Jun 5, 2008

Our Legal System...


For our wedding, we decided on a friend of my Aunt to do the photography. We thought that we got a great deal on the photographer and were excited about having him do our pictures. Well needless to say some deals are too good to be true. He was very difficult to work with and in the end he canceled on us last minute. We frantically searched for a new photographer and luckily ended up with a very talented one. We had given our first photographer a deposit and assumed that after he cancelled his contract we would recieve our deposit back. Well guess what? He refused to give it back!


Fast forward to after the wedding....

We decided to sue the negligent photographer and WE WON! My mom, my grandma, my dad and I were so happy after leaving our court case. We felt like we had conquered the world. We thought that we had gotten our revenge for him doing this to us on such an important day! Well, little did we know. The battle had only just begun.


Just because you win the lawsuit doens't mean you will actually get the money. We were dismayed to say the least with the process and tried to think of a way to get our money back. We were doing this more on principal than on the actual monetary gain. My parents racked their brains and came up with the idea of garnishing his bank account. Well, we had to figure out where he banked. My parents thought they were genuiuses and came up with the idea of looking at the check that we had given him to see where he deposited the money. After spending months waiting for their bank to send us copies of their checks they finally got some information. They were so proud of their crafty ideas and wanted to quickly file for garnishment of the photographers account.


They sent off for the paperwork to garnish the account and after a month of waiting and spending more money to get the paperwork they realized their plan was doomed. The legal paperwork explained that the court would give the photographer 6 months to pay us our money before they would garnish his account. Also, we would be chared $75 just to serve him the warning of his account garnishment. He also had every right to move his account before that date. WOW! We were stunned. Our big victory had been taken away from us and our hope of revenge had turned to defeat. We then realized that the time and effort that we had already put into this and the energy that it would require to win the battle was not worth the deposit money. We have now given up the battle against the neglectful photographer in order to save our own sanity.


I contacted an attorney that I work closely with and told him our situation. He let me know that garnishing someone's bank account was actually a long, drawn out, ugly legal battle and advised me to get an attorney or to drop it for such a small amount of money. Of course, we agreed but are disheartened with the complexity of our legal system for the common citizen.

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