Jason,
First, and with all due respect, use your spell check before you post. I don’t want to seem hoity-toity or smug but reading your message was terrible, and if your contract is written anything like this, it won’t be to your advantage.
Now, with a family full of attorney’s and a pretty good handle on the law as used in this arena, you should read the following as a fairly reliable bit of information and use it at your convenience. An agreement that “allows” you to sue them for “X amount” isn’t legal anywhere in the United States unless you’re married to them, literally, and those prenuptial agreements aren’t legal unless the state in which you live supports them, so steer clear of that. You may create a legally binding contract that states a full amount for your services or the estimated value of said services over the next year that either is representative of your best estimates or is made via dutiful research, but that has to be stated as a “service agreement” versus an intangible figure due upon disillusion. That’s why repossession contracts are so iron-clad. Sue them for the timeliness of the payment amount instead of the full amount as an individual sum. Generally, any judge who respects the law would look at a contract with a predetermined “payout” based solely on an allowance of funds to sue for and throw that case out immediately. What you need to do is find a local attorney who can word your text so that there is a ceiling amount for your services based on a monthly fee arrangement. With that, you can go before a judge and say quite confidently that, “Our agreement was such that I was under contract for a predetermined amount of time and that time was worth (insert dollar amount here) to me. Since that contract was not honored, I am entitled to the agreed upon monthly fee for “X” months. That total fee is (insert amount)”. If you need a bit more flexibility, you can word it so that there is a monthly agreed upon fee limit, or basin/ceiling or a itemized account for billing should your services be less than that amount so that you could recoup the itemized amount for each month of work completed and paid, and every month after that point would be decided by the judge. You would either get the entire monthly fee, or some median of the amounts previously paid to you and that monthly maximum. The law is very tricky work and you need a legitimate attorney to word everything for you for your own protection. Any guesswork on this and you might actually do yourself a LOT more harm than you would good.
So, in conclusion, my best advice would be to get a professional to word a template for you with just such an agreement and then build the specifics as you need them per client.
Good luck,
Michael Munkittrick
Managing Creative Director
Spiral Design Studios/DieselVFX
Forum COWmunity leader for:
Sony DV
Magic Bullet
