Is it possible to sue a UK based company from the US regarding debt collection? I have a US-based LLC. The LLC is a service oriented company as opposed to product oriented. And all work is performed in the US. A UK-based client is delinquent in payments. The amount in dispute is under $10k. Is it possible to effectively implement some sort of debt collection from the US for a UK-based company (with no US offices)? Given the value of the claim, is it worthwhile to pursue any formal legal action (small claims)? If so, what country would the legal action need to originate from? Would one file in the US and note the foreign defendant or would one file, as a foreigner, in the home country of the defendant?
Yes it is kind of possible what country would the legal action need to originate from? Would one file in the US and note the foreign defendant or would one file, as a foreigner, in the home country of the defendant? You can go either way. It is not obtaining the judgment that is the biggest trouble here, but enforcing it. You will need: A UK mailing address. Services like ScanMyPost will suffice. Some money to pay the court fees. Time, tenacity and patience to follow through the procedure and fill all necessary forms. Be lucky in that the defendant actually has something to pay the debt with. There are two stages: Obtain a court judgment in your favour. Unless the defendant pays you, enforce the judgment. Obtaining court judgment in the UK In the UK, the "small claims court" functions are executed by HM Courts &amp; Tribunals Service. The specific service is called "Claim for money" which can be filed online via their old or new system. So, basically, you file the online form, pay the fee by credit card and wait for defendant's response. If they do not respond, you ask the court to make a judgment (in my case it took 10 weeks from filing claim to getting judgment). If the defendant responds and defends themselves, expect much longer wait and uncertain outcome. Enforcement So, you and the defendant have both received court judgment saying that they must pay you. But they are not paying. There is a range of options you can choose from: County Court Warrant of Control (claims from £50 to £5,000). Court bailiff will go to the defendant's address and try to seize goods that can be easily sold. High Court Writ of Control (claims from £600). Attachment of earnings order (you ask the court to order the defendant's employer to deduct his earnings in your favour). Third-party debt order (a.k.a. "Garnishee Order") — if you know the defendant's bank account details. Read about potential pitfalls here. Charging order: you will only get paid if the defendant sells their land. Bankrupt the defendant (big court fees!). Alternatively, you could always hire a UK lawyer but then you would probably not need this answer.
A business owned by a debtor is not itself liable for the debts of its owners. But, a membership interest in an LLC is one of your assets and is normally not exempt from creditors, so legal process may be used to collect a money judgment obtained by a creditor in a suit against the membership interest owner from this asset. There are several ways of doing this that a creditor can utilize, each of which is discussed below. Charging Orders And Writs of Garnishment The presumptive way for a judgment creditor to collect a judgment from a debtor's LLC membership interest asset to do this is to either garnish any monies the LLC owes to you with a writ of garnishment (so that the LLC would pay the amounts due to the debtor to the creditor instead), or to impose a &quot;charging order&quot; on the LLC interest, which is like a writ of garnishment that remains in force until the full amount of the debt authorizing the charging order is satisfied. The downside of a writ of garnishment or charging order is that the people who control the LLC can often defer distributions to the members indefinitely, which deprives you of the funds that would otherwise have been distributed to you, but doesn't let the creditor have those funds either. Some LLCs require that certain distributions be made to owners and require that the LLC be liquidated under certain circumstances (e.g. the completion of a real estate development project). But, those LLCs are the exception rather than the rule. Normally, an LLC only makes distributions to its members when the people who control that LLC decide to do so by a majority vote of the managers or of the managing-members as the case may be. Writs of Execution Directed To Membership Interests There is a split in authority between states (with many states not having resolved the issue) over whether you can enforce a money judgment against the owner of a membership interest not just by collecting money due to the owner as a result of the membership interest and instead use a writ of execution to seize the membership interest and sell it in a sheriff's sale to whomever bids at the sale (much like someone might seize a parcel of real estate or a car to pay a debtor's debts to a judgment creditor). In most states, even if this is allowed, the buyer at the auction gets the right to distributions from the membership interest seized, but not a vote on how the business of the company is conducted, unless the other members agree to grant the new owner voting rights or the operating agreement of the LLC provides otherwise. All of the remedies so far presume that the asset to be collected out of consists of the ownership interest in the LLC (analogous to shares of stock) rather than the assets of the LLC itself. Reverse Piercing Seizing assets of the LLC itself, rather than merely the ownership interest in the LLC, is called &quot;reverse piercing&quot;. Usually, reverse piercing is not allowed. But, there are some circumstances where reverse piercing is sometimes allowed. Almost all jurisdictions allow reverse piercing in some circumstances, but those circumstances vary