Contract Issues - Happy Endings, Not So Happy Endings

Contracts between clients and designers end in a variety of ways.

Most of the time, a project comes to its natural end, and the designer and the client part ways amicably. In many cases, clients return to the designer to extend or renew a contract to cover updates, revisions or redesigns, and their collaboration continues for many years.
Sometimes, a contract will come to an end, and updates and revisions are passed along to the client's employees or volunteers. Some projects grow to a point where it is necessary that they be handed over to larger entities to manage, and they are passed off in a seamless, professional manner.

Other contracts do not end on such high notes. For example, just recently, we worked with a client, a dog breeder group called American Coton de Tulear Association (ACTA), with contract for what was to be a very small simple website; no bells, no whistles, a small information only website. And that was the contract that was provided to and signed by the client. This "small simple" website quickly expanded through a series of literally hundreds of emails (sometimes upwards of 40 a day) far beyond the scope of their contract to a huge unwieldy website of 50 plus pages, with a complicated dropdown menu and several proposed flash photo galleries, as well as repair, major editing and redesigning their club logo; all things that were completely out of the scope of their contract. And these requests, or should I say demands, would have continued had a stop not been put to them.

I blame myself for letting it get as far as it did; I was too nice, too accommodating, and allowed myself to be manipulated and taken advantage of, which is something very much out of character. It wasn't even a situation that could be considered scope creep, which is a common and usually minimal thing. This project was scope barrelling down a hill out of control.

When the out-of-scope demands got completely out of hand, I put a stop to it, indicating that no more out of scope work would be performed, and that invoices would be issued at an hourly rate for the continual additions and expansion of the site not included in the original contract. This included an extra fee for the creation of flash galleries that we were notified would be added, which in no way were included in the original scope of the project.

Suddenly, I was the bad guy. How could I charge them for anything at all over and above what they'd paid for the contract?? After all, couldn't they just continue to ask for the moon and the stars and the sun, more and more and more, and not pay another dime? Didn't the flat fee they paid with the original contract cover anything they wanted to add, regardless of complexity or scope, for the next year?

Since they were facing having to pay for scope creep, and could not continue to demand additional features for the site without payment, the client decided that they would just walk away from the contract as if it didn't exist, ignoring all emails, changing password access to the site, and violating the terms of a binding and legal contract blatantly and with quite a bit of arrogance.

After repeated attempts to solve this problem in a logical way and being ridiculed and even threatened, I did a bit of research on this particular breeder organization, as well as contacting other breeder clubs. I found that this client had been in legal trouble in the past, and has caused quite a bit of drama in the Coton Breeders world. It didn't occur to me to do this kind of research while in the contract writing stage, it was never something I had come across before. I have since learned that it may be a new requirement for our company, to do a bit of research on a client before offering them a contract. It might also indicate that our contract needs to be expanded and "toughened up" a bit, so that a prospective client knows that they will be responsible for payment on any items not included in the original contract. In the meantime, we will be forced to take this client to small claims court for hundreds of dollars of unpaid fees, an unfortunate consequence of them violating our legal and binding contract.

I will be writing a much tougher cancellation policy into our new contracts, as well as our Terms of Use. It will protect our clients, it will protect us, and it will eliminate those clients and those contracts that become a drain on our talent and our time. This is sad, but unfortunately, true. We should all strive to treat each other in the most professional manner possible, whether client or contractor. When that doesn't happen, it is a sad day indeed.