2024 Ones to Watch - Innovators in CRE: Daniel Evans, Seyfarth Shaw LLP

Daniel Evans co-chairs Seyfarth’s 70-lawyer Real Estate Finance practice. He represents lenders and borrowers across all aspects of commercial real estate finance, from loan originations and loan sales, to workouts and restructurings. He has handled a wide range of transactions - from small conduit deals to billion dollar credit facilities. His work emphasizes the structuring and closing of mortgage and mezzanine loan transactions, including capital markets, interim/bridge, construction, and balance sheet loans, across the U.S. 

Evans collaborates with clients and Seyfarth’s Technology Innovations group in applying technology to gain greater speed and greater efficiencies in performing legal work, successfully developing technology solutions for clients. For large-volume clients, he applies Seyfarth Lean best practices and process maps, as well as Seyfarth Link web-based tracking and deal updates. 

Innovative Outlook:

I believe innovation in the provision of commercial real estate legal services in the near term will inevitably involve greater communication and document sharing among various parties to transactions. Virtual deal rooms have changed how diligence is delivered. 

I am excited that programs like SeyfarthLink, when combined with process mapping and streamlining, will continue to enable lawyers to better communicate with deal teams and clients across entire platforms and portfolios. In the slightly longer term, I am confident AI combined with attorneys trained in how best to utilize it, will decrease review times substantially while retaining quality assurance standards. 

Innovative Solution: 

We use process mapping and project management to bring efficiencies to new, high volume lending programs for various financial institution clients for such matters as launching a debt fund lending platform or a new construction lending arm. 

We also integrate the use of Kira into real estate finance. Kira is an AI product that uses machine learning processes that automatically read, interpret, and extract key information from documents and return a desired business output. 

Finally, using AI/Seyfarth Cognition to understand the Impact of LIBOR, utilizing an AI/machine learning platform to process and analyze a large number of our clients’ loan documents to gain an in-depth understanding of the potential impact of the LIBOR transition in order to quickly tailor and export summaries of key provisions.