I Was Told There Would Be No Math

They lied.

Fun case where my client owns a restaurant.

A mismatch occurs in the food orders and the bills, and the provision company claims he owes over $20k over the year relationship.

This is compounded by the fact that the head chef (now appropriately fired) was apparently ordering things on the restaurant's dime that he was then taking out the back door to use for his own benefit - apparently with the knowledge and in cahoots with the delivery guy from the food provision company.

So they sue, and I'm defending agaisnt this 20k claim.

Both delivery guy and head chef are now no longer with their respective companies and not about to admit what they did, we have some hearsay statements from other employees as to what was going on but admissibility of such statements are rather difficult.

Even better, the food provision company claims they had no idea what was going om and denies they ever made a statement to my client that they also thought something was off when they saw stuff being ordered that had not been ordered before that was out of character for the type of restaurant it is.

So we want to see how much is owed.  They had sent invoices they claimed were unpaid but did not provide all of the invoices so we can't match payments to invoices.  Nor do they provide an actual running balance nor record of payments being applied. 

We ask for the invoices in discovery, they send the same ones they already sent and do not send all of them, even as \we asked for all of them.

We're on a stupid tight timeline, and the court had originally ordered it to trial without any discovery period.

I asked for discovery and the court is rocketing this one through and give exactly 30 days for it - and parties have 28 days to respond to a request for discovery.  Not good, so I send the requests out immediately.

They answer claiming they already provided the invoices.  Well, no they did not - they only provided those they claim are unpaid as they are the most recent.

They finally provide all invoices a few days before the scheduled trial date as I threaten to do a motion to compel them to produce it - unfortunately it wouldn't be heard until after the trial date so that is a problem. But at least they provide them.

Over 192 pages.   Not given in any particular order. Many pages are not invoices either. A couple days before trial I might add.

So we start going through and adding them up.

And we find duplicate invoices salted into the pile. Not beside one another, but shoved in throughout the stack.

So we stop, reshuffle all 192 pages to date order, remove the duplicates that just happened to be for highest possible amounts,  purely a coincidence I'm sure, and start again. 

We also calculate all the payments from the cashed checks my client has to see what was paid.

The mathing really doesn't math. 

Totaling up all the payments and charges, instead of owing 20k, he at most owes $8k and possibly less.

We do it again to make sure and come up with the same result.

This isn't even counting the issues with the invoices themselves, nor the fact that stuff on them is clearly not for the restaurant, just straight comparison of the numbers. Total truly owed is likely even less. 

With this pointed out to opposing counsel, we get a very quick settlement for a lot less than the revised 8k amount, as they are stuck with the evidence they provided and the math is not exactly going their way, and neither side wants to spend money on a trial at this point and with no time to further prepare.

So instead of a trial we out the settlement on the record and are done with the matter. 

Their delay in providing the backing for their claim certainly raised the pressure on getting this done, but done it is. Sheesh.