An SLA is a contract.
A contract is... a contract.
Does that mean you can take them to small claims court if they don't pay
you the agreed SLA credits?
--Michael Dillon
Absolutely, so long as the amount in controversy
doesn't exceed the small claims limit in your jurisdiction.
If it does, off to regular court.
Most contracts have an arbitration clause and in my experience small
claims courts judges get confused by anything high-tech and will use the
arbitration clause to get out of thinking about it.
Oh I'm certain you could if you wanted to be bothered, it's a contract
with a promise of value like any other. Absolutely nothing unusual or
even very difficult to understand unless it gets into a real technical
pissing match that confuses the referee.
But that's all a crap shoot at best and time-consuming. One reason to
always avoid direct legal action is that even if you get what you're
due it's exceedingly rare to be awarded legal or other
expenses. Expect only the prima facie value. Despite common folklore
it's just not done, that's the cost of not figuring out some other way
to settle the matter as far as the court is concerned.
In fact, at least here in MA, I don't believe a small claims court has
any authority to award either legal fees (and even if you don't bring
a lawyer it might be a good idea to rack up a coupla hours with your
lawyer to make sure you're using the right lingo and statutes etc), or
punitive damages tho they can award some direct costs like if you had
to (reasonably) pay a moving company to move some object in question,
something like that, and you'd better have a receipt and it better not
be a "normal" expense (like don't bother asking for bus fare or
gasoline for your car or phone calls or other incidentals.)
I'd just say you want to go to legal means for things like this only
as a very last resort and maybe not even then. What you want to do is
figure out ways to raise the stakes in a way to make them into better
people even if it goes entirely against their nature.
Steve Rubin wrote:
Does that mean you can take them to small claims court if they don't pay
you the agreed SLA credits?--Michael Dillon
Most contracts have an arbitration clause and in my experience small
claims courts judges get confused by anything high-tech and will use the
arbitration clause to get out of thinking about it.
Don't blame small claims courts. Bigger courts have avoided executing their office around tech or big money issues, IME (in my experience). I've seen judges make wrong decisions because the burden on the defendant (would have had to post a bond to do the appeal) seemed "too great". $2,000, $200,000 or $20,000,000 -- if you are the one to get paid, you will usually be happier in a court that handles matters of that size regularly.
DJ
> Does that mean you can take them to small claims court if they don't pay
> you the agreed SLA credits?
Most contracts
[in the U.S. today with largish to large corporations]
have an arbitration clause
...though they shouldn't. Arbitration isn't, as far as I know, one of
the official branches of government. I always find it rather contrary
to logic that a contract, which is governed by the U.S. court system,
can be written not to be covered by the U.S. court system. What an
amazing loophole for corporate legal that is.
(ObExperience: Every *forced* arbitration decision out of the 200+
I've researched has been in favor of the original contract writer --
the service provider and not its customer. The only arbitration
settlements I've seen go the other way were only voluntarily moved to
arbitration; one pretty major such settlement was made into a movie
about a large energy company....)