Sleep! The free and legal version of time travel!

I’m a big advocate of the benefit of a good night’s sleep.

It’s why I’ve never fallen asleep on my train and missed my stop – my devotion to getting to my bed on time being that strong.

Although I have (on at least one occasion) been so sleepy (really, I wasn’t drunk, honest!) that I’ve got on the wrong train and been late home, but that’s another story.

But would you sign a lease to a property that you could ONLY use to sleep in.

You can’t do anything else.

You can’t even eat, or wash?

Well, I suppose you might, but you’d probably want to be 100% clear on what else (if anything) you could do at the property and what the consequences would be if you overstepped the mark.  Are we saying that the occupants cannot even use the bathroom in the middle of the night, or clean their teeth before they go to bed?????

Nevertheless, two large organisations, each with big legal budgets and big legal names, ended up in court recently, arguing over a big lease, where the landlord said that all the tenants were allowed to do was sleep at the property, and the tenant said that that did not exclude related activities, such as eating and washing.

The final decision was that the tenant was in the right, but I would say that both sides legal advisers have to take some responsibility for not ensuring that both parties were clear in their own minds about what the provisions of the lease meant in reality. Despite the fact that the tenant won, and would no doubt have recovered costs, they will still have had expenditure that they cannot recover, not to mention the trouble and disruption that this will have caused.

I often talk about the need for clarity and the risk of one side or the other not being clear both in negotiations but also in any written agreement and this is a good example of how something as simple as the provision of a lease can be interpreted differently by each side.  Even if you are certain that you are right and the other side are wrong, it’s always better to have clarity at the outset than at the end of a long court case.

Kleyman & Co Solicitors.  The full service law firm.  Never asleep on the job.