What are the rules between a tenant and its landlord after a lease expires? In today’s blog posting, we aren’t exactly thinking about a “holdover” tenancy. In the context of this question, we’ll leave that for another day. [For those who haven’t yet read what we wrote in our November 2012 posting: “Why So Much Confusion About Holdover Tenants?,” it can be seen by clicking here: HERE. For other Ruminations about holdover tenancies, you can click: HERE or HERE.]
It is common to see a lease recite something like the following: “If the Tenant remains in possession after this lease ends, the continuing tenancy will be from month to month.” At least, that’s how the lease we learned about in a California appellate decision (of January 10, 2019) just read by us. [It, Smyth v. Berman, can be seen by clicking: HERE.] On its face, it would seem that those quoted words are equivalent to a lease extension just as would be the case if the tenant had an extension (or, poorly named, renewal) option. Well, is it the same? [Read more…]
Most retail leases have a “CAM” provision and though they are formulated in a myriad of ways, a common element can be found in the way “common area maintenance” (CAM or Operating Expenses) is defined. The words used are seen so often that many eyes glaze right over them. They are so familiar that, long ago, we stopped thinking about them. This occurred to Ruminations as we read an unpublished February 19 decision from the Court of Appeals of Arizona (an “intermediate” appellate court).
Are there “magic words” or are there not? Once again, we feel compelled to warn readers that “we need to know what we are doing.” A lot of people in this “business” of ours cross over jurisdictional lines whether rightly or not. There is a lot of material out there about the ethics of doing so. That’s a reasonable concern to have, but there is a far less discussed, but more serious, problem. It is called malpractice. That term is not limited to attorneys. It isn’t even limited to professionals. It is hard enough to know the law in a single jurisdiction. Know the “law” in every jurisdiction (e.g., state) is, frankly speaking, impossible.
Today, we write about the use of pretext. We’ll explain. First, here’s a story from a recent California appellate court decision.
Two weeks ago, we cautioned against thinking that because we know the “general” law, we know the law in a particular jurisdiction. Yes, there is a lot of commonality on a broad level – if a tenant doesn’t pay the rent, it can lose its right to stay – but just what a landlord has to do (the needle it needs to thread) varies greatly from place to place. Today, we’ll give a more focused example in the context of explaining why the (misnamed) waiver of subrogation is important.
Guilty! Ruminations and its author have done this, though we’ve long been conscious of its flaws. What is “this”? It is that we’ve criticized documents prepared by others when we “weren’t there.” Before we proceed with today’s rant, a small clarification is in order. There will be no apology for our pointing out unnecessarily vague or ambiguous language. In fact, we think there is a place for intentional ambiguity and remain firmly behind the thoughts we expressed seven years ago in a piece titled: The Artful Use of Intentional Ambiguity in Document Drafting. It can be seen by clicking: 
It’s a funny thing about this business. After all is said and done, you still need to know the “law.” And, by “law,” we aren’t thinking about the “law in general.” Instead, we are thinking about the “law” in the place where it matters. Almost always, that’s the state where the property in question is located. In today’s world, it’s not possible to know everything, everywhere. But, what is possible is to know the “questions.” There are some universal concepts. Not all of those concepts are universal, fixed rules such as the rule that if valid rent is unpaid, the tenant can’t stay. The most important universal concept is that the law is not the same throughout the more than 51 jurisdictions that make up the United States. In most cases, the law is similar, but the law is not the same. As with many “learned professions,” knowing the questions to ask is the hard part. That’s the real challenge we face. Finding answers is easy. Said another way, if you want to have your agreements, such as leases and guaranties, mean what you have said, then you have to be aware of the way the law differs jurisdiction to jurisdiction. 
If exclusive use rights are so important to some tenants and if landlords almost always resist granting such rights, why is it that, when agreement (compromise) is reached, the parties keep making the same mistakes? We’ve written before about the generality of “exclusives” and also about some specific approaches. For the benefit of new readers and to remind others, Ruminations holds that the presence or absence of an exclusive use right (and the scope of that right) is purely a function of bargaining power. Basically, how much does each party want the lease? That having been said, here are more of our thoughts.
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