Contract Disputes: Resolving Contractual Conflicts Through Civil Litigation

When you were a child, your parents or grandparents may have told you that no matter what other talents you possess, there is no substitute for getting along well with other people. Your good looks, wealth, and educational attainments cannot save you from yourself if you are a jerk. Of course, once you got older, you probably accepted a cash-strapped acquaintance’s invitation to a multilevel marketing party where the host was trying to get you to buy a business skills course, in which the upshot was that, as long as you have some sort of entrepreneurial charisma that you can only get by buying the business skills course and pressuring others to buy into it. If you are so un-social that you cannot even manage to get invited to a multilevel marketing party, then perhaps you have found YouTube videos where someone tries to persuade you that you can live without interpersonal skills if you are sufficiently intimidating.  

When it comes to business, you can start with a shoestring budget or a mountain of capital, and you can be a scary boss or a high-responsibility, low-control leader, but you will need to manage conflicts, sometimes by resolving them and sometimes by preventing them. The good news is that you do not have to do it through sheer emotional intelligence. In fact, even if your EQ is off the charts, you still need to back up your promises and agreements with written contracts, and for that, you need a Whittier civil litigation lawyer.

Why Do Contract Disputes Arise?

Business disputes can arise any time two stakeholders in the business disagree or misunderstand each other’s intentions; these stakeholders include business partners, employees, and clients, among others. You can prevent many of these disputes by setting down your agreements in detail in a written contract. If someone tells you that you promised to pay more than you paid sooner than you paid it, then you can point to your contract and show them what you promised and prove that you have, in fact, kept your promise.

In other words, the mere existence of a written contract is sometimes enough to prevent a contract dispute. When contracts arise from contracts, though, it is often because of ambiguities in the contract or formal errors that may render the contract legally invalid.

Elements of an Airtight Business Contract

You can avoid many contract disputes just by being sufficiently thorough in drafting your business contracts. These are some of the details you should include in a business contract, whether it is with an employee, a vendor, a client, a landlord, or anyone else:

  • The full legal names and accurate contact information of both parties to the contract
  • The date the contract becomes effective
  • When the contract expires, whether it is renewable, and how to renew it
  • The obligations of each party to the contract
  • The remedies available to each party if the other party does not fulfill its contractual obligations
  • Force majeure clauses outlining the society-wide disruptive events that indemnify a party for not fulfilling its contractual obligations because circumstances make it impossible for it to do so
  • Dispute resolution procedures, including whether arbitration is mandatory and which courts have jurisdiction to rule on disputes arising from the contract

To ensure that your contract contains all the necessary details and that its provisions mean what you think they mean, it is best to ask a business law attorney to review it before you sign it.

How Do Breach of Contract Lawsuits Work?

If one party does not fulfill the promises to which it agreed in the contract, the other party can file a breach of contract lawsuit unless the provisions of the contract preclude this. To prevail in a breach of contract lawsuit, you must prove the following claims:

  • You and the other party signed a legally valid contract.
  • You fulfilled your contractual obligations, but the other party did not.  Any failure to fulfill your obligations is the direct result of the other party’s breach of your agreement.
  • You incurred financial losses as a direct result of the other party’s failure to fulfill its contractual obligations.

If you win your breach of contract case, the court will award you damages in the amount that you lost because of the other party’s breach of contract.

Contact the Law Offices of Omar Gastelum About Breach of Contract

A business law attorney can represent you in civil litigation related to breach of contract.  Contact the Law Offices of Omar Gastelum and Associates APLC in Whittier, California, to set up a consultation.

Sources

https://selfhelp.courts.ca.gov/civil-lawsuit/breach-contract

A Whittier civil litigation attorney can help you resolve business disputes such as breach of contract claims.