Success story: Recovering unpaid invoices for branding company

By Hiatham Javaid, Senior Litigation Executive

Through the pandemic we worked in tandem with a longstanding client of ours, a UK-based company who specialise in garment branding, to support them with the recovery of their unpaid invoices and owed debts.

The team there work alongside global fashion brands and manufacturers and manage fashion projects from production through to completion.

The challenge: Coronavirus impact on the industry

Working in the manufacturing and retail space, many of their clients were negatively impacted by the global pandemic and lockdown, which meant they found themselves in a tricky situation when one of their high-profile clients had several unpaid invoices due.

The client decided to take matters into their own hands and start legal proceedings themselves, issuing a claim against their customer.

Unfortunately, the team made some errors when issuing the claim. Unbeknown to them, (as they simply were not aware) they failed to comply with the Practice Direction on Pre-Action Conduct, the claim was issued against the wrong company entity and for the wrong amount, and their pleadings missed vital information including the legal basis for them bringing a claim in the first place.

All this came to light during proceedings via their customer’s defence solicitor, and after they had paid substantial court fees, they realised they needed expert help.

The Primas Solution

As the client hadn’t issued the claim correctly initially, we firstly had to prove that there was a commercial relationship between the parties and that the invoices were payable by the company they had issued against. This was tough as their customer wouldn’t acknowledge the invoices were owing, there was no evidence of a contract or agreement with this company entity and it was alleged that no one of authority legally had placed the orders.

Luckily, we were able to prove a longstanding trading relationship through previous correspondence and historic payments from the entity that they had issued the claim against, but this was without formal contracts between the parties.

We proved the debtor was liable for the invoices, inclusive of the ones related to stock that hadn’t been shipped yet, and we were able to produce photographs from our client’s factories proving that the stock existed.

Another Successful Outcome

We managed to get the opposing party to agree to not only settle outstanding invoices for stock they had received but in addition pay a portion of the invoices related to the non-shipped stock, something which was against the opposing party’s company policy.

As part of the resolution, we also facilitated the transportation of the outstanding stock from our client’s factory in China to their client’s factory in Hong Kong.

We were able to settle the claim for an amount which our client was very happy with, especially considering the company they were claiming against was in financial difficulty due to the pandemic, and that they’d made several errors when they’d tried to take on the legal proceedings themselves.

Our client said of the work: “Primas took a pragmatic approach to our debt recovery and we were more than pleased with the outcome they delivered for us. They handled the challenge professionally throughout, and ensured both parties were satisfied so that we could continue our work with them.

“We’ve since worked with the Primas team on two other cases of unpaid client invoices – both of which have been settled successfully – so that we’re able to focus our time on delivering high-quality goods for our paying clients.”

If you’re facing a similar situation and you’re looking for the best way to approach it, please contact our dedicated recovery team directly by emailing Hiatham.Javaid@primaslaw.co.uk.