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Comment by wkirby | Hacker News Reader

The project was for a fixed term which has ended. All deliverables are delivered and accepted. "Enforcing the contract" would mean termination, which is meaningless in this context.

In theory we could sue for our money, but the imbalance of power between an enormous multinational company and our small agency makes that utterly nonviable.

Our mistake was made on the front end, when we didn't ensure the contract specified what to do if payment was late. Because of that, we simply have to wait out the bureaucracy.

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Enforcing a contract means enforcing the terms, which is… payment. We use contracts because courts can enforce them. You don’t have to hire $1k/hour lawyers and fight a multinational in court. Pay $500 for a lawyer to write a letter containing a copy of the contract and a demand for payment. That’s it. They’ll pay up within a week.

The fact that your contract doesn’t contain anything about late payment is immaterial.

I think your underestimating the slowdown that will happen if we have to involve the client's legal team in addition to the accounts payable team.

Your problem is that nobody cares enough to deal with paying you because maybe someone forgot a purchase order or something. Your solution is to make someone care. Sending a letter to their legal team will make someone care (and they will in turn kick the accounts payable team into action). They will receive letters like this constantly. Your situation is not unique, except for the fact that you’re not taking action.

I think this makes assumptions about the speed at which things are currently moving.

If you had reason to believe that the client was really, truly, about to pay you, then you wouldn't have written the blog post.

If you get legal involved, the speed at which you move towards getting paid may change to become nonzero. At some point the speed of the client's legal team is irrelevant, because a sufficiently slow legal response by the client translates to a court judgement against them.

I've been in this situation, a little bit of a legal threat does wonders

This is likely incompetence, not malice

It is impossible for things to get slower than nothing happening. There’s a very good chance that they’ve decided to just not pay you until you show you’re willing to get lawyers involved. That is a fairly routine thing that large companies do with smaller suppliers.

> In theory we could sue for our money, but the imbalance of power between an enormous multinational company and our small agency makes that utterly nonviable.

Have you even talked to a lawyer? You had clear contract terms, you delivered, they are in breach. That's the easiest case a lawyer has ever seen.

The real question is if it's worth suing, giving the lawyers a cut and pissing off the client, vs hoping they pay eventually.

There are statutes of limitations though, check those out. If you wait too long you might be totally out of luck.

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