Cheapest Way To Sue Over Breach of Loan Contract? 6 months ago, I loaned a business friend $15000 to be repaid as $18,000 in a week. I have a complete contract which also includes the following section regarding lawyer fees for defaulting “Borrower shall pay all costs incurred by Lender in collecting sums due under this Note after a default, including reasonable attorneys' fees. If Lender or Borrower sues to enforce this Note or obtain a declaration of its rights hereunder, the prevailing party in any such proceeding shall be entitled to recover its reasonable attorneys' fees and costs incurred in the proceeding (including those incurred in any bankruptcy proceeding or appeal) from the non-prevailing party.” The contract also states that the loan should incur the maximum amount of interest allowed. Additionally, myself and the borrower are located in different states. Is my best bet to get a lawyer and sue? If so, approximately how much should I expect it to cost? How would it work with the requirement for him to pay the legal fees? Do I have the option to take this up via civil complaints? Or is that only for people who are in the same state? Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thank you all in advance
Is my best bet to get a lawyer and sue? If so, approximately how much should I expect it to cost? How would it work with the requirement for him to pay the legal fees? You would ordinarily either hire a lawyer or bring suit yourself in a limited jurisdiction court (the kind that handles misdemeanor criminal offenses and smaller dollar amounts owed, the exact name of the court differs from state to state). You can always bring suit in the county where the debtor resides. If the loan was not for consumer purposes, you could sue in the place where the loan &quot;was made&quot; or in a forum provided by the loan documents (which does not appear to be present), that might be different from the place where the debtor resides. Usually, you would want to hire a lawyer with offices not too far from the place where you are bringing suit, as limited jurisdiction courts often require in person appearances. Normally, a lawyer would ask to be paid up front, with you posting a retainer equal to a significant share of the estimated legal fees, called a retainer against which the lawyer would bill until it was exhausted, and would normally bill on an hourly basis. Fees on the order of $1,500-$5,000 wouldn't be unusual. One factor that would increase the cost would be the fact that your loan is almost certainly at an illegally high rate of interest, and you and your lawyer would have to examine the relevant law to determine the effect of that on the enforceability of your loan, and the correct amount to claim. In some jurisdictions and circumstances, this might make your entitle loan or at least all interest on it and all fees incurred to collect the debt, uncollectible. In other jurisdictions it might just reduce the amount of interest you could recover. Without this complication, it might have been a matter you could handle on your own. With this complication, you really need a lawyer. You could probably not legitimately claim the full $18,000 plus attorney fees and costs. Some lawyers would take a case like this on a contingent fee basis with you only advancing court costs and out of pocket expenses like process serving charged, but they'd typically do so only if they were confident that they would prevail at trial and if they were also confident that the debtor had the ability to pay. On a one-off basis, a contingent fee percentage of 40%-50% would be more common in this situation that the &quot;usual&quot; one-third contingency rate. &quot;Reasonable&quot; legal fees would be added to the amount you are owed on the loan if the high rate of interest doesn't invalidate this provision. Amounts recovered for legal fees would be paid to you from which you could repay your lawyer whatever you owed your lawyer. In a contingent fee case, usually hourly based fees are awarded and included in the total amount recovered (once the debtor actually pays) and the lawyer would get a percentage of the total collected regardless of what the amount recovered is supposed to be for. Another option would be to sell your debt to a debt collection firm which would charge you a small sign up fee and then collect a percentage of the debt recovered. The usurious interest rate involved, however, might discourage them from accepting you as a customer or buying the debt. If the debtor is not collectible with a job and/or real estate with substantial equity, you probably won't be able to find someone to take the case on a contingent fee basis at all, and will probably have to pay an hourly rate. Do I have the option to take this up via civil complaints? Or is that only for people who are in the same state? It isn't clear what you mean in these questions. A lawsuit is commenced by filing a civil complaint, filed by you or your lawyer in a court, and this can be done even if you don't live in the same state as the debtor, although it may be necessary to file it in the state where the debtor lives. But, the government won't supply a lawyer to help you collect your debt in the way that it would appoint a prosecutor to bring criminal charges against someone who committed a crime in which you were a victim.
