Skip to content
Writing

Field guide, April 26, 2025

Field guide: auditing service charge demands against the lease

Imani Osei-BonsuHead of Legal Engineering4 min read

The problem

The short version: auditing service charge demands against the lease is easier to get wrong than most teams assume, and the failure is usually silent.

Volume changes the shape of the problem. At ten documents you can hold the exceptions in your head. At four hundred you need the exceptions written down and checkable.

What we do about it

The register is the deliverable. A finding without an owner and a date is an observation, not a control.

In the current build this runs as part of the standard pass, so it applies to every document in the set rather than only the ones someone thought to check.

Where it breaks

Scanned originals with poor image quality remain the weakest input. So do agreements that were assembled from three precedents and never reconciled, which is common in long-lived supplier relationships.

If you take one thing from this, make it the habit of checking the adjacent provision before you sign off the clause in front of you.

diligencegovernance

Working notes from the Lawrs team. General information about legal technology and practice, not legal advice.