What to Do When Client Relationships Go Wrong
You’ve been working hard on your latest project for a client. You’ve delivered, so now it’s time for that last payment. But after weeks of wrangling with them, there’s still no payment. Turns out, they feel they don’t owe you any money. You feel betrayed and frustrated. You held up your end of the deal, why can’t they?
One of the challenges of being a creative freelancer is dealing with client disputes. What do you do when you and a client have a disagreement and your relationship starts to deteriorate?
1. Give it some space, then talk it out
Disputes between creatives and their clients more often result from misunderstanding than from bad faith. Happily, the solution is often pretty simple: communication.
Put the dispute front and centre and attack the problem together. If your client brings up a problem, restate what they tell you to make sure you’ve got it right. Ask them if they have a solution in mind and be proactive about proposing your own.
If things get heated, the best thing to do is to wait until tempers have cooled and then pick the conversation back up again. Schedule a call or meeting for the next day or two, after you’ve both had a chance to calm down.
2. Seek help from a trained mediator
In mediation, you and the other party sit down with a trained facilitator who runs a structured process that gives you each a chance to talk about your issues, eventually moving to a discussion about solutions.
Because conflicts often stem from a party feeling like they haven’t been heard, mediation can be very effective. Mediation also has the advantage of being relatively inexpensive or even free.
3. Use your deliverables as leverage
Discussion and mediation can work well when you’re trying to resolve a good-faith disagreement with a relatively reasonable client. Unfortunately, not all clients are reasonable and not all disputes arise in good faith. So if you’ve exhausted your other remedies, you may need to take more extreme measures.
One of the toughest parts about being a creative freelancer is feeling like the client has all the leverage. After all, they’re the ones who get to decide whether to pay you, give you future business or recommend you. But you might have some leverage of your own. Usually, this means withholding deliverables from a client pending resolution of your dispute. For photographers, this might mean delivering only watermarked images until you’re fully paid. For a graphic designer, it could mean holding back native image files.
It’s never fun to have to resort to these tactics in reaction to a dispute, so plan in advance. Take control of your client agreements at the outset and structure them so that you’re keeping part of the work until final payment.
4. Have a lawyer send a threat letter
Sometimes the only language a troublesome client understands is a legal threat. Short of actually filing a lawsuit and serving a client with a summons to appear in court, an ominous letter from a lawyer can be one of the most effective ways of signaling to a client that you mean business. When a client gets a threat letter from a lawyer, they often decide it’s not worth it to hire a lawyer of their own, so they relent.
5. As a last resort, go to court
When all other options have failed, there is, of course, the lawsuit. But going to court has several downsides. Most obvious is the time and expenses involved. It’s also possible that you’ll lose, which can be easy to forget when you’re convinced you’re right. And even if you win, collecting money is a separate process that involves additional time, expense and uncertainty.
If you’re lucky, the other party will cooperate and pay up. If not, attempts at collecting payments can drag out for months or even years. And, when you file a lawsuit, you open yourself up to the possibility of a counterclaim, where the other party sues you back.
Before you consider filing a lawsuit, check your client contract (if you have one) for an arbitration clause, which might require you to resolve your dispute outside of court.
SOURCE: 99U
