The challenge
An aircraft owner and asset manager won the bid to acquire 36 cargo and passenger aircraft on lease to a diversified portfolio of airline lessees across more than 30 jurisdictions. These newer, sought-after aircraft were priced at hundreds of millions of dollars each, and the transaction totaled billions. Geopolitical pressures drastically shortened the deal timeline in February and March 2026 – the team had just five days to deliver the bulk of a comprehensive due diligence checklist covering 234 individual data points extracted from 36 lease contracts, each approximately 600 pages, for a total of 21,600 pages.
Creating an index of key lease terms was essential to allowing the deal to proceed. The client needed a breakdown of key provisions across all 36 leases – parsed, organized, and cited – delivered in their preferred format. The client selected Reed Smith specifically because of the firm’s reputation as a leader in AI-powered legal work, a capability they recognized would be critical given the timeline.
Our solution
The team deployed a strategic toolkit of AI programs to tackle the project. Legal tech professionals first used Harvey, a generative AI platform purpose-built for legal work, to identify and extract key clauses from the leases, training the AI over a weekend to locate data corresponding to each of the 234 fields required by the client’s checklist. A second AI program, Hebbia, then assisted with cross-document analysis, converting the extracted data into the client’s preferred format. In just 16 hours of focused work, one team member accomplished an initial abstraction and analysis of complex terms that would have otherwise required six people working 40 hours or more.
The results
The AI-powered approach filled a total of 9,900 data fields and delivered the complete due diligence package on time, with the client impressed by how clean and accurate the data was. The technology-enabled process also produced a reusable framework of indexed lease terms that the client can draw on for future portfolio management and transactions.