considerably from state to state based upon both the language of the relevant LLC statute and the relevant case law. There are four main circumstances that justify reverse piercing. Single Member LLCs One is the case of a single member LLC where the creditor obtains ownership of 100% of the LLC. In these circumstances, courts have allowed creditors to dissolve the LLC and reach its assets, because neither the debtor nor any third party other than the creditor has any legitimate ownership interest in the property. Alter Ego Cases Another is the case where the assets of the LLC and the personal assets of the debtor are co-mingled or there is not clear documentation existing prior to the litigation establishing which underlying assets belong to the LLC and which belong to its owner. In these cases, reverse piercing is allowed because the existence of a company identity has been disregarded and there is no de facto distinction between company assets and personal assets. This justification for reverse piercing is sometimes called an &quot;alter ego&quot; theory. Fraudulent Transfers A third case where reverse piercing is allowed is where the contribution of the asset to the capital of the LLC was a &quot;fraudulent transfer&quot; from the individual debtor to the LLC (e.g. if the $1 million parcel of real estate was sold to the LLC for $100 at a time when the debtor was insolvent or rendered insolvent as a result of the transfer). Contributing an asset to the capital of an LLC in exchange for a membership interest with a capital account in the LLC's books set based upon the fair market value of the asset contributed to the LLC is usually not considered a fraudulent transfer, but could be in particular facts and circumstances where it has the intended effect of hindering creditors or concealing an asset. Equitable Reverse Piercing Based Upon Control Of The Entity A fourth case where reverse piercing is sometimes allowed is where the debtor does not own 100% of the LLC but has the ability to dissolve the LLC or force its assets to be distributed in kind to him, without the assent of the other LLC owners, because the debtor controls the LLC. Whether this is allowed or not is another issue upon which there is a split of authority and in many cases simply an absence of authority which would make such a case one of first impression in a state.
A business has the right to refuse service, except in the case of unlawful discrimination. &quot;Sued us&quot; is not a protected characteristic. Unless part of the settlement was that the business must serve that customer in future, there is no way this could be considered contempt.
Given that this is a UK based company, the most applicable Act would be the Unsolicited Goods and Services Act 1971 A person who, not having reasonable cause to believe there is a right to payment, in the course of any trade or business makes a demand for payment, or asserts a present or prospective right to payment, for what he knows are unsolicited goods sent (after the commencement of this Act) to another person with a view to his acquiring them [for the purposes of his trade or business], shall be guilty of an offence and on summary conviction shall be liable to a fine not exceeding level 4 on the standard scale. This law specifically refers to [unsolicited] charges for entries in directories. You also mentioned that they're misrepresenting that a company is already a customer and sending out invoices on that basis. That would be a breach of the Fraud Act 2006 A person is in breach of this section if he dishonestly makes a false representation As to their enforceability, that answer is no. If this came before an actual judge, the judge would throw it out in a heartbeat. No agreement was made to provide a service in return for a payment and these companies rely on sending threatening letters via (seeming) third-parties precisely because they wish to avoid that level of scrutiny.
Civil lawsuits seeking damages for torture or similar grave misconduct by corporations outside the United States are often brought under the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act (a.k.a. ATS) in U.S. federal courts. Multiple cases brought under the Alien Tort Claims Act have involved claims that U.S. corporations, through their agents carrying out company policy, tortured people outside the U.S., or were complicit in conduct that caused someone to be tortured by a government. One example is the case of Wang Xiaoning v. Yahoo! In 2007, the World Organization for Human Rights USA filed a lawsuit against Yahoo! on behalf of Chinese dissidents Wang Xiaoning and Shi Tao (Guao Quingsheng), claiming jurisdiction under the ATS. According to the complaint, Wang and Shi Tao used Yahoo! accounts to share pro-democracy material, and a Chinese subsidiary of Yahoo! gave the Chinese government identifying information that allowed authorities to identify and arrest them. The Complaint alleges that the plaintiffs were subjected to &quot;torture, cruel, inhuman, or other degrading treatment or punishment, arbitrary arrest and prolonged detention, and forced labor.&quot; Yahoo! settled the case in November 2007 for an undisclosed amount of money, and it agreed to cover the plaintiff's legal costs as a part of the settlement. In a statement released after the settlement was made public, Yahoo! said that it would &quot;provide 'financial, humanitarian and legal support to these families' and create a separate 'humanitarian relief fund' for other dissidents and their families.