Because your legal fees and contract damages are not "in addition to" your risk; they are your risk. If you pay the retainer and lose, you don't lose anything more than the retainer and damages. If you pay the retainer and win, you don't win anything more than the retainer and damages. The only kind of argument I can see here is that you're incurring some kind of psychic cost by enduring the uncertainty surrounding the litigation, but I can't remember ever seeing a case -- in Florida or elsewhere -- in which the court recognized taking on risk as a compensable harm, especially in a contract case, where damages are much more limited than in other kinds of cases. Risk is just a necessary feature of an adversarial legal system.
If the landlord gave you a key, and you can not give it back to him he has every right to charge you for correcting the oversight. I put to you that if you can't provide it back to him, he can't be certain that it has not fallen into the wrong hands, and he would be prudent to change the lock - and indeed, he may not even have another copy of the key in which case he really does not have a lot of alternatives. If you look at the section on "Claims for Damages or Loss" pdf there is a section B - Damage which confirms that Loss includes less tangible impacts including "loss of a service or facility provided under the tenancy agreement" Section C of the same document goes on to assert that "The purpose of compensation is to put the person who suffered the damage or loss in the same position as if the damage or loss had not occurred". There is arguably a question of the amount of loss suffered, and they can't sting you for punitive damages, but they can charge you a reasonable amount to get a new key cut (or possibly to replace the lock) - but that was not your question, and would probably arise if the amount he charges was unreasonable in the circumstance. Depending on if he has already taken action - and if not, how much the bill would be - promptly remedying the breach by finding and returning the key or equivalent action might save you some money.
There is a reasonable chance that the amount that you are borrowing and paying interest on is through a third party, so the dealer can't just waive the interest for the period when they are fixing the car. Legal responses would include canceling the sale, and suing for damages. The problem with suing for damages is that this isn't costing you an extra $15/day (the loan gets paid off at a fixed time, regardless of how much you get to actually drive the car). It would be a considerable stretch to argue that you were deprived of a week's worth of enjoyment for the car because of the wrongful acts of the dealer, and should be compensated. Your attorney would be in a good position to tell you, based on the facts and Texas law, whether that approach would be futile. The legality of the situation primarily depends on what the contract says. It is likely that the contract has clauses that maximally disclaim responsibility to the maximum extent allowed by law. There will be some clause that says something about taking delivery of the car, so you can check whether they have breached the contract on that point: it is possible that there is some escape hatch like "as soon as possible, upon receipt of payment". It seems pretty clear that they concealed a material fact, in order to induce you to buy the car. For example, the manufacturer may have installed a defective veblitzer which had to be replaced, and a reasonable person would not buy a car with a defective veblitzer, thus the veblitzer is a material fact. Or: the veblitzer may have been damaged in a flood. The fact that the car is, by their representation, not safe to drive in its current state, the mind of fact that would push most people into the "no thanks" category. To pursue the fraud angle, you need to be more specific about the defective part in your complaint. The only way to force them to reveal the nature of the missing part is to sue them and compel disclosure of the relevant facts during discovery. Again, your attorney would deal with this. You should bear in mind that if the sale is simply cancelled, you may not be able to recover the loan application or processing fee, and the trade-in will no doubt have been sold, so you can't get the old car back. There are laws against deceptive trade practices which might be applicable, depending on whether they said anything deceptive in their disseminated advertising. Section 17.46 may be applicable, if they patched the car together temporarily with a counterfeit veblitzer.
