When contracted to do work for large companies, there are often a lot of hoops to jump through to complete the contract.

What happens when a contractor demands additional payment from work that was completed (and paid for) over a year ago?

That is what is happening in this story.

Check out the details to see how it plays out.

Your lawyer’s letter will make things worse.

I own a small engineering company providing electrical engineering services.

I had a series of small projects with a large delivery company who seems to like the color brown.

Ok, simple enough so far.

These projects each had a small need for some mechanical engineering to design some heating.

So, I hired a small local mechanical engineering company to do that work.

We had completed one job a full year earlier and I had two more projects that he had completed and we were just waiting for brown to deliver final payment.

Too little too late.

Apparently, the engineer starts looking at his books and realizes that there was some time from the job that had been done for a year that he had never invoiced me for.

He calls me about it and I tell him that there is no way to capture that money this far removed.

When large companies do projects, they create budgets for the projects and once that project is closed, the money source is gone.

It’s his fault for not invoicing correctly.

He insists that they should pay, I explain why they would not.

About a month later I get a demand letter from his lawyer, demanding that year old money plus immediate payment on the two current invoices.

A demand letter is simply a demand written by a lawyer, so it has no real power except the intimidation factor of being written by a lawyer.

So, I ignore the demand letter.

About that time I had received the money from brown.

Now you’re just messing with him.

I tell him that I have a new policy that requires a lien release before final payment will be issued.

Lien releases don’t have much power over engineering services, they are for contractors, but this strings him along.

After a couple of weeks, I sent him a lien release that required him to notarize it.

Me requiring a notary on a powerless document was just another way to mess with him.

About a month later I did the same thing with the other final invoice.

So in the end, this dude didn’t get his year old invoice paid, but did have to pay for his lawyer to write a letter, then wait for payment and waste time getting a couple of notary signatures.

Sometimes turning to a lawyer does more harm than good.

Let’s see if the commenters have anything to say about it.

Accurate billing is essential.

Honest pay for honest work.

Good point.

Yup, lesson learned.

That’s an important question.

A lawyer isn’t always going to be able to help you.

But they will always take your money.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.