“Who doesn’t like depriving lawyers of revenue?” Nick Kirby says with a laugh when I ask him about Least, the lease automation startup he co-founded. Doesn’t it deny real estate lawyers hours of work they would otherwise do?
Of course, depriving lawyers of revenue isn’t the point. Kirby is a lawyer himself at London-based Mishcon de Reya. It was here he saw first-hand how inefficiently the industry worked. “We were still being sent packs of documents by post to review,” he says, recalling his experience as a junior lawyer 12 years ago.