Why I Spent $100k to Fight a $10k Small Claims Lawsuit
Eek.  First off, joelx, sorry about the painful process.  If things are truly as presented here, I hope things turn out in your favor.<p>I&#x27;m inferring that the post is being polite in leaving off some of the challenging aspects of the client, but as someone that&#x27;s run a little consulting shop, this alarmed me:<p>&gt; &lt;Client&gt; at this point began to make lots of requests for out of scope items not included in the contract. My team bent over backwards to accommodate him and finish these items...we had gone far beyond what he had paid for. Our team had racked up 294 hours of work on a project that TheClientCompany had only paid 116 hours for.<p>Why wasn&#x27;t this contract closed, and a new one opened, before the 150% work overage mark?<p>Obviously, sometimes you need to eat a bit of work due to misestimation&#x2F;unexpected-unexpecteds&#x2F;reputation&#x2F;keeping your client happy, but with the estimation of $12k@116 hours, this is $30k worth of work on a $12k agreement (assuming the estimation didn&#x27;t account for legal&#x2F;accounting&#x2F;insurance&#x2F;pre&amp;post-sale time&#x2F;expense, which are a bit more static in my experience).<p>Was the client not politely informed that the requests were going well beyond the scope of work?  If you&#x27;re beyond 2x of the agreement, I can understand that the client started to think of the contract as inconsequential.  When dealing with customers without a technical staff (or experience in managing or running something technical) that are asking you to over-deliver, it&#x27;s often just an issue of not knowing which asks are time-consuming&#x2F;expensive -- and if you&#x27;re making it look easy, the client will think it&#x27;s easy.<p>&gt; Our contract requires that before a website launches, final payment must be made. My team launched despite this and continued to work on it for him.<p>When you flagrantly break the parts of the contract that protect your business and interests, it&#x27;s somewhat understandable that the client would expect to be able to sign-off the work before payment.<p>Just my two cents, but I&#x27;m positive that those two pennies have saved me a ton of money in walking away from certain clients during the negotiation phase.<p>&gt; I ran right up to both of them, and punched him in the nose. I got in big trouble, but I thought it was worth it.<p>This metaphor, coupled with the story, makes it seem as if it&#x27;s &quot;worth it&quot; to hit a client back in front of a judge.  Super weird, IMHO.