lease-check
Check a commercial lease before a startup signs it for its first office, studio or lab — a script turns the lease's terms into every date and sum the tenant must plan around (rent year by year through stepped rents, fixed and index-linked reviews with caps and collars, rent-free months, what the company is committed to pay up to each break and to the end, and each break, renewal and notice deadline as a date), then flags terms that can't all be true and deadlines already passed — and reads the lease for the clauses that hurt a small tenant. Use when a founder says "review this office lease", "what's our break clause notice date", "how much are we committing to on this lease", "check this lease before I sign", "when can we get out of this lease", or "what does the rent review do".
Other ways to install
With the sibling skills it hands off to:
The whole pack it belongs to:
By hand, from a clone of the repo:
In Claude Code, with the startup-legal plugin installed, invoke it as:
Try it
A realistic prompt from the skill's acceptance evals:
We've been offered heads of terms for our first office (heads-of-terms.md). The agent wants an answer this week. What are we committing to, and when could we get out?
What a good result looks like
Example output
Worked example: heads of terms for a first office · the skill's own worked example, source
Input
"We've been offered heads of terms for our first office (inputs/heads-of-terms.md). The agent wants an answer this week. What are we committing to, and when could we get out?"
The terms extracted are ../templates/terms.json.
What it computed
# Lease: dates and money
Term: 2027-01-01 to 2031-12-31 (60 months).
## Deadlines
| Date | What | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| 2027-04-01 | rent starts | after 3 months rent-free |
| 2029-07-01 | tenant break notice | for the break on 2030-01-01; conditions: all rent paid; vacant possession |
| 2030-01-01 | rent review | cpi, upward only |
| 2031-06-30 | notice to leave at the end | for the end on 2031-12-31 |
## Committed cost
| Up to | Rent | Service charge | Total |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| to the break on 2030-01-01 | £99,000 | £14,400 | £113,400 |
| to the end of the term (2031-12-31) | £179,990 | £24,000 | £203,990 |
## Rent by year
| Year | From | Yearly rent | Paid that year |
|---:|---|---:|---:|
| 1 | 2027-01-01 | £36,000 | £27,000 |
| 2 | 2028-01-01 | £36,000 | £36,000 |
| 3 | 2029-01-01 | £36,000 | £36,000 |
| 4 | 2030-01-01 | £40,495 | £40,495 |
| 5 | 2031-01-01 | £40,495 | £40,495 |
Deposit: £18,000.
WARN the break on 2030-01-01 is conditional (all rent paid; vacant possession): one unmet condition, such as a small unpaid sum, can make it failReply
Signing commits Brightloop to £113,400 up to the break on 1 January 2030 (33 months' rent after the rent-free, plus service charge), and £203,990 if you stay to the end on 31 December 2031. The break needs written notice by 1 July 2029, and as drafted it fails if any sum is unpaid or the unit isn't empty on the day, which would keep you in to 2031 for another £90,590.
Fixes before signing
- 🟥 Personal guarantee. Ask for: "No personal guarantee; the Tenant will provide a rent deposit of six months' rent instead." The deposit is already there.
- 🟥 Break conditions. Ask for: "The only condition of the break is that the Tenant has paid the principal rent due up to the break date."
- 🟧 Full repairing with no schedule of condition. Ask for a photographic schedule of condition, attached to the lease, and repair limited to that condition.
- 🟧 Service charge with no cap. Ask for a cap at £4,800 rising with CPI, and no charges for improvements or replacing plant.
- 🟨 No sharing. Ask for the right to share with group companies without consent, and to sublet with consent not to be unreasonably withheld.
Deadlines to diarise
- 1 April 2027: rent starts.
- 1 July 2029: last day to serve the break notice.
- 1 January 2030: rent review, to £40,495 a year at the capped 4 % (CPI below the cap would mean less).
- 30 June 2031: notice to leave at the end.
Worth a lawyer's hour: the personal guarantee, if the landlord won't drop it.
How it's checked
Admitted against plain Claude Code: on held-out evals written blind from its description, two judges preferred it in 3 of 4 and 3 of 4 pairs, and it met 89% of their checks, against 86% without it (RFC-0079). How skills are checked
20 assertions across 3 acceptance evals, and 7 trigger queries. Every skill's checks
What the output must do
When it should and shouldn't activate
Should activate:
- Review this office lease before we sign
- What's the notice date for our lease break clause?
- How much are we committing to on this lease?
- When can we get out of our office lease and what does it cost to stay?
Should leave to another skill:
- Review this SaaS agreement before I sign it
- Find us coworking spaces in Manchester
- Should we rent or buy a flat?
Source
SKILL.md · the whole folder on GitHub.