Indeed. The response to breach of contract has no place in a contract. Breach of contract is explicitly an event outside the bounds of a contract. Defining penalties within the contract attempts to place those events and outcomes within the terms of the contract, and can grant the other party leverage to avoid legal remedies.

However, some terms can help encourage payment on schedule. Early payment discounts encourage inexperienced AP to pay early. Late payment penalties signal highly strategized AP as to when the cost of not paying will intersect with their retained time value of money. If the person paying the bills is directly