Commercial Lease Law Insider

The bad news is that you may not be able to completely contract out of your duty to mitigate damages; the good news is that you can limit it. But to do so, you need to add specific language to your lease. Here’s how to draft and negotiate a fair, reasonable, and legally enforceable mitigation of damages limitations clause, along with a Model Lease Clause that you can adapt for your own use. 

What Happened: The federal government leased two floors of an office in Queens to house the Field Office of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. The 15-year lease included the following clause ...

What Happened: Tenants, an elementary school operated as a Delaware limited liability company and the husband and wife who owned it, wanted to renew their 10-year lease after it expired. But rather than an extension, the owners insisted on a lease amendment naming the LLC as the only tenant ...

What Happened: A landlord got the individual principal of a new restaurant to sign a guaranty of the tenant’s performance of the lease. The guaranty, which the tenant didn’t sign, included a waiver of jury trial clause. Disputes later arose, and the tenant and landlord sued each other for breach of contract ...