Sienam Lulla
CEO-Bryckel
Real Estate Lawyers, Leasing, and Asset Teams on One Platform
Why leasing, legal, and asset management teams need a unified CRE platform — from LOI to lease comparison, redlining, and lease abstraction.
Why leasing, legal, and asset management teams need a unified CRE platform — from LOI to lease comparison, redlining, and lease abstraction.
It's Time for Lawyers, Leasing, and Asset Teams to Work on One Platform
The fragmented deal workflow is costing everyone — time, money, and deals.
There's a moment every commercial real estate professional knows well. A lease is somewhere between Letter of Intent and execution. The asset management team is waiting on the latest draft. The leasing broker wants to know if the business terms from the LOI made it in. The in-house attorney just sent redlines but hasn't looped in the asset manager. Someone is working off version seven of a document that's now on version eleven. And nobody — not the lawyer, not the leasing team, not the asset manager — is looking at the same thing at the same time.
This isn't a people problem. It's a platform problem.
For decades, commercial real estate lease transactions have been managed across a patchwork of tools: email threads, shared drives, Word documents, PDF markups, and Excel trackers. The LOI lives in one place. The draft lease lives somewhere else. The lease abstract gets done way after the deal and in yet another system. The institutional knowledge about why certain concessions were made, what was negotiated out, and what was agreed to in side conversations? That lives in someone's inbox. Or worse, their head.
The cost of this fragmentation is enormous, and it's getting harder to ignore.
The Three Teams, and Why They're Constantly Out of Sync
Leasing teams are deal-oriented and speed-driven. Their job is to get LOIs executed, terms agreed, and leases signed as fast as possible. Every day a lease isn't signed is a day of lost revenue. When they hand a deal to legal, they often feel like they're throwing it over a wall and waiting.
Legal teams — whether in-house counsel or outside law firms — are risk-oriented and precision-driven. Their job is to translate business terms into enforceable contract language and protect the client's interests. Speed matters, but accuracy matters more. When asset managers call asking "where are we on the lease?", lawyers are usually mid-negotiation and don't have bandwidth to produce a clean status update.
Asset management teams are performance-oriented and portfolio-driven. They need lease abstracts. They need to know if the LOI terms made it into the final lease. They need to compare what was agreed in principle against what was actually signed. And they typically get all of this after the fact — once a lease is executed and someone has time to summarize it, which can be weeks or months later.
Three teams. Three sets of priorities. Three different workflows. One deal running through all of them.
The Hidden Costs of the Handoff Model
The current process treats lease transactions as a series of handoffs: leasing to legal, legal back to leasing, leasing gets it executed, asset management gets a copy at the end. Each handoff is a potential point of failure.
When leasing hands a deal to legal, the LOI terms are summarized in an email or a deal sheet. The attorney interprets those terms if its your own form or looks for them in the other party's form and hopes they've captured every nuance. One missing clause, one ambiguous deadline, one undefined term — and you've got a dispute.
When legal sends redlines to tenant's counsel, leasing is often not looped in. Business terms get traded in a legal negotiation, and by the time a leasing director sees the final lease, the deal looks subtly different from the LOI they signed. There's no easy way to compare what was agreed in the LOI against what ended up in the final document without doing it manually, line by line. What concessions were given that are now a deviation from your typical positions?
When asset management finally gets the executed lease, the abstraction process begins. Someone reads the lease and pulls out the key economic and operational terms. This process is slow, expensive, and prone to human error. Critical clauses get missed. Non-standard provisions get flagged inconsistently. And the asset manager is making portfolio decisions based on information that's weeks stale.
The entire workflow is sequential when it should be parallel. Opaque when it should be transparent.
Let's Address the Elephant in the Room: Lawyers Work in Word
Here's the objection that derails almost every conversation about unified platforms in legal-heavy workflows: "Our lawyers will never give up Word."
It's a fair point — and it deserves a direct answer rather than a workaround.
