The trick I learned in my freelance days came from a designer friend who'd picked this up the hard way and developed his own nuclear option for non-paying clients. Whether it works for a given contractor depends on what the contractor is doing, and so consulting with a lawyer (I am not one) is important. But in general it goes like this:<p>Step 1 is to ensure in advance that your standard agreement includes clauses indicating that creative work you do is not work for hire, that you will, at the start, retain copyright in that work, and will assign the copyright to the client on receipt of payment in full.<p>Step 2 is to go through the normal process; if they don't pay, you send invoices, attempt to negotiate, etc.; make a good-faith effort to resolve the problem.<p>Step 3, if the client still refuses to pay, is a DMCA takedown. You don't have to go to court, you don't have to get into legal wrangling about contract terms, you just get their site taken down until they pay up, which they often will.<p>Of course, they'll give you a bad reputation and you'll never get business from them again, but you'll have food on your table and they'll have learned an important lesson about trying to screw their contractors.
Architects have a subtly different but related problem.<p>They bill at the end of the month, and the standard, as everywhere else, is to send Net 30 invoices. So it can be 30 days before the client is officially "late", by which time they've done 2 months of free work. In these uncertain economic times, a lot of clients are actually going bust without making a lot of noise, so architects end up exposed to losing 2 months' worth of fees.<p>There's an even bigger "free work" problem for them, though: a lot of their work is speculative - responses to "competitions" which other architects are applying for too. Whoever wins the competition does get the job, usually, but that still leaves out a bunch of people who worked for free to submit designs for that competition (and often elements of their submissions might make it into the final design, based on client requests, after the competition is lost).<p>Hard times to be an architect...
oh man, hasn't everyone had this stunt tried on them at least once? I guess I'm kindof an impatient jerk about money, though, 'cause I'm pretty quick to say "Ok, well, I'm not working on your project until I see a cheque"<p>you need to be especially careful of this if you are using a third-party broker or body shop. I find that going direct means that you usually deal with people who are much less slimy.<p>The key to getting paid is the willingness to walk away. First, if you are doing work before getting paid, remember you are giving them a loan. Never loan someone more money than you are willing to walk away from. And cut your losses early. If they won't pay you after one month, they probably aren't going to pay you after two or three months. stop work. do something else. If they decide to pay you, great. you win. If they don't, well, you are only out one month rather than 3 or 6 months, so you don't lose quite as much.
Can someone explain the "subjective contract" think that happened towards the end of this article? Also, assuming they never got paid by the client, I assume they packed up their marbles (and the site they built for the client) and went home.
I have a simple rule.<p>As soon as any invoice is one day late, all work stops until the account is up to date. There is no excuse for not paying your bills.<p>I mean it.
I know it's not always possible with websites but developing on your own server or locally can reduce this problem. I'm not sure about the circumstances in the article but the customer isn't going to be able to make these demands if they haven't got th product yet.<p>I'm assuming this may need to be done in conjunction with holding the copyright to the end.
There's about 10,000 little painful lessons like this, that you usually learn by making the mistake and cursing repeatedly and vowing never to let it happen again.<p>If you're lucky, you'll be able to pick up a few of the 10,000 painful mistake lessons from reading about them or being taught them. But most of us are rockheaded and insist on making the same mistakes as everyone else until it's happened to us. Better to learn from a close associate or someone else's story when possible, but people aren't so good at that. But life goes on, as it were. Making those mistakes is where a lot of your skill and lessons come from.