UK top 50 law firm Mishcon de Reya has entered a commercial agreement with contract review startup Della, which was part of Mishcon’s most recent startup incubator, MDR Lab.
The Lab, which finished at the start of this year, afforded the pair the opportunity to build a deeper relationship and extend Della’s offering, which is still being tested and developed by teams across the firm. According to real estate managing associate Oliver Neasham, who was involved in the Della pilot, all the signs are that the 2018-founded London startup will become Mishcon’s ‘go-to’ solution for reviewing large volumes of leases in the very near future.
Powered by massive language models, Della enables lawyers to ask natural language questions about the contracts they need to analyse, and speaking to Legal IT Insider, Neasham said: “As a real estate practice we are always looking to find ways to help us review things faster or looking for ways to create efficiencies, and in a lot of cases we deal with investment properties that are subject to lots of leases.
“When we were introduced to Della, we quite quickly discovered that we liked the software, but there are areas we can improve, and within the next few months I expect it will be our go-to tool when we get investment acquisitions with lots of leases.”
One of the significant advances to Della’s offering since working with Mishcon is the way its contract review findings are presented. Della’s COO, former lawyer, Hugo Seymour said: “The nice thing about the Lab is that it gives you access to people, and it pretty quickly became apparent that people don’t want a whole bunch of data, they want to get close enough to something that they can give to a client. We’ve got to a stage where Della is enjoyable to use, and we’ve moved from an initial need to expanding the value delivered.”
Seymour added: “The evolution is our ability to template out the responses and begin to push them into reports, letters, and status updates. We’re beginning to move from ‘here is your stuff’ to, ‘here are one or two more steps further.’’
According to Neasham, Della is “now almost like a one-stop-shop for document review.”
Della is working towards creating standard contract checklists that users can build on and Neasham says: “Our ideal situation is that we have a standard checklist for a full lease review and anyone going in to use it can pull it out and don’t have to design it.”
Significantly for Della, it’s not just the real estate department trialling its technology. Neasham says: “It’s been used in a litigation matter where we have hundreds of pre-action letters, so it’s a case going back to the generative as well as extractive side of Della. They needed to pull information out of the documents and work out what goes into the pre-action letters.” He adds: “You can adapt it to do most things.”
In a statement out today (30 June) Dulcie Pearson, solutions engineer in Mishcon de Reya’s Practice Transformation Team, which worked closely with Della during its time with MDR Lab, commented: “We have been looking for an intuitive tool to enable our teams to review their contracts faster, and Della does exactly that. It lets us ask questions about our contracts in plain English and get answers quickly. This functionality matches the way our teams work on a daily basis, I am hopeful that Della can be rolled out across a number of practice areas in future.”
Mishcon announced in 2018 that it was collaborating with Kira Systems for document review. We have asked the firm for comment on the status of that collaboration.