Commercial lease review · solo practice
Lease Cake is a one-person workshop for reading, annotating, and negotiating commercial lease drafts on behalf of independent tenants — the bakery on the corner, the framer upstairs, the record label in the warehouse unit. I don't litigate. I mark up paper before you sign it.
Selected work
Each card summarizes a recent engagement. Names and identifying details are paraphrased; dollar figures are approximate. Published with tenant permission.
Bakery · 1,400 sf · 7-yr term
Landlord draft passed through all common-area maintenance expenses uncapped, with an audit window of ten business days. Negotiated a 5% year-over-year cap on controllable expenses and extended the audit right to ninety days with landlord cost-reimbursement on errors above three percent.
Neighborhood café · 2nd generation space
The center owner routinely leased competing concepts within the same plaza. Drafted an exclusive-use clause narrow enough to pass landlord review (specialty coffee and espresso drinks as primary business) and killed a punitive five-mile radius restriction against the tenant.
Print studio · industrial sublet
Original draft required landlord consent "in its sole and absolute discretion" for any transfer. Replaced with a reasonableness standard, carved out permitted transfers to affiliates and successors-in-interest, and removed the landlord's recapture right on partial subleases.
Wine bar · white-box delivery
"As-is" delivery was unworkable given code requirements for grease-waste interception and ADA restroom upgrades. Restructured the work letter to make the landlord responsible for base-building code compliance at possession, with a tenant-improvement allowance paid on completion milestones rather than at term end.
Bookstore · mixed-use ground floor
A hybrid base-plus-percentage structure had a breakpoint so low it functioned as pure overage from month eighteen onward. Recalculated the natural breakpoint against audited trailing revenue, annualized it, and wrote a reset on renewal tied to CPI — not landlord discretion.
Yoga studio · second-floor walk-up
Landlord demanded a full-term personal guaranty from a sole-proprietor tenant. Negotiated a twenty-four-month burn-off conditioned on no material defaults, and carved the guaranty down to a good-guy limitation so the owner could surrender the premises and cap personal exposure.
Method
You send the full draft lease, any exhibits, the letter of intent, and whatever back-and-forth has already happened with the leasing agent. I read it cold before we talk.
A line-by-line redline against the LOI and against the standard I expect for your asset class — retail strip, urban ground-floor, mixed-use, flex industrial. I flag what's market, what's aggressive, and what's quietly catastrophic.
We walk the redline together. You decide what to push on. I don't issue legal opinions — I translate, prioritize, and draft the counter-language you'll send back through counsel or broker.
Up to two additional turn rounds are included. Most deals close in three. A handful need more, and I quote those separately so the clock is never a surprise.
About
Before Lease Cake I spent a decade as a commercial-leasing paralegal inside a mid-market landlord's in-house group. I drafted the forms I now tear apart. That vantage — knowing which clauses the landlord will actually concede, which ones the asset manager treats as religion, and which ones exist purely so they can be traded away — is the thing I sell.
This is a deliberately small practice. I take roughly two active engagements at a time so that nothing sits on a desk for a week while your broker is chasing signatures. I am not an attorney and do not provide legal advice; I work alongside your counsel, or recommend bringing one in when the facts warrant it.
Currently serving existing clients. New matters are considered through referral from prior tenants, brokers, and counsel I've worked with.
If you're a returning client or you were referred, use the private intake link you were sent. If you found this site on your own and want to be kept in mind for future capacity, the best path is still an introduction from someone whose lease I've already touched.
Based in the Upper Midwest. Remote engagements across U.S. asset classes. No retainer; flat fee per lease, quoted after intake.