From Launch to 100 Billion Tokens
A look back at 2025: the year Orbital Copilot went from ambitious experiment to industry milestone
December 29, 2025
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In January 2024, we published a blog post announcing Orbital Copilot: the legal industry’s first AI-powered real estate assistant. It was ambitious, it was early, and honestly, none of us were quite sure where it would lead but we knew customers wanted it.
This month, OpenAI recognised us for processing over 100 billion tokens through their API1, making us one of the highest-volume legal AI applications in the world. That number represents hundreds of thousands of documents reviewed, tens of thousands of hours saved, and a fundamental shift in how real estate lawyers work.
Here’s what we learned getting there.
The Data
Property law runs on paperwork and geospatial data. A single commercial real estate transaction might involve:
- Title registers dating back decades
- Leases with numerous amendments
- Planning permissions and environmental reports
- Surveys, easements, and encumbrances
- Tax parcels and legal descriptions
Before Orbital Copilot, reviewing this data meant hours, sometimes days, of manual work, scanning for red flags, cross-referencing clauses, and building schedules line by line.
The Challenge
We didn’t start with processing 100 billion tokens. We started with a simple question: What if AI could review real estate legal data the way an experienced real estate lawyer does?
The answer required solving problems that didn’t have off-the-shelf solutions:
- Document intelligence: Teaching AI to understand the structure of real estate legal documents. For example, distinguishing a deed from a lease, parsing nested schedules, and handling the quirks of OCR’ing poorly scanned documents from the 1800s
- Citation accuracy: Every claim is usually underpinned by multiple sources, so we built citations to trace answers back to specific paragraphs across multiple related documents
- Domain expertise: Property law varies wildly between jurisdictions. Our proprietary real estate legal knowledge base is needed to understand UK land registration, US title insurance, and everything in between
As I wrote about in Commercial Observer, commercial real estate owners are only just starting to embrace AI, and those who do are finding massive efficiency gains and faster understanding of the underlying risks involved with transacting the property.
The Product
In 2025, we shipped over 50 customer-facing features and blueprints, with many more improvements under the hood. Highlights include:
| Core Platform | Property Visualizer (US) | Blueprints (US) | Blueprints (UK) |
|---|---|---|---|
| • 2x Speed Improvement • Orchestrator and Research Agents • Comments & Tagging Collaboration • Background Document Ingestion • Auto-Save for Blueprint Testing • Title & Survey Review Workflow including Property Visualizer | • Sketches & Manual Plotting • Closure Checks for Metes & Bounds • Auto-Positioning Legal Descriptions • Snapshots with Legends • Centerline & Offset Support • Dimensions/Bearings Labels | • Intercreditor Agreement Abstract • Hotel Management Agreement Abstract • Franchise Agreement Review • Retail Lease Abstract • Estoppel Certificate Generation • Data Center Lease Abstract • Colocation Agreement Abstract • Phase I Environmental Site Assessment • Joint Venture Agreement • CC&R Abstract | • Certificate of Title Schedule 2, 4, 5, 6 (CLLS 2025 Update) • Combined Search Report • Agreement for Sale • Environmental, Coal Mining, Chancel Repair, Highways, Flood Risk searches • Planning Permission Condition Tracker • Custom CoT disclosures • HMLR Application Check • Title Register & Underlying Documents |
The Expansion
2025 wasn’t just about product. Our US team grew from 3 to 20 people, including opening our New York office. The product expansion followed: Property Visualizer for US title & survey work, specialised blueprints for American lease structures, and partnerships with firms across the country including AmLaw 100 firm Seyfarth Shaw.
Along the way, we were recognised by Sifted as one of the Top 100 AI companies in Europe and by LegalTech Hub as a Top 16 company to watch.
Our team attended and presented at events across the UK and US including Legal Geek, TLTF Summit, and CREtech.
The Team
None of this happens without extraordinary people. Our team now spans two continents, with deep expertise in:
- AI Engineering and large language models
- Full-stack development for complex legal workflows
- Infrastructure that handles billions of tokens reliably
- Legal domain expertise that bridges tech and law
I’m most proud of the culture we’ve built where real estate lawyers and product engineers work side by side, shipping the best ideas to our customers on a daily basis.
What 100 Billion Tokens Means
It’s easy to get lost in big numbers, but 100 billion tokens represents something more important: Trust.
Every token is associated with someone’s home, their workplace, a coffee shop, or even a nationwide infrastructure project. Lawyers and their clients have trusted us to review those properties correctly. Every output we generate helps shape actual decisions about actual properties around the world. Real estate lawyers using Copilot aren’t just experimenting—they’re relying on us to help them serve their clients globally.
Orbital products now also handle over 6% of UK residential conveyancing transactions2 and we’re processing over 150,000 property transactions annually3, with hundreds of thousands of documents reviewed each year. And we’re just getting started.
We’re Hiring
If you are interested in helping us solve some very hard problems building the world’s first AI-powered real estate lawyer, see our open roles and get in touch via our Careers Page. If nothing quite matches your experience, please connect with me on LinkedIn, Andrew Thompson, and I’d be happy to chat.
Here’s to the next 100 billion tokens!
Andrew Thompson
CTO
