power to quickly scan and summarize legal documents, flag issues, and save attorneys time. In practice areas like litigation research or corporate contracts, they’ve proven to be genuinely helpful.

But when focussing on real estate-specific due diligence, is general legal AI enough?

There’s a pervasive misconception in the legal world: the idea that any domain-specific legal AI can be dropped into a real estate transaction and instantly deliver results. But the truth is, not all legal AI is created equal. And when it comes to real estate transactions, using general-purpose legal AI can do more harm than good.

Real estate transactions involve a dense web of interrelated documents including title reports, surveys, leases, joint venture agreements, and more. These aren't just legal documents; they’re industry-specific blueprints that require a trained eye to spot what really matters. General legal AI tools simply don’t have that training.

These tools struggle to recognize key defined terms, miss important cross-references, and can’t reliably connect dots across multiple documents. For specific nuances that a seasoned real estate attorney would catch instantly, a general AI model wouldn’t even register it as relevant.

That gap in understanding isn’t just a technical hiccup. It can introduce real business risk.

Firms that deploy general legal AI in real estate workflows often find themselves in an unexpected predicament. Instead of saving time, attorneys end up double-checking every flagged clause, verifying lease terms by hand, and untangling misinterpreted title exceptions. This counterproductively results in more billable hours spent cleaning up the AI’s output, with less value delivered to clients.

In other words, the promise of efficiency backfires. And it backfires in a way that’s both costly and invisible until it’s too late. 

The solution isn’t to abandon AI altogether, but to choose tools purpose-built for real estate.

Real estate legal work demands a level of intelligence that broad AI tools simply can’t deliver. Specialized legal AI, such as Orbital Copilot, is fine-tuned on real estate documents and workflows, and understands the language of the industry. It can recognize how a lease clause affects a financing agreement, or how an easement buried in a title report changes a development plan. It doesn’t just read documents, it interprets them like a real estate attorney would.

The bottom line is that legal AI has the potential to transform real estate due diligence, but only if you’re using the right tool for the job. Firms who invest in purpose-built solutions will gain a true competitive edge. Those who stick with generic tools risk falling behind, potentially pulling their clients (or their reputation) with them.

Orbital Copilot: Your real estate AI assistant

Orbital Copilot is the only AI assistant purpose-built for commercial real estate legal teams.

Backed by a team of legal engineers with deep real estate practice expertise and already used across over 100,000 real estate transactions a year, Orbital Copilot speeds up complex due diligence tasks—like title & survey reviews, plotting legal descriptions, lease abstracts, and more—by up to 70% while ensuring attorney-level precision. 

Trusted by leading firms, including Goodwin, BCLP, and Bilzin Sumberg, Orbital Copilot helps legal teams automate busywork, freeing up time to focus on high-impact legal work, deliver exceptional client service, and win more business.

This blog is taken from our latest whitepaper, ‘The AI Reality Gap: 3 Illusions Costing Real Estate Attorneys'. Access the guide here.