Most lease drafting still happens by typing into a Word document: change the tenant name in twelve places, hope you didn't miss one, copy-paste a clause and pray its cross-references still resolve. Deal Terms is the structured side of that. You fill named fields on the right; the document on the left re-writes itself, with every value landing in every place it should.
01What's on the screen
Open any document in LeasePilot. The right panel shows three tabs across the top:
- Deal Terms (default) — the form view of the lease. This page.
- Clausebook — the firm's library of negotiated language, ready to drop in. See clausebook.
- Autopilot — automated drafting from imported context. See Autopilot.
Deal Terms is organized into collapsible cards. The cards and fields inside them are built around the way _your_ firm thinks about a deal — same vocabulary, same groupings, same order. A drafter shouldn't have to translate between an internal mental model and what the platform asks for. A retail-focused team's cards (_Tenant_, _Premise_, _Term_, _Rent_, _Options_, _Restrictions_, and so on) look nothing like an industrial team's or a ground-lease team's, because the underlying deal structure is different. The platform isn't a fixed form trying to fit every portfolio; it's your forms, organized.
02How the fields work
Each control inside a card is wired to a piece of the document. Change a value, the document updates immediately. The control type matches what the field actually is — these are the kinds of inputs the platform supports, mapped to whatever your forms need:
- Text for names, descriptions, free-form prose.
- Number for square footage, dollars, percentages.
- Date for effective dates, option windows, expirations.
- Checkbox for binary toggles (_Tenant has a guarantor: yes/no_) that often unlock or hide entire sections.
- Radio for one-of-a-set choices (_Lease Type: Triple Net / Modified Gross / Full Service_).
- Dropdown for closed lists you've curated (_Entity Type_, _State of Formation_).
Behind every field is the conditional logic your firm's drafting decisions actually depend on, encoded during onboarding. A _yes_ on a checkbox can pull in three new sections elsewhere in the document. A change to a single date can recalculate every downstream date that depends on it. The legal judgment behind those rules is yours; the platform just executes it, on every keystroke, the same way every time.
03Finding your way around
The panel grows as your portfolio's complexity grows. A few shortcuts make it manageable:
- Find in deal terms — the search box at the top of the panel jumps to a field by name. Useful when you know a term exists but not which card holds it.
- Occurrences in the document — when a deal term lands in multiple places, the document panel shows _Occurrences 1 of N_ at the top with Previous / Next controls. Step through to verify every place a value applied.
- Import Deal Terms — at the very top of the panel. Pulls structured terms from an LOI or term sheet so you don't type them in by hand. See import deal terms.
NoteDon't edit the document directly when a deal term will do. The document is a real editor and you can type into it; that's covered in text editing. But if a value is governed by a deal term, hand-edits to that value will be overwritten the next time the encoded logic re-evaluates that section. Use the field, not the keyboard.
The starting values that fill these fields when you open a new draft come from per-building defaults. For prose that _isn't_ governed by a deal term (a custom recital, a negotiated paragraph, language a counterparty asked for), see text editing.