London logistics acquisition case study: Legal innovation meets logistics

This was a public markets offer with rigid deadlines, but with a large and diverse portfolio of approximately 150 individually let assets. Due diligence had to be completed for the entire portfolio within a tight public markets timetable, relying mainly on publicly available information as traditional input from the target’s legal team was not feasible.

These factors, paired with the scale of the project, led us to deploy bespoke legal technology and AI developed by our in-house innovation team. Our tools directly accessed certain publicly available data, such as the Land Registry and certain property search providers, allowing us to produce draft due diligence reports for all assets within 72 hours, ready for manual input from the property legal team. This approach only required a small team of lawyers and legal tech professionals, saving significant time and costs compared to traditional methods.

Although our experienced real estate lawyers reviewed and finalised all due diligence reports, using legal technology and AI reduced the initial reporting phase from weeks to just days, while also ensuring high accuracy for client-ready reports.

Gap analysis was equally important to understanding the risks which could not be verified from publicly available information, allowing us to focus the residual risk management exercise on the value items which mattered to our client. Our technology solutions meant that this could be considered very early in the process. Our ability to share live due diligence reports as they developed via a legal technology platform meant that the client could carry out its own review alongside our own exercise, avoiding a situation where all information was delivered at once and placing the client team under immense pressure. 

LondonMetric formally completed its acquisition of Urban Logistics in June 2025, in a cash-and-share deal worth approximately £698.9 million. Our work was completed ahead of schedule, which meant that management could dedicate greater focus to transactional matters during an intensive period for the business. Post acquisition, LondonMetric’s market capitalisation was circa £4.4bn, positioning it as one of the largest UK real estate investment trusts by market value, and further consolidating its position as the UK’s leading triple net lease REIT with contracted rent of over £400m per annum.