PORTAL: Nabarros completes on-line auction of five pubs

City firm Nabarro Nathanson has used new technology to complete a sale at auction of five pubs as a paperless transaction.

The 6.5 million sale by The Public House Company - a joint venture between British Land and Scottish and Newcastle - through auctioneers Allsop & Co made considerable savings in time and costs.

The transaction relied on the British Land corporate portal, Nabarro Nathanson's Web-based disclosure system, known as Net Documents, and the on-line catalogue of Allsop & Co.

All the documents were scanned, loaded onto the portal, and then transferred to the Net Documents system.

The process was run entirely without paper, although the final documents will have to be sent on paper to the Land Registry.

Rebecca Kitchingham, a real estate solicitor at Nabarro Nathanson's Sheffield office, said: 'We issued paperless packs to every one of the 62 enquirers within an average timescale of one hour against a benchmark of 48 hours'.

She added: 'Technology in the legal sector has a very important role to play in differentiating one law firm from another.

As the market becomes more competitive, clients are going to be looking at the extra added value that separates one law firm from another.

'We have a dedicated asset management team in Sheffield working towards this with the use of Net Documents and, as a firm, we combine this with two other innovative technology packages, TeamFlo (an electronic property licence case management system) and Npress (an electronic document assembly tool that we are developing).'

British Land director Stephen Spooner said: 'This is an important step forward as it means that we can process sales more quickly and cost effectively.'

Rachel Rothwell