&quot; Corporations can also be prosecuted criminally for crimes. Pacific Gas &amp; Electric was recently convicted of manslaughter in a California State Court related to deaths caused by wildfires that were caused by reckless disregard to maintenance and safety by the corporation. The fines were largely waived in subsequent bankruptcy proceedings with the permission of the prosecution, in order to free up funds to pay compensatory damages to parties prevailing in civil lawsuits and funds to comply with orders from utility industry regulators in the state. Arthur Anderson, then one of the &quot;Big Six&quot; accounting firms in the United States was convicted of fraud related criminal charges in relation to the collapse of Enron, an oil company for which it was an accountant, that resulted in the demise of the firm, even though the conviction was ultimately reversed on appeal by the U.S. Supreme Court. I am not aware of a case in which a U.S. corporation has been prosecuted criminally for authorizing its agents to torture someone or being complicit in torture, but it certainly could be done (and probably has been done). The federal Racketeering and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and parallel state statutes, are specifically designed to authorize both criminal and civil actions against corporation or de facto entities engaged in criminal activity. The statute was designed to target organized crime activities, particularly those involving corporations used as fronts for criminal activity, and in the criminal context, the focus of prosecutions has largely continued to be on old school mafia type organized crime gangs and cartels. But private civil actions authorized by RICO against companies engaged in a pattern of criminal activity usually involve allegations of a pattern of fraud and other forms of white collar crime. This would be a likely statute to invoke in a criminal case alleging that a company had engaged in a pattern and practice of torturing people. In practice, the difference between a civil lawsuit in which compensatory and punitive damages may be imposed, and a criminal prosecution of a corporation, in which fines and restitution may be imposed, is subtle indeed when it comes to the remedies available in each case, even though procedurally, the two kinds of legal proceedings are very different, which is why usually a civil lawsuit, rather than a criminal conviction, would be the legal tool of choice when a corporation engaged in conduct, through its agents, which is criminal in nature. Also, it is possible, but harder, to prosecute officers, employees and agents of corporations in addition to the corporations themselves, for criminal conduct. Indeed, this is the usual approach. But it is harder to convict an individual because you have to show that the individual had the requisite intent and was personally involved in the criminal conduct. This typically requires access to internal communications in a firm which can be difficult to obtain in a criminal proceeding that doesn't have as much pre-trial discovery, and can be difficult to establish because responsibility within a large corporation is often diffuse. Generally speaking, prosecutors have seen the Arthur Anderson case as an unjust one and a cautionary tale that encourages them to think twice before prosecuting a major U.S. corporation criminally, rather than merely bringing a civil lawsuit against it.
IANAL. I am not your lawyer. The following is not legal advice. The insurance company, regardless of how you feel about their process, has it appears, to have discharged their duties, namely they have paid out two separate claims. The personal property claim has been paid to the estate as the beneficiary, while the property claim has been paid out with the mortgage company as the beneficiary. The mortgage company seems, to me (disclaimer, I work at a financial institution, albeit in an IT role), to also be reasonable. Six months is an extremely long time without contact or payment (where I work, the loss mitigation department is sent all loans that are 3 months delinquent); the fact that you, the estate executor were not aware of the passing of the debtor is of no consequence. Also, many loans contain clauses that allow the lender to accelerate the loan (i.e. demand "immediate" payment of the whole outstanding balance). So they've started foreclosure proceedings, probably about 3 months ago. As for the foreclosure proceedings: The received $45,000 will be applied to the loan. The property (not just the house, but the entire lot) will be sold at public auction, as all foreclosed houses are in the state of New York. Proceeds from the sale of the house shall be applied to paying off the loan. If the proceeds exceed the outstanding mortgage amount, the estate will be sent the remaining proceeds. If the proceeds are less than the remaining amount, the estate is retains (i.e. owes) the remaining debt. EDIT: As an example of why the noting of jurisdiction is important on this stack-exchange, Nate Eldredge has informed me that in New York, it is possible for a judge to reduce the "remaining debt" of the estate by declaring that the sold house had a higher "fair market value" than it sold for.
If you form an LLC, and then someone later obtains a registered trademark in the same name, the registered trademark would be enforceable everywhere except in the markets and places where the LLC developed common law trademark rights prior to their registration. Your LLC formation would also put a bump in the road in their trademark application. You can, of course, do both, although it is unclear to me why you feel such urgency in the likelihood of an infringement, which suggests that there may be relevant facts that aren't revealed by your post.
If you are going to sue, and can prove they overcharged - consider going to the small claims court. It should cost you $15 + time - unless you loose quite badly - in which case its conceivable the court could award costs against you (I don't know if this is true of the small claims court in NY). You can represent yourself, so no heavy legal bills. It will take a a few hours of your time to prepare and have the hearing. Of-course, very often, just by filing you will get the opposing party to sort out the issue - and probably won't even need to go to court.