Attorneys don't love Word because it's the best tool ever built. They love it because it's the tool they trust. Tracked changes, redlines, comment threads, version history — the entire rhythm of legal negotiation has been built around Word's feature set for thirty years. An attorney's redlining workflow isn't just a habit. It's a professional standard. Clients expect it. Courts recognize it. Opposing counsel works in it. Asking a lawyer to abandon Word is like asking a surgeon to operate with different instruments mid-procedure. The resistance isn't irrational. It's deeply practical.
So the answer isn't to replace Word. The answer is to embed it.
The best unified platforms don't ask lawyers to change how they work — they wrap around how lawyers already work. When Word is natively embedded inside the platform, the attorney never leaves their familiar environment. They open a document, they redline it, they accept and reject changes, they add comments — all exactly as they would today. The difference is that those actions are now happening inside a shared, connected workspace where leasing and asset teams have visibility, where version control is automatic, where the document is linked to the LOI it came from, and where every change is captured in a single auditable thread.
From the lawyer's perspective: nothing changes. From the organization's perspective: everything changes.
This is the key design principle that separates platforms that actually get adopted from those that stall in pilot. You cannot ask legal to change their tooling and expect it to work. But when the platform meets lawyers where they are — inside Word, in their native redlining workflow — the objection disappears. Because lawyers aren't opposed to collaboration or transparency. They're opposed to friction and risk. A platform that removes friction without introducing new risk is one they'll actually use.
The same logic applies to the other teams. Leasing professionals shouldn't have to learn a new way to track deal terms if the platform presents LOI data in a familiar, intuitive way. Asset managers shouldn't have to become lease attorneys to benefit from a unified abstraction. The platform should do the translation — presenting each team with the view they need, in the format they're comfortable with, while keeping everyone working from the same underlying source of truth.
What a Unified Platform Actually Changes
When these teams are on one platform, the workflow transforms in concrete ways.
LOI to lease comparison becomes automatic. When both documents live in the same system, it's possible to compare them systematically — surfacing where the lease diverged from the agreed business terms before execution, not after.
Redlining becomes collaborative without disrupting legal workflow. Leasing can see deal status in real time. Asset management can flag provisions that will create operational issues. Legal gets instant clarity on whether a concession is within approved parameters. Decisions happen faster because the right people are looking at the same document — each in the view that makes sense for their role.
Lease summaries become a byproduct of the process, not a separate project. With AI generating and refining the summary as the document evolves through negotiation, the abstract is ready on execution day — not three weeks later.
Abstractions become consistent and auditable. Every data point is tied to the source clause that generated it. No more inconsistent abstraction standards across a portfolio. No more untraceable numbers in a lease admin system.
The AI Layer That Makes This Practical at Scale
Modern AI can read a lease, extract key provisions, compare it against an LOI, flag deviations, generate a plain-language summary, and populate an abstraction template — in minutes. This doesn't replace lawyers. It gives them leverage. An attorney who used to spend three hours identifying non-standard provisions can spend thirty minutes reviewing an AI-generated analysis and directing their attention to the genuinely complex issues.
The same is true across all three teams. AI removes the low-value, high-friction work — the manual comparison, the after-the-fact abstraction, the version confusion — and lets everyone focus on the judgment work that actually requires their expertise.
The Competitive Pressure Is Already Here
The most sophisticated operators in commercial real estate are already moving. Large institutional asset managers, top-tier law firms, and major REITs are investing in unified platforms and AI-assisted lease workflows. They're closing deals faster, catching errors earlier, and deploying portfolio insights in days instead of months.
The gap between organizations that have modernized and those still running on email and shared drives isn't just an efficiency gap. It's a risk gap. Every deal that runs through a fragmented process is a deal more likely to have a material term fall through the cracks — more likely to produce a lease that doesn't reflect the LOI, more likely to generate a dispute that could have been avoided.
The question isn't whether to bring these teams onto a unified platform. The question is how long organizations can afford not to.
