How £1,000 of legal advice saved a Colne retailer from a £75,000 mistake

The commitment: A 5-year commercial lease worth around £75,000

The risks: No break clause and excessive repair obligations

The result: A break clause was added and the tenant’s repair liabilities were reduced before signing

The legal spend: Around £1,000

When you are starting a new business, every cost matters.

That can make legal fees feel like something to minimise, particularly when a lease appears straightforward and the premises seem right.

That was the position facing a new retailer in Colne.

A £75,000 commitment

The client was preparing to sign a five-year lease on a shop unit in Colne, representing a total rental commitment of around £75,000.

As a new business owner, they understandably questioned whether paying for a legal review was necessary.

Our advice was simple: committing to £75,000 without understanding the lease in full was a far greater financial risk than the cost of having it properly reviewed.

When we examined the document, that concern proved justified.

No way out if the business struggled

The first issue was the absence of a break clause.

That meant the client would have been committed to the property for the entire five-year term, regardless of how the business performed. For a brand-new retailer with no track record in the premises, it created a significant risk.

If the shop underperformed, circumstances changed or the location simply did not work, there was no contractual route to bring the lease to an early end.

We negotiated that position before the client signed and secured the addition of a break clause, giving the business an important degree of flexibility.

Repair obligations that went too far

The second concern was the extent of the tenant’s repairing responsibilities.

Under the proposed lease, the client could have become responsible for parts of the building’s structure that we considered should remain the landlord’s responsibility.

For a small retailer, unexpected building repairs can quickly become a substantial expense.

We challenged the wording and negotiated a more proportionate position, reducing the client’s exposure and ensuring the repair obligations better reflected what they were actually taking on.

A better lease before the business opened its doors

The key advantage was that these issues were identified before the lease was signed.

Once a commercial lease has been completed, changing unfavourable terms can be difficult and may depend entirely on the landlord being willing to renegotiate.

By reviewing the agreement at the right stage, we were able to improve the client’s position while there was still an opportunity to negotiate.

The outcome

For legal fees of around £1,000, the client secured two important protections:

A break clause, giving the business a route out of the lease if circumstances changed.

Fairer repair obligations, reducing the risk of being responsible for inappropriate structural costs.

The client could then proceed with a much clearer understanding of their responsibilities and with significantly less commercial exposure.