Secured Six-Figure Default Judgment For Plundered Contractor

Pro tip: If you fail to pay your colleague for supplying resources and they serve you with papers, you should make your court appearance a priority. Otherwise, your colleague will automatically win their case, and you may owe three times as much as you did to start. 

This was the outcome of a case where we obtained a default judgment for our client, netting them over $200,000 in damages and attorney fees. 

Our client is a contractor who supplied parts like windows and doors to a now-defunct home-building company. This contractor entered into an agreement with the company’s owner to supply materials and services for multiple residential construction projects. Having worked with this company’s owner for over a year before missed payments became the norm, our client had no reason to suspect his colleague was capable of committing theft. 

Unfortunately, our client found out the hard way when invoices worth over $60,000 went unpaid. To make matters worse, the home builder dissolved the company and disappeared. Not knowing where the business owner went or how they would recoup the losses, our client turned to Robinson & Henry. 

We conducted a skip trace report. This enabled us to locate and serve the defendant. In our lawsuit, we requested the presence of a six-person jury trial to decide on three claims for relief. The first was a standard breach of contract. Clearly, the defendant failed to perform the contractual obligation of paying for the materials our client provided. The second claim invoked the Colorado statute which makes failure to place funds for project materials over $60,000 into a trust account a form of theft, with the third claim involving civil theft. 

We waited for the defendant’s response, which never came. After that, we moved to file a motion for entry of default judgment. The court granted the motion, awarding our client over $200,000 in damages, including attorney fees. 

Now, our client gets to decide how to proceed regarding the method of collecting the default judgment. Our client certainly has plenty of civil options at their disposal.