What Happened: Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Los Angeles County imposed a temporary moratorium on residential and commercial evictions. A commercial landlord that had leased property to an auto repair tenant that was no longer paying rent due to COVID sued the county, claiming...
What Happened: A restaurant tenant sold its business to another operator and her brother, the Marcials, who signed a 10-year lease with the landlord to continue operating the restaurant and bar from its current location at the mall. Problems with the transaction arose, and the...
What Happened: A landlord bound by a no-compete clause with Verizon Wireless leased retail property to a vape shop for the “sole purpose of a vape, tobacco, clothing, computer repair” operation. The lease also required the tenant to refrain from competing with...
What Happened: A construction materials tenant that admitted to not paying rent and abandoning the premises had no problem with the default judgment entered in the landlord’s favor but claimed that the sought-after award of 47 months’ rent was excessive, noting that...
What Happened: In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a landlord agreed to reduce a retail tenant’s rent from $7,147 to $3,500. Signed in November 2020, the agreement was retroactive to May 2020 to March 2021, at which time rent would revert back to the original amount....
What Happened: A restaurant subtenant admitted to defaulting on its obligation to pay rent and vacating the premises. But it objected to the $689,554.94 that the trial court awarded because the landlord didn’t mitigate its damages by seeking to relet the space to another...
What Happened: A nonprofit ran a multi-day music festival on recreational space it leased from the city. Two attendees who purchased tickets to the event were denied entry because they were carrying guns in violation of music festival rules banning attendees from having weapons...
What Happened: A call center employee who stopped by the office to pick up her paycheck after sunset got run over by a city bus and died. Her estate sued the call center and landlord for negligence. The defendants denied owing the victim a duty of care because the accident...
What Happened: A national retail chain insisted that its shopping center lease include a clause requiring the landlord to indemnify it against losses arising out of things that happened in the common areas. The exact language:
What Happened: After signing a 10-year lease with a health clinic, a landlord put the property on the market for sale as “net lease investment,” meaning there was a tenant already in place. The tenant then defaulted just three years into the lease. Invoking the...
What Happened: A shopping center lease required the landlord to notify a clothing retail tenant and abate its rent if the anchor tenant, TJ Maxx, ceased to be “Open for Business” for three consecutive months. TJ Maxx moved out, and it took six months for the landlord...
What Happened: An indoor cannabis cultivator operated under an oral lease while negotiating the terms of a written agreement. But after two years of fruitless negotiations, the landlord decided enough was enough and served the tenant a 30-day notice to quit. When the tenant...
