On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 15:26:08 +0100, "Owain"
wrote:

"Jinge" wrote
[snip tales of woe]
| Even though we owe him £1000s he has still dragged the job out,
| which has caused us to lose a tenant on the property already

That's a quantifiable financial loss. I think you need to Call Your
Solicitor.

Owain


I've had a similar situation, although with a different type of
project, where the supplier took longer than stated, didn't complete
certain aspects properly and did some property damage through
incompetence and lack of supervision into the bargain.



I had withheld the remaining payment of just under £10k. The
supplier had agreed to only a £1500 deduction to cover the property
repair, so we were a long way apart.

I gave them several opportunities to fix the other outstanding issues
and they failed miserably, still persisting in holding out for
complete payment. After about a month, and several letters, they
brought in their solicitor who began threatening legal action. They
hadn't prepared their position at all well and I sent them
photographs, copies of a diary that I had kept etc. The offer was
upped to £2500 on their side and at that point I contacted my
solicitor.

I bought an hour of his time to discuss how to handle this at a cost
of just over £100, which in the context of what was at stake, was not
a lot. Nevertheless, the costs can quickly mount if he were expected
to do much.

I had included in my counter claim amounts for time lost supervising
the supplier's subcontractors and other inconveniences. His advice
was that unless I was self employed or in a profession that bills
explicitly for time then a court would be unlikely to take that time
and its cost into account.

His additional advice, if I was prepared to settle at the figure, was
to offer to settle at a figure just under £5000 (e.g. £4995), and to
pay the difference to reduce the outstanding balance to this figure.
The strategy behind this is that this is the break point where a claim
would be heard in the Small Claims Division rather than in full court.
Any solicitor will know this and it's virtually a coded message that
one understands the game.

I was advised that in general, the small claims court will err towards
the customer in this type of case where a supplier has been
incompetent, done poor work etc. Moreover, the case will be heard
in the locality of the defendant, and in this case, the supplier was
half way across the country. This would have the potential of
incurring a lot of professional cost for them, as well as management
time.

After three further exchanges of letter where I stood firm and called
their bluff, the supplier's solicitor had clearly been told to settle.
We did so, at £4000 plus £1500 worth of other goods from the supplier.

Throughout this exercise, I kept records of what was happening and
every letter was sent by special delivery so make sure that there was
a record of signature and receipt.

I also made sure that each letter repeated the points of the previous
ones in full (word processors are great for this) and got up to seven
pages at the end, with plenty of cross references. Of course, the
supplier's solicitor would have to read all of this stuff to be able
to follow the details. I estimate that that would have cost them
quite a bit in legal fees.

A dispute with an individual would not need to have this amount of
standoff, but nevertheless the principle of withholding payment and
making the supplier take legal action is a sound one.





..andy

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