How LeaseLens analyzes your lease
A plain explanation of what happens when you upload a lease PDF — how the text is processed, which categories are analyzed on every submission, and where AI-based extraction is reliable versus where a human attorney is still the right call.
The pipeline
LeaseLens is not a chatbot that reads your lease in conversation. It is a structured extraction pipeline that processes every lease the same way, every time.
Text extraction
Your PDF is parsed with pdf-parse, a library that extracts raw text from PDF documents. The extracted text is then wrapped in explicit document delimiters before it reaches the AI model.
Structured analysis prompt
The lease text is passed to Claude with a fixed system prompt instructing it to extract and analyze 16 specific categories. The prompt specifies exact JSON output fields — not a freeform response. Every field is defined and required.
Structured output
Claude returns a JSON object with all 16 categories populated. The output is validated against the expected schema. Fields the lease is silent on are marked "Not specified" rather than inferred or fabricated.
Report generation
The JSON output is used to generate a formatted PDF report. Escalation math is computed from the extracted rates and base rent. Risk flags are sorted by severity. The top 3 negotiation priorities are included with specific suggested language. The report is emailed as a PDF attachment.
What gets analyzed on every lease
The same 16 categories are extracted and evaluated on every submission. Not dependent on the lease length, the clause structure, or how you describe your situation. Every category, every upload.
Each report also includes a lease grade (A–F), a tenant-friendliness score (0–100), and a plain-English overall assessment.
Where AI-based analysis is reliable
AI is not reliable at everything. It is well-suited to specific parts of lease analysis — and those happen to be the parts that take humans the longest.
Finding and reading every clause of a defined type — every CAM provision, every personal guarantee clause, every holdover rate — and pulling out the specific terms. Commercial leases are long but structurally consistent. AI is reliable at this.
Calculating what rent escalation clauses actually cost over the full term. A 3% annual escalation on a $10,000/month base over 7 years produces a specific number. The math is deterministic. The report shows the full schedule.
Identifying clause structures that carry known risk — uncapped CAM, holdover above 150%, full-term personal guarantees with no burn-off, renewal options set at open-ended fair market value. These patterns are consistent across leases regardless of how they're drafted.
The same 16 categories are analyzed on every lease, every time. Not dependent on what you ask. Not skipping the holdover clause because the lease is long. Not missing the relocation right because it's in an exhibit. Every category, every upload.
Where you still need an attorney
LeaseLens does not replace legal counsel. It replaces the hours spent figuring out what the lease says so your attorney time is spent on what it says to do about it.
LeaseLens tells you what's in the lease. It does not tell you what to do — that's legal advice, and it requires a licensed attorney in your state. The report's "Top 3 Priorities" section tells you what to raise with counsel, not what decision to make.
Some lease terms interact with state law in ways that matter — implied warranties, eviction standards, self-help remedies. LeaseLens flags the clause; an attorney tells you how your state law affects it.
Most commercial leases follow standard structures. Occasionally a lease includes unusual custom language or dense negotiated carve-outs where interpretation genuinely requires legal judgment. LeaseLens flags these as requiring review.
LeaseLens gives you the analysis and the asks. Actually negotiating on your behalf — drafting counter-proposals, communicating with the landlord's counsel, advocating for your position — requires an attorney.
Accuracy and what happens when something is missed
LeaseLens covers all standard commercial lease provisions reliably. There are edge cases: highly unusual custom language, non-English clauses, or handwritten addenda in PDFs with poor OCR quality.
If the report misses a material term that was clearly present in the lease text — a renewal option it didn't extract, a personal guarantee scope it misread, a CAM cap it overlooked — email us and we will reprocess your lease at no charge. This is not a marketing promise. It is written into the Terms of Service.
Material misses reprocessed at no charge
If LeaseLens fails to identify or materially mischaracterizes a standard lease provision that is clearly present in your lease document, contact us at hello@leaselens.org and we will reanalyze your lease at no additional cost. This applies to terms that are present in the lease text but were missed or misread — not to implied terms, negotiation positions, or jurisdictional interpretations.
Security: prompt injection protection
Some parties embed hidden instructions in lease documents attempting to manipulate AI analysis — text designed to tell the model to ignore risk flags, report the lease as tenant-friendly, or produce a misleading output. This is called a prompt injection attack.
LeaseLens defends against this at two levels: the system prompt explicitly instructs the model to treat all text inside the lease document as data, never as instructions; and the model is instructed to flag any embedded manipulation attempt as a HIGH-severity finding in the report itself.
LeaseLens is certified under the AI Document Integrity Protocol (ADIP) v1.0 — an open standard for prompt injection hardening in document-processing AI systems. The full standard and the LeaseLens implementation notes are published at leaselens.org/adip-certified.
A note on what this is not
LeaseLens is not legal advice. It does not create an attorney-client relationship. The report is a structured analysis of the terms present in your lease document, prepared for informational purposes to help you understand your lease before consulting with legal counsel.
For any significant commercial lease decision — particularly multi-year commitments, leases over $15,000/month in total occupancy cost, or leases involving personal guarantees — we recommend having a licensed real estate attorney in your state review the lease in addition to using this analysis. The report is designed to make that attorney review more efficient, not to replace it.
Built by Conner Anderson after watching a friend sign an NNN lease she didn’t fully understand. The full story behind why this exists →
See the analysis in action
A sample report shows you exactly what the output looks like — all 16 categories, the risk flags with clause language quoted, and the top 3 negotiation priorities.