Landlord-tenant law is an area that is heavily statute-based, jurisdiction-dependent, and far from uniform across the country. A complex, specific, multi-part question like this one is not going to get a simple answer. In general, though, I can clear up some of the confusion with a quick example. Let's say you abandon your lease, but as you do so, you write a letter to the landlord saying: "While I won't be living there any more, my friend's band needs a place to practice. They have agreed to pay half my rent if you let them play there 4 nights a week. They'll be starting on Tuesday at 11 PM: please have a set of keys waiting for them at the front desk." The landlord does not give your friends the keys. They re-key and clean the apartment and rent it two months later. Are you going to stand up in court and argue, with a straight face, that you should only be liable for half the rent for those two months because of the landlord's "failure to mitigate"? Again, jurisdictions differ, but the duty to mitigate is not absolute. If the landlord could rent out a $1,000/month apartment for $5 a month, it doesn't have to do that, and you can't make the Court take $5 a month off their damages if they refuse to do so. Also, you seem to be confused about what subleasing is. A sublessor owes duties to you; you still owe the duty to your landlord to get the rent paid. A sublease is an agreement between you and a third party to pay you rent. It does not affect your relationship with the landlord at all, unless it's a breach of your agreement with the landlord or of local law protecting the landlord from unauthorized subleasing.
Here is the Illinois Landlord and Tenant Act, and here are the Chicago Residential Landlords and Tenants ordinances. Neither set of law addresses application fees. So it would have to be covered in whatever agreement you have with the agent (assuming you paid the agent), or with the landlord (if you paid the landlord). Fees for a credit history check are generally not refundable since they are actual costs incurred by someone, no matter what the outcome is. Check the forms you signed, like this one, to see whether they explicitly say that the fee is not refundable.
Nope. Say I sue you successfully, and the court delivers a judgement that awards $1000 in damages. It is not the responsibility of the small claims court to ensure that the judgement is fulfilled. In fact, the debtor (person who lost) can outright refuse to pay the creditor (or the person who won). They are not in violation of any law at this point. However, the creditor can ask the court for options on enforcing their judgement, and these can include, but are not limited to: Garnishing wages Providing a court order Seizure of assets (through court sheriff, don't use this yourself or you end up getting into criminal matters) and others to enforce the judgement. The debtor isn't liable for refusing, unless when they are in violation of a court order. Violating a court order is a criminal matter, and the debtor could possibly be found guilty of contempt of court. Oh, and the case wouldn't move on to a higher court. Cases go to a higher court when an appeal is made, generally when there has been an error in enforcing the law. You also need to be provided leave to make an appeal.
The law only addresses possible legal consequences, from which you could surmise what actually happens. If a person stops paying rent, the landlord institutes eviction proceedings, and may sue for the remainder of the rent for the term of the lease: they have an obligation to try to find a replacement tenant, to mitigate the damage. Some relief is available to the landlord in the deposit, from which the unpaid rent might be deducted, but let's assume that after that, the actual damage suffered is $5,000. When you sue a person in your home state, the court serves official notice that the defendant must appear to answer the charges, and the state has jurisdiction over the respondent because they are in that state. Giving notice and collecting on a judgment across jurisdictions can get complicated and expensive, so it would depend on what kind of treaties exist between the countries. There is the Hague Service Convention which may simplify the business of giving notice to parties, which works if the respondent fled to Norway or India but not if they fled to Somalia or Turkmenistan. Since it turns out the US is not party to any multinational treaty recognizing foreign judgments, that country is not obligated to care about a US judgment, so unless the person left assets in the US, you may not be able to collect. You could sue in the person's country (hire a local attorney to pursue the matter). The main legal question would be whether there is any conflict between the lease and local law: while the basic idea of a lease is universally recognized, there may be peculiar conditions or procedures applicable in that country. (Norway has some laws pertaining to "shared utilities" which don't exist in the US, which might put a US lease at odds with Norwegian law, and there are rent-raising rules that don't exist here). It might be necessary that you appear in court in that country to swear under oath that the lease was agreed to voluntarily, or the court may require a special form of 'notarization' not available in the US. None of that renders international litigation impossible, though a favorable judgment might be unlikely in some courts. The cost of litigation might be much higher than what would be awarded by a court.