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

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[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]

It is unethical and potentially malpractice to take a client’s money to bring a suit with a -$50,000 expected value without firmly advising them of that fact. If the school was able to fill the seat and the family has one full-pay child at the school, the school probably has a 25% chance of winning, at best. Bringing the case to trial could easily cost $150,000. That means the expected value of the suit is -$165,000. Even if the school won everything (and the seat wasn’t filled). The expected value is still only about $90,000.

The school might get lucky and the family might pay as soon as the suit is filed. But what if they don’t? Will the school drop the suit once it gets too expensive? That’s probably worse from a PR standpoint then never bringing the claim in the first place.[/quote]

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