This failure has caused harm to my business, wasted my time, forced me to change our address, and caused loss of personal mail, and I had solid documentation on what had happened (loss of mail). I initially thought I had a good case and I mentioned my plan to sue in the letter I sent to MBE demanding compensation. Turns out I was wrong; the case has legal (theoretical) merit but there is no practical legal case here. I talked to an attorney about this, and he said that this is a breach of contract. In the US, there are no punitive damages associated with breach of contract, so if I sued the most I could get out of them would be a few hundred dollars in fees back. While the claim has merit, legal solutions are not practical because the amount we could recover would be too small. My attorney said I could get my fees back in small claims court, but I don't think it is practical for me to pursue this even in small claims court to recover six months of fees.
If we had suffered a substantial (at least $10,000) and documented business loss that would have made attorney's fees worthwhile. For example if we had gotten late fees of $10,000, the attorney said it would have been worth pursuing. Fortunately nothing like that happened. The harm was small dollar amounts, like small late fees, and large amounts of stress, staff time in dealing with this, business chaos, and harm to our reputation. According to the attorney, there is no legal remedy for those harms in a breach of contract case.
Because there are no punitive damages available for breach of contract, most litigants who pursue breach of contract cases claim there was fraud (intentional misrepresentation), which does allow pursuit of punitive damages, and which does make an otherwise impractical case into a financially feasible case. If there had been fraud we would be able to base a case on that. In this situation, the only intentional misrepresentation was their repeated claims that they had checked my account, when in fact they did not look at the roster. That is just sloppiness, laziness and dishonesty but it isn't fraud. It was plain old not caring about what happens to a customer. That shows lack of values, but it's not fraud.
