Hi Everyone
We are a small IT Service Provider company based out in New Delhi and have 25 employees. We had an agreement with one of our clients who is based out in USA and they have outsourced their project to us. We had an agreement on Indian stamp paper where it was written :
a) If client wants to end the project , they have to give 1 month notice to the service provider .Client did gave us 1 month notice but didn’t pay our last month invoice which they were supposed to do at the beginning of the month.
b) Payment terms in the agreement were : client will pay the contractor at the most 10 days after the invoice has been raised otherwise they will pay 18% interest/annum . But they never paid on time for the time they paid and infact in the last they cleanly sweeped the last invoice. And we are a fair company , we paid all our employees on time. We have requested several times to the client that we don’t want to have any legal complications so please pay our invoice and lets stop working if you do not want to move ahead with the project.
Now we have all the proof that we did the project exceptionally well and never breached the agreement whereas the client have been breaching agreement since the agreement has been made.
Even , there was a clause that client will never interact with our employees outside our company’s email account and I have seen that one of our employees and the client are friends at facebook.
So I would really like to know whether we can sue this client legally and get our invoices paid up as well as claim for damages as they have directly interacted with our team.
I really want genuine advise. Jurisdiction which we have kept in the agreement is dual jurisdiction (can take place in courts of New Delhi and courts of United states as well).
Please suggest as we are seriously losing time and money and they have not paid for the efforts which we put in.
How much can be expenses for such a lawsuit and how much time involvement it will take as we are a startup company but the amount which is not paid is also quite big.
I am looking forward to your suggestions.
Thanks
Rohit.
