Reply to Any experience of walking away from a school contract?

Forum Index » Private & Independent Schools

Reply to "Any experience of walking away from a school contract?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I find all of the pearl clutching about the morals of breaking contracts in these threads to be so interesting. I am someone who never breaks contracts or backs out of things, so I doubt I'd find myself in this situation absent unusual circumstances. But I'm also a lawyer and people break contracts all the time. Sometimes it's the reasonable, logical thing to do. These schools are businesses too, and they will get over it and likely fill the seat if the school is any good. [/quote]
So as a lawyer, your advice to the school where someone broke their contract but doesn’t want to pay the costs they agreed to by signing the contract, is to just get over and not try to enforce it? Interesting take. [/quote]

Lol, as a lawyer, I can assure you that advice is dispensed very regularly. You explain the likelihood of success, what the client would obtain if it won everything it wanted, and the cost of litigation. You then put a dollar figure on the value of the case. If the case has negative or minimal value, you typically advise the client not to bring it unless there is some sort of personal reason for not bringing the suit. [/quote]

Also a lawyer.  Would have to advise client near zero chance of success in these situations because contracts are very explicit on what damages are for breach.  Further, there is an easy way to mitigate, tuition insurance.  Far cheaper to pay $40,000 than litigate and then pay $40,000.

Also, the military service poster is clearly a troll.

[/quote]

Do you practice contract law or commercial litigation? Because there’s no duty for the breaching party to mitigate? [/quote]

What is your argument that the contract is not enforceable?   It has an explicit and not onerous liquidated damages provision.  The fact that tuition insurance is available makes the liquidated damages provision even more reasonable.[/quote]

Where did we establish a liquidated damages provision? In any case, liquidated damages provisions are typically for contracts that are hard to value. This isn’t hard to value. And if the liquidated damages provision provides for the full value of the contract (i.e., a year of tuition), it’s unlikely be enforceable. And in evaluating the enforceability of the provision, the ability of the non breaching party to mitigate loss is considered. Last, most tuition refund insurance doesn’t cover voluntary withdrawal. Most that do cover it at only about 50%.

And way to not answer my question about whether you practice contract law or commercial lit.

[/quote]

I am litigator.  Are you not following along?  Every private school contract explicitly  states that if you are committed by a certain date, you are responsible for the entire next year’s tuition. The fact that people here are arguing that the school is damaged not at all or a lot by such withdrawals demonstrates the damage is not obvious.  And liquidated damages provisions are routinely upheld in Court, particularly where the amounts are reasonable (you seem unfamiliar with basic contract law).  Your client would stupidly pay thousands to litigate only to find they still are on the hook for the tuition.  [/quote]

Doesn’t seem like you practice contract law. You seem confused by the posture here, along with basic principles of contract law and assessing case value. The question was never about what to do if a school sues you for breach. The question was how likely a school is to sue a family withdrawing a child for tuition. The cost to sue is high and the likelihood of success on the merits heavily depends on factual circumstances like the existence of a wait pool of qualified candidates. If there is no fee-shifting provision and the school has a strong wait pool, it’s extremely unlikely that the school will waste money pursuing the family for a negative value claim likely to garner poor publicity.

The school is not damaged much at all if they have a long line of full pay kids on the waitlist ready, willing, and able to enroll. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics