Our client sued to collect on a bill for services rendered—the claim was for about $25,000. The contract had a clause stating that if legal proceedings were necessary to collect, the customer would also be liable for attorney’s fees and court costs.
The Defendant company tried to claim that not only was the work done by our client unacceptable but that the company was damaged to the tune of over $1,000,000. We vigorously defended against this and the company ultimately dropped the claim. We then continued to pursue the original claim, adding the additional attorney’s fees and costs incurred in defending against the baseless counterclaims.
The case was first tried before an arbitration panel as required by the court rules. That hearing resulted in an award for the original claim plus counsel fees, a total of about $48,000.
The Defendant then appealed, requesting a new hearing before a judge. We prevailed in that hearing also which meant that, along with money paid to our client due to an additional claim we made for the cost of defending the frivolous counterclaims, our client ultimately collected over $90,000.