How to Sue a Client in Small Claims Court

After a dispute over a low kill fee, Jonny Coleman took a publication to small claims court. He recommends the experience.

If you’ve worked as a freelancer, you’ve probably been close to suing an outlet before. It could be an overdue check, a nonexistent check, an inexplicable kill fee, a misunderstanding, or a publication that owes you money going out of business overnight. There are other reasons to sue a publication — abuse, harassment, IP theft, putting journalists in harm’s way — but wage theft is absurdly common in Los Angeles, where I live, for low-wage workers and freelance writers alike. 

Last year I was freelancing for a very stupid website, one that you will never read and to which I won’t even link. It was a tech company that had launched an editorial arm, but even calling it “editorial” overstates a comically insignificant little content mill. I was told that they would pay $1,000 and up for features, and I was looking for extra work, having been stiffed for a major project the year prior by a foreign tech-based company that had gone out of business, leaving me with $5,000 in unpaid invoices. 

This tech company’s editorial arm — let’s call them Shit — had taken a long time in commissioning these bigger, more expensive features they had promised in early conversations. They clearly didn’t have the resources or personnel to handle this endeavor, and projects they had soft-greenlit last year took months to develop over email. In the meantime, they stuck me on $300 gigs rewriting anodyne conference panels as unbylined shlock that I could mindlessly churn out; these were always received and posted with few or no edits. I was promised there were juicier features around the corner in which I could report in greater depth on things that actually seemed relevant, like below-the-line worker issues in content production. (Now, almost two years later, Shit has not yet published content in this vein.)

It took ages, but I finally got the assignment to write a feature about what record labels do for artists in 2019. It seemed straightforward enough, and I was under the impression I would get at least $1,000, and perhaps more, depending on how much reporting I could do. This seemed finally worth my time, so I opened up my Rolodex and started reporting the story out. 

It turned out that it’s much harder to get someone to sit for an interview for a publication (Shit) that no one has ever heard of and no one ever will hear of. I had to call in a lot of favors, but I took my editor’s list of recommended sources and added my own: artists, producers, people who run labels, publishers, DJs, people who’ve worked for major labels. The editor wanted me to talk to someone at TikTok or another tech platform, but couldn’t help me get a call back. 

My first draft came in at several thousand words. To me, it was a solid cross-section of the music industry: I had interviewed over a dozen sources, people with a variety of perspectives from around the country. Feeling good about the piece, I filed the draft. A couple weeks later I got a reply saying that a new editor had been hired; the old editor and new editor both had a list of separate notes (that didn’t fully reconcile); and finally, that they wanted to kill my piece. I was caught off guard. I asked why — I had put a lot of labor into the piece already, and I was happy to try to fix whatever they thought was wrong per their notes. But I couldn’t get a clear answer. I took a couple weeks to meticulously go through the notes and, when I returned the edit, they informed me they were still killing my piece.

They offered to pay me a $200 kill fee. I offered to do as many edits as possible and asked for more direction or explanation of what they didn’t like. I didn’t get any satisfactory answers. I deposited the $200, and then decided a few months later to go to small claims court for what I thought was the rate I was promised. In LA, small claims court is for claims of $10,000 or less and represents a more informal set of procedures that are usually resolved in one hearing, like Judge Judy minus the zingers, perfect for my needs.

If you decide to take a late-paying or non-paying client to small claims, Here are some tips that I learned from the procedure.

1. 1. Decide why you’re doing this. Do you need the money, is it on principle, or both? Clarifying your intentions will help figure out if this is even worth it in the first place — the cost of filing in LA is $30 to $75, depending on the amount of the claim, so if your claim is small, it’s probably not worth it. If you’re underemployed or have flexible freelance time and it’s not that difficult to spend three hours in a courthouse and it’s more than the cost of filing fees, then it might be worth it.
2. 2. Double-check your paperwork. Or, better yet, call someone while you’re filling it out to double-check. These forms and websites are notoriously unnavigable for lay and otherwise poor people, so be patient. I had one round of returned and rejected forms (left off the “LLC” in a name and did not provide sufficient postage for my self-addressed envelope), which delayed the suit a couple weeks.
3. 3. Don’t pay for a process server. Process servers, who deliver the lawsuit in person to the defendant, can run you $60 and over. I got a friend who was recently laid off to do the job: he trekked all the way to Shit’s office in Marina del Rey and then I took him out to breakfast after. Still cheaper than $60. In California, anyone who is an adult and not involved in the case can serve papers. (This step isn’t even necessary everywhere: In New York, for example, the suit can be mailed to the defendant’s home or business address.) Your accomplice doesn’t have to say, “You got served,” but they can if they want. 
4. 4. Use the court-appointed mediator. The general rule of thumb with all sorts of trials is that the state would rather not have one, so I took the opportunity to negotiate in the hallway with my perturbed editor and a mediator. 
5. 5. Err on the side of bringing too many documents, including a copy of your work. Small claims court often favors the more prepared party. Both my editor and I had forgotten to print out drafts of the piece itself, which probably would have bolstered my case. I just simply forgot and, like many content serfs, haven’t had a home printer in over a decade.
6. 6. Document the hearing (if you can). In California, if you get the judge’s permission ahead of time, you can use “inconspicuous personal recording devices” to keep audio notes. In case you want to pursue further legal action down the road, it’ll help to have a transcript.

 

My hearing was frustrating. I had to stand next to my editor, who I had never met in real life, while they accused me of submitting the worst first draft in human history. I tried to have a good sense of humor about it; I definitely didn’t walk away thinking this was a slam dunk. The decision, they explained, would come in the mail. A little while later, I was awarded $100 plus my filing fee of $30 (in addition to the $200 kill fee I’d already deposited), a fraction of what I was claiming, because there were multiple, contradictory statements made about what my rate was supposed to be. The judge presumably felt there was enough miscommunication not to award me the full amount. But it was worth it to face my editor and feel some sense of playing out a confrontation, even if it isn’t what I’d call justice.

The small claims system, of course, tends to favor bosses and is a deeply imperfect venue for just compensation or effecting systemic change. I knew this going in. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be used or explored. If every journalist has been cheated out of money before, every journalist should go to small claims court and sue their clients at least once in their lives.

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