Swiss Prime Site

Swiss Prime Site (SPS), one of Switzerland's largest publicly listed real estate companies, faced an acute legal operations challenge when it decided to close and transform its Jelmoli department store on Zurich's Bahnhofstrasse. The closure triggered a mandatory review and amendment of over 1,000 active contractual relationships — a volume far beyond what in-house counsel could absorb within the required timeframe. All amendments had to be completed by a hard deadline of 24 November 2023, leaving roughly ten weeks. Engaging a large law firm to handle the document volume was evaluated but ruled out as prohibitively expensive, forcing SPS to find a cost- and time-efficient alternative without sacrificing legal accuracy.

SPS deployed Legartis AI, a Swiss legal AI platform specializing in contract analysis, to process the entire document corpus. The system used Natural Language Processing to learn the structure of SPS's unstructured contract documents, identify relevant clauses, and extract specific data points from each file. Extracted data was exported to a structured Excel list, then automatically imported into pre-prepared contract amendment letter templates in Word format — eliminating manual transcription. The workflow followed a four-stage pipeline: AI extraction, automated validation via Legartis's internal test sets and evaluation mechanisms, client-side validation by SPS's legal team, and final generation of amendment letters. Legartis contractually guaranteed output quality, giving SPS confidence to proceed at scale without a parallel law firm engagement.

The project was completed on time and without errors. All contract amendment letters were dispatched within the September–November 2023 window, meeting the 24 November deadline. Key outcomes:

• 1,000+ contracts analyzed and amended across the full Jelmoli supplier and tenant base
• ~10% of law firm cost — the AI solution delivered equivalent quality at a fraction of traditional legal spend
• Zero errors in the amendment letters; no negative feedback from contractual partners or internal stakeholders
• Two-month end-to-end delivery, from project kickoff (8 September 2023) to completion

Jürg Sommer, General Counsel of SPS, confirmed the result met expectations on both precision and cost.

• Post-signing contract management — not just pre-signing review — is a high-value, underutilized application for legal AI in corporate settings.
• A structured validation pipeline (AI extraction → automated test sets → client review) is essential for maintaining accuracy at scale; skipping any layer creates risk.
• Contractually guaranteed quality from the AI vendor meaningfully de-risks the decision to forgo a traditional law firm.
• Corporate legal teams facing event-driven document surges (M&A, store closures, restructurings) should evaluate AI contract tools before defaulting to external counsel for volume work.
• The cost advantage of legal AI is most pronounced when document volume is high and the task is repetitive — exactly the conditions SPS faced.