Lease related legal costs are driven by the amount of attorney time involved. Lease work is not rocket science, but it is time-consuming and tedious work. Sometimes clients forget the time-consuming nature of lease work. This can cause unrealistic expectations about lease review and drafting. For example, clients want a lease review, but don’t want us to spend more than an hour on it. We cannot comprehensively review a five to ten thousand word document in an hour. During a one-hour review, an attorney can only read the lease and highlight the most fatal or obvious flaws. This brings us to a critical point about lease review work and related costs. It is always less expensive to buy a well-developed lease product, then to try to fix a bad lease. Reviewing, revising, and fixing most leases can easily exceed five hours of attorney time which is more than the base cost of our most expensive lease product.
