It’s not that big a deal, but this win feels nice. Basically, you have a home improvement contractor who is taking a bit too long and he gets fired. That’s my client. He sue the homeowner to get paid for the work and materials already put in to the project – in this case a custom kitchen. He then learns that he can’t sue because he didn’t have a written contract. Ooops! NJ law is a bitch that way. The contractor gets sued for failing to provide a contract and failing to do a good job before he got fired.

At trial we proved that he was never given an opportunity to do the job right because he was fired and never advised of the complaints. Also, we proved that there were no ‘ascertainable’ damages which resulted from his failure to provide a written contract. Those ascertainable damages would have been multiplied by three (3x) if they were found to exist. So my guy started out hoping to get money and then was exposed to the possibility of having to pay $20,000 plus. He still is on the hook for attorney fees attributable to the homeowners’ effort to enforce the violation. We’ll see what that amount adds up to in January, but on the other high-ticket items, we were very successful today.