A recent
legal malpractice case finds a client suing its former attorneys for failure to
include terms in a lease addressing their landlord’s ongoing construction. As a result of this construction, the client
was unable to occupy its office space for nearly four years and claims to have
suffered lost profits and consequential damages amounting to millions of
dollars.
Attorneys
must be aware of potentially disruptive issues like construction when they
negotiate a lease and be sure to address them all in the contract. These
attorneys failed to include a single lease term, and now they find themselves
defending a multi-million dollar lawsuit arising from a simple commercial
transaction.
There is a
lesson here for non-attorneys as well.
Oftentimes real estate brokers will rely on form contracts or draft
provisions themselves. Don’t. A missing or improperly drafted term
in an agreement can have significant financial consequences. If even skilled attorneys, trained to
anticipate litigation around every corner, may miss these issues, how confident
are you that a Blumberg form will cover them?
