Retail & Leisure

We act for landlords and for occupiers, though never on both sides of the same matter, and the aim is the same either way. A settlement both parties can live with, reached without three years of correspondence.

The detail that usually decides a claim is reinstatement rather than condition. Fit-out alterations agreed years earlier under a licence to alter are rarely priced at the point of consent, so the obligation to strip out mezzanines, extraction, plant or gym flooring arrives as a shock to somebody.

We read those licences at the start of an instruction, cost the works properly with our own cost consultants, and give our client a realistic view of their position early. Including when that position is weaker than they hoped.

Breaks and expiries appear in the diary years in advance, yet most instructions arrive weeks before them. That timing costs money on both sides of the table.

Working with clients across a portfolio rather than unit by unit lets us flag the events worth preparing for, get ahead of the ones likely to be contested, and take a consistent approach to the rest.

It also means we already know the buildings. On a portfolio of any size, that familiarity is what allows us to give a useful answer to a quick question without opening a new file every time.

Building safety in retail and leisure is complicated by the lease rather than the building. Fire risk assessments generally fall to the landlord for structure and common parts, while the occupier controls the fit-out, extraction and storage that shape the actual risk. Neither party sees the whole picture.

Where retail sits beneath flats, the block above may be a higher-risk building whose duty holder has no visibility of what happens at ground floor level.

So our fire risk assessments and compartmentation surveys set out plainly whose obligation each finding falls to. A report that identifies a defect without identifying its owner tends to sit unread, and the same evidence supports the dilapidations position later.