Pubs Advisory Service
An AI service that turns 50+ page commercial pub leases into citation-anchored natural-language answers delivered through email.
Hours of OCR and keyword search on every 50+ page commercial pub lease.
Pubs Advisory Service helps tenants negotiate commercial pub lease agreements before they commit. Each lease runs to 50+ pages of dense legalese, often poorly scanned, often with handwritten amendments. Adobe OCR plus keyword search was the working method, and it cost an advisor hours per document.
The errors were real. Handwriting got transcribed wrongly. A critical clause got missed in the middle of a long page. The advisor spent skilled time on document handling instead of advice, and detailed pre-entry analysis for a client became expensive enough that it priced PAS out of certain conversations entirely.
- Every answer must cite a paragraph in the source PDF: no untraceable claims.
- The model must refuse questions the lease does not actually answer.
- No new tool to learn. Advisors live in email.
- Scale to portfolios of leases, not single-document review.
Inside the PAS lease assistant.
A pass tuned for scanned legal PDFs with handwriting
The first stage normalises every lease into citable text, with handwriting handled alongside printed pages. Confidence scores attach to each block so the LLM downstream knows when to defer.
Natural-language answers anchored to the paragraph that justifies them
The advisor asks a question in normal English. The system returns a clear answer with the paragraph reference on the source PDF. Out-of-scope questions are refused, not guessed.
Batch analysis across a Google Sheet of leases
Where the work crosses multiple properties (comparing rent reviews, surfacing repeat clauses, sanity-checking a portfolio), the same engine runs over a sheet and writes the answers back in place.
A citation-anchored pipeline that talks back through email, where the advisors already work.
We built a two-stage pipeline. A custom OCR pass tuned for poor-quality scanned legal PDFs normalises every lease into citable text. A retrieval-anchored question-answering step then takes natural-language questions from the advisor and returns answers with paragraph-level citations. The model refuses out-of-scope questions instead of inventing an answer.
Delivery is email-native. An advisor forwards the lease, asks the question, gets the cited answer back. No portal to log into, no training, no new vocabulary. For batch work across a portfolio, the same engine runs over a Google Sheet of leases and writes answers back in place.
- Custom OCR pipeline tuned for handwriting and skewed scans.
- Retrieval engine searching on meaning and exact wording.
- Hallucination guard: out-of-scope questions refused, not answered.
- Email integration so advisors keep working the way they already do.
- Google Sheets batch mode for portfolio-level lease comparison.
Hours per lease became minutes. The advice stays the work; the document handling stops being the bottleneck.
Operational efficiency
Roughly 67% boost on the advisor's lease workflow. The skilled time goes into the advice, not into reading 50 pages of legalese twice.
Document accuracy
Custom OCR catches the handwriting and the bad scans the standard tools miss. Every answer cites the paragraph it came from.
Email-native workflow
Advisors did not have to learn a new tool, log into a portal, or change a habit. The service drops into the inbox they already work from.
Portfolio scale
Batch mode over Google Sheets makes multi-lease comparison tractable. PAS now offers detailed pre-entry advice at price points it could not previously sustain.
Their deep understanding of our business needs, coupled with their expertise in GPT and Cloud (AWS) software-services, enabled them to navigate complexities and deliver a bespoke AI solution tailored to our operations. The team demonstrated a high level of professionalism and adaptability, ensuring a smooth project delivery.
Chris Wright Director, Pubs Advisory Service · PAS
OpenKit provided us with a robust and innovative back-office tool to tackle the wide range of commercial agreements we need to examine. Their iterative process and collaborative approach made complex technical decisions accessible, and the delivered solution has significantly improved our operational efficiency and user satisfaction.
How we delivered it.
Stack
Capabilities
Compliance
From scoping to live.
- DiscoveryMapped the advisory workflow with PAS specialists. The bottleneck was OCR plus keyword search across 50+ page leases written in dense legalese. Weeks 1-2
- Pipeline buildCustom OCR pass plus a question-answering LLM, with every output anchored to a paragraph in the source PDF. Hallucination guard: model refuses out-of-scope questions. Weeks 3-10
- Email integrationAdvisors send a question by email and receive a cited answer back. No new tool to learn, no portal to log into, no training required. Weeks 11-14
- Live operationUsed by PAS advisors on real client work. Google Sheets export for batch analysis across portfolios of leases. Ongoing
Read another story
All case studies
Bring your team's next AI project to a 30-minute call.
No deck. We listen, sketch a delivery shape, and tell you honestly whether AI is the right tool for the problem.
