A developer wants access to your property. You’ve heard AI can draft legal documents now. Here’s an honest answer from an attorney who represents adjacent owners — starting with the fact that makes this question mostly moot.
If a developer or contractor next door has asked for access to your property — to install roof protection, erect scaffolding or a sidewalk shed, underpin your foundation, or monitor your building during excavation — you may be wondering whether you can simply ask an AI chatbot to draft or review the access agreement instead of hiring a lawyer.
It’s a fair question, and you deserve a straight answer rather than a scare piece.
Start here: the developer typically pays your attorney’s and engineer’s fees
Before we talk about what AI can and can’t do, you need to know the economic reality of these negotiations, because it changes the entire question:
In a properly negotiated access agreement, the developer pays the adjacent owner’s attorney’s fees — and the adjacent owner’s engineer’s fees.
Why? Because the developer needs access to your property, and you don’t need anything from them. That leverage — reinforced by RPAPL § 881, the statute a developer must invoke in court if you say no — means reimbursement of your professional fees is a standard term of these agreements. It’s a term I obtain in the agreements I negotiate.
And note that there are two professionals in that sentence. These matters aren’t handled by a lawyer alone. A licensed engineer — retained on your behalf, paid for by the developer — reviews the developer’s protection plans, inspects your property to document its existing condition before construction starts, and evaluates the monitoring program that will watch your building while the excavation proceeds next door. No AI chatbot walks your foundation with a flashlight. The engineer’s pre-construction survey is often the single most important piece of paper in the file the day a crack appears in your wall — and under a properly negotiated agreement, it didn’t cost you a dime.
So the honest comparison isn’t “free AI versus an expensive lawyer.” It’s “free AI, with you personally absorbing every risk it missed” versus “an experienced attorney and a licensed engineer, typically paid for by the developer.” Using AI to save money on an access agreement doesn’t save an adjacent owner money. It only removes the people at the table whose job is to know what you’re entitled to.
With that understood, here’s the straight answer on the technology.
Yes, AI can draft an access agreement
Modern AI tools can produce a document that looks very much like a license access agreement. It will have recitals, a description of the work, an insurance paragraph, an indemnity clause, and a signature block. If you ask it to “protect the neighbor,” it will add language that sounds protective.
For some situations, that might even be adequate. If the only request is for a painter to lean a ladder against your fence for two days, you probably don’t need a lawyer — or an AI.
But construction access in New York is rarely that simple.
What AI-drafted agreements consistently miss
Having reviewed and negotiated access agreements for years, these are the gaps that appear over and over in machine-generated drafts:
License fees. Most adjacent owners don’t know that monthly license fees for scaffolding, sidewalk sheds, tie-backs, and crane swings are customary and negotiable. An AI won’t tell you what developers in your borough are actually paying for a shed that darkens your storefront for eighteen months, because that market knowledge isn’t written down anywhere it can read.
Insurance that actually works. This is the most dangerous gap. An AI draft will require the contractor to carry “commercial general liability insurance of $1,000,000 per occurrence” and to name you as an additional insured. That sentence is nearly worthless by itself. Whether you are actually protected depends on the endorsements behind the certificate — the specific additional insured forms, whether coverage extends to completed operations, and whether the policy contains exclusions that eliminate coverage for injuries to the contractor’s own workers, which in New York is precisely where the catastrophic claims come from.
The engineer’s role. An AI draft won’t provide for your own engineer to review the protection plans, document your property’s pre-construction condition, or oversee vibration and optical monitoring — much less require the developer to pay for it. Those provisions have to be negotiated in, and they’re the provisions that protect you when something goes wrong.
Term limits and what happens when the project runs long. Construction projects in New York run late. Routinely. An agreement without a firm expiration date, escalating fees for overstays, and removal obligations is an invitation for the protection to sit on your property for years.
Security for damage. Who pays, immediately, when the excavation cracks your foundation wall? An AI draft will say the developer “shall repair any damage.” A properly negotiated agreement puts real mechanisms behind that promise — the pre-construction survey documenting existing conditions, monitoring at the developer’s expense, escrowed funds or other security, and a clear process for disputes. The difference shows up the day something goes wrong.
Permanent encroachments dressed up as temporary access. Underpinning and tie-backs physically enter your land and stay there forever. Some developers present these as routine items in a temporary access agreement. They are not; they are permanent takings of your property rights, and they are compensated differently. An AI has no way to know that the innocuous-looking paragraph on page six is the most valuable thing in the document.
Meanwhile, the developer is definitely using AI
Expect the first draft you receive to be partly or wholly machine-generated. Developer-side AI drafts tend to be aggressive in a particular way: broad access, vague duration, minimal fees, boilerplate insurance language, and indemnity that runs in one direction. They look clean and professional, which makes them more dangerous, not less — a sloppy draft invites scrutiny; a polished one invites a signature.
The recent amendments to RPAPL § 881 (December 2025 and February 2026) have also changed the legal landscape these agreements sit in. A generic AI tool trained on older materials will negotiate against you using last year’s law.
The bottom line
For an adjacent owner facing a construction access request, the question isn’t whether AI can produce a document — it’s whether you can afford to be the only unrepresented party in a negotiation where representation, and your own engineer, would have cost you nothing.
Before you sign anything — or ask a chatbot to sign off on anything — it costs nothing to find out what you’re actually entitled to.
James J. Corbett, P.C. represents adjacent and neighboring property owners in construction access matters throughout New York City and Long Island. Call 646-470-1107 or visit jamesjcorbett.com.
Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. This article is for general informational purposes and is not legal advice.