Closing: Meet Everyone Where They Are
The commercial real estate lease transaction has always been a team sport. Leasing, legal, and asset management have always been working toward the same outcome. The problem has never been the goal. The problem has been the tools — and the assumption that changing tools means disrupting how people work.
The right platform doesn't ask lawyers to leave Word, leasing to abandon their deal sheets, or asset managers to become paralegals. It meets every team in their native workflow and connects them underneath. Same document. Same deal. Same version. Finally.
The technology is here. The business case is clear. And for the lawyers who thought a unified platform meant giving something up — it doesn't. It means Word, with everyone else finally in the room.
Ready to see what this looks like in practice?
It's Time for Lawyers, Leasing, and Asset Teams to Work on One Platform
The fragmented deal workflow is costing everyone — time, money, and deals.
There's a moment every commercial real estate professional knows well. A lease is somewhere between Letter of Intent and execution. The asset management team is waiting on the latest draft. The leasing broker wants to know if the business terms from the LOI made it in. The in-house attorney just sent redlines but hasn't looped in the asset manager. Someone is working off version seven of a document that's now on version eleven. And nobody — not the lawyer, not the leasing team, not the asset manager — is looking at the same thing at the same time.
This isn't a people problem. It's a platform problem.
For decades, commercial real estate lease transactions have been managed across a patchwork of tools: email threads, shared drives, Word documents, PDF markups, and Excel trackers. The LOI lives in one place. The draft lease lives somewhere else. The lease abstract gets done way after the deal and in yet another system. The institutional knowledge about why certain concessions were made, what was negotiated out, and what was agreed to in side conversations? That lives in someone's inbox. Or worse, their head.
The cost of this fragmentation is enormous, and it's getting harder to ignore.
The Three Teams, and Why They're Constantly Out of Sync
Leasing teams are deal-oriented and speed-driven. Their job is to get LOIs executed, terms agreed, and leases signed as fast as possible. Every day a lease isn't signed is a day of lost revenue. When they hand a deal to legal, they often feel like they're throwing it over a wall and waiting.
Legal teams — whether in-house counsel or outside law firms — are risk-oriented and precision-driven. Their job is to translate business terms into enforceable contract language and protect the client's interests. Speed matters, but accuracy matters more. When asset managers call asking "where are we on the lease?", lawyers are usually mid-negotiation and don't have bandwidth to produce a clean status update.
Asset management teams are performance-oriented and portfolio-driven. They need lease abstracts. They need to know if the LOI terms made it into the final lease. They need to compare what was agreed in principle against what was actually signed. And they typically get all of this after the fact — once a lease is executed and someone has time to summarize it, which can be weeks or months later.
Three teams. Three sets of priorities. Three different workflows. One deal running through all of them.
The Hidden Costs of the Handoff Model
The current process treats lease transactions as a series of handoffs: leasing to legal, legal back to leasing, leasing gets it executed, asset management gets a copy at the end. Each handoff is a potential point of failure.
When leasing hands a deal to legal, the LOI terms are summarized in an email or a deal sheet. The attorney interprets those terms if its your own form or looks for them in the other party's form and hopes they've captured every nuance. One missing clause, one ambiguous deadline, one undefined term — and you've got a dispute.
When legal sends redlines to tenant's counsel, leasing is often not looped in. Business terms get traded in a legal negotiation, and by the time a leasing director sees the final lease, the deal looks subtly different from the LOI they signed. There's no easy way to compare what was agreed in the LOI against what ended up in the final document without doing it manually, line by line. What concessions were given that are now a deviation from your typical positions?
When asset management finally gets the executed lease, the abstraction process begins. Someone reads the lease and pulls out the key economic and operational terms. This process is slow, expensive, and prone to human error. Critical clauses get missed. Non-standard provisions get flagged inconsistently. And the asset manager is making portfolio decisions based on information that's weeks stale.
The entire workflow is sequential when it should be parallel. Opaque when it should be transparent.
Let's Address the Elephant in the Room: Lawyers Work in Word
Here's the objection that derails almost every conversation about unified platforms in legal-heavy workflows: "Our lawyers will never give up Word."
It's a fair point — and it deserves a direct answer rather than a workaround.
Attorneys don't love Word because it's the best tool ever built. They love it because it's the tool they trust. Tracked changes, redlines, comment threads, version history — the entire rhythm of legal negotiation has been built around Word's feature set for thirty years. An attorney's redlining workflow isn't just a habit. It's a professional standard. Clients expect it. Courts recognize it. Opposing counsel works in it. Asking a lawyer to abandon Word is like asking a surgeon to operate with different instruments mid-procedure. The resistance isn't irrational. It's deeply practical.
So the answer isn't to replace Word. The answer is to embed it.
The best unified platforms don't ask lawyers to change how they work — they wrap around how lawyers already work. When Word is natively embedded inside the platform, the attorney never leaves their familiar environment. They open a document, they redline it, they accept and reject changes, they add comments — all exactly as they would today. The difference is that those actions are now happening inside a shared, connected workspace where leasing and asset teams have visibility, where version control is automatic, where the document is linked to the LOI it came from, and where every change is captured in a single auditable thread.
From the lawyer's perspective: nothing changes. From the organization's perspective: everything changes.
This is the key design principle that separates platforms that actually get adopted from those that stall in pilot. You cannot ask legal to change their tooling and expect it to work. But when the platform meets lawyers where they are — inside Word, in their native redlining workflow — the objection disappears. Because lawyers aren't opposed to collaboration or transparency. They're opposed to friction and risk. A platform that removes friction without introducing new risk is one they'll actually use.
The same logic applies to the other teams. Leasing professionals shouldn't have to learn a new way to track deal terms if the platform presents LOI data in a familiar, intuitive way. Asset managers shouldn't have to become lease attorneys to benefit from a unified abstraction. The platform should do the translation — presenting each team with the view they need, in the format they're comfortable with, while keeping everyone working from the same underlying source of truth.
What a Unified Platform Actually Changes
When these teams are on one platform, the workflow transforms in concrete ways.
LOI to lease comparison becomes automatic. When both documents live in the same system, it's possible to compare them systematically — surfacing where the lease diverged from the agreed business terms before execution, not after.
Redlining becomes collaborative without disrupting legal workflow. Leasing can see deal status in real time. Asset management can flag provisions that will create operational issues. Legal gets instant clarity on whether a concession is within approved parameters. Decisions happen faster because the right people are looking at the same document — each in the view that makes sense for their role.
Lease summaries become a byproduct of the process, not a separate project. With AI generating and refining the summary as the document evolves through negotiation, the abstract is ready on execution day — not three weeks later.
Abstractions become consistent and auditable. Every data point is tied to the source clause that generated it. No more inconsistent abstraction standards across a portfolio. No more untraceable numbers in a lease admin system.
The AI Layer That Makes This Practical at Scale
Modern AI can read a lease, extract key provisions, compare it against an LOI, flag deviations, generate a plain-language summary, and populate an abstraction template — in minutes. This doesn't replace lawyers. It gives them leverage. An attorney who used to spend three hours identifying non-standard provisions can spend thirty minutes reviewing an AI-generated analysis and directing their attention to the genuinely complex issues.
The same is true across all three teams. AI removes the low-value, high-friction work — the manual comparison, the after-the-fact abstraction, the version confusion — and lets everyone focus on the judgment work that actually requires their expertise.
The Competitive Pressure Is Already Here
The most sophisticated operators in commercial real estate are already moving. Large institutional asset managers, top-tier law firms, and major REITs are investing in unified platforms and AI-assisted lease workflows. They're closing deals faster, catching errors earlier, and deploying portfolio insights in days instead of months.
The gap between organizations that have modernized and those still running on email and shared drives isn't just an efficiency gap. It's a risk gap. Every deal that runs through a fragmented process is a deal more likely to have a material term fall through the cracks — more likely to produce a lease that doesn't reflect the LOI, more likely to generate a dispute that could have been avoided.
The question isn't whether to bring these teams onto a unified platform. The question is how long organizations can afford not to.
Closing: Meet Everyone Where They Are
The commercial real estate lease transaction has always been a team sport. Leasing, legal, and asset management have always been working toward the same outcome. The problem has never been the goal. The problem has been the tools — and the assumption that changing tools means disrupting how people work.
The right platform doesn't ask lawyers to leave Word, leasing to abandon their deal sheets, or asset managers to become paralegals. It meets every team in their native workflow and connects them underneath. Same document. Same deal. Same version. Finally.
The technology is here. The business case is clear. And for the lawyers who thought a unified platform meant giving something up — it doesn't. It means Word, with everyone else finally in the room.
Ready to see what this looks like in practice?
Learn more about Bryckel AI.
Trusted by hundreds of leading real estate businesses.
Book a Demo
In-house Legal
Move at the pace your business requires while ensuring every decision is informed and defensible. Handle more work with less resources. Reduce your external counsel spend, invest in codifying expertise across deals for future efficiency.
Real Estate Development Team
Fast growing tenants in industries such as restaurant, retail, fitness, banking, grocery, logistics and coworking. Never sign an unfavorable lease. Speed up lease approvals, streamline negotiations, and manage multiple locations with confidence.
Real Estate Investors & Asset Managers
Never miss an acquisition opportunity. Maximize NOI & monetization opportunities. Respond to investors, leasing team, brokers, outside counsel and leadership in fraction of time.
Real Estate Advisors
For anyone who loves deals, not documents. Get your head around complex leases and portfolios, and advise clients about issues from day one. Deliver actionable insights and strategic advice that accelerates deals and strengthens client relationships.
Law Firms
Spot issues before they become problems, watch your clients’ back and protect their business. Meet tight client deadlines. Handle work at scale and stay competitive.
Learn more about Bryckel AI.
Trusted by hundreds of leading real estate businesses.
Book a Demo
In-house Legal
Move at the pace your business requires while ensuring every decision is informed and defensible. Handle more work with less resources. Reduce your external counsel spend, invest in codifying expertise across deals for future efficiency.
Real Estate Development Team
Fast growing tenants in industries such as restaurant, retail, fitness, banking, grocery, logistics and coworking. Never sign an unfavorable lease. Speed up lease approvals, streamline negotiations, and manage multiple locations with confidence.
Real Estate Investors & Asset Managers
Never miss an acquisition opportunity. Maximize NOI & monetization opportunities. Respond to investors, leasing team, brokers, outside counsel and leadership in fraction of time.
Real Estate Advisors
For anyone who loves deals, not documents. Get your head around complex leases and portfolios, and advise clients about issues from day one. Deliver actionable insights and strategic advice that accelerates deals and strengthens client relationships.
Law Firms
Spot issues before they become problems, watch your clients’ back and protect their business. Meet tight client deadlines. Handle work at scale and stay competitive.
Learn more about Bryckel AI.
Trusted by hundreds of leading real estate businesses.
Book a Demo
In-house Legal
Move at the pace your business requires while ensuring every decision is informed and defensible. Handle more work with less resources. Reduce your external counsel spend, invest in codifying expertise across deals for future efficiency.
Real Estate Development Team
Fast growing tenants in industries such as restaurant, retail, fitness, banking, grocery, logistics and coworking. Never sign an unfavorable lease. Speed up lease approvals, streamline negotiations, and manage multiple locations with confidence.
Real Estate Investors & Asset Managers
Never miss an acquisition opportunity. Maximize NOI & monetization opportunities. Respond to investors, leasing team, brokers, outside counsel and leadership in fraction of time.
Real Estate Advisors
For anyone who loves deals, not documents. Get your head around complex leases and portfolios, and advise clients about issues from day one. Deliver actionable insights and strategic advice that accelerates deals and strengthens client relationships.
Law Firms
Spot issues before they become problems, watch your clients’ back and protect their business. Meet tight client deadlines. Handle work at scale and stay competitive.