LeasePilot CEO Gabriel Safar spoke with Law.com for a piece on the fast-growing prop tech sector. The article was published on March 19th, 2019. The full text can be found here. An excerpt is below.
Better development could help to drive adoption of prop tech inside law firms too. Gabriel Safar practiced as a commercial real estate attorney before co- founding LeasePilot, the company behind the lease-drafting solution of the same name.
He thinks that many real estate tools aren’t designed with lawyers in mind. “Most technology is created by engineers and people that have an understanding of some big benefit or the generic concept of efficiency. But the tools that are being created actually make the end-user’s life harder,” Safar said.
That doesn’t mean that law firms won’t continue to try and incorporate prop tech, though. Giving up isn’t exactly an option. Safar pointed to an increasingly crowded marketplace and the desire—or need—for a competitive edge as drivers that make both law firms and real estate companies more willing to look to the future.
Pressure from clients doesn’t hurt, either. “[Clients] want stuff done fast, and they can’t understand why lawyers can’t do it faster. They don’t realize that lawyers are using a cell phone from 1993, and they think that lawyers are using an iPhone. There’s this fundamental disconnect,” Safar said.
In this case the “iPhone” is automation software that can make key changes inside a 100-page lease while potentially cutting down on errors. Still, lawyers aren’t just going to get away with delivering faster leases.
