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I sent Martin an email
reminding him of the terms of our agreement, and asked him to pay up.
Then I made another trip to the local courthouse. The story I got
there was, they had never gotten any sort of response to my statement
of claim. Since the 14-day time limit had expired months ago, I could
apply to a judge for a default order. That's what I did. I had a
hearing in front of a judge on May 26, 2005. Nobody from Empery
Software showed up. I had my written and signed agreement with Martin
with me, but the judge didn't want to see it. Instead, he subtracted
the amount I had been paid from the $10,000 claim, and came up with a
judgment of $6,500. The judge concluded with this warning: “Your
battle is just beginning”.
Once you get a judgment, you can start taking steps to collect. You could send the debtor a letter along the lines of “you lost; pay up”. Given Martin's record so far, I didn't bother with this. Instead, I got a court date for a payment hearing. Since the corporate registration I had gotten a year earlier showed that Stripp was the sole director of Empery Software, I got the Dye & Durham Company to service him with a summons. This costs about $80, and, as with the notice of claim mentioned earlier, it's your job to make the servicing happen, not the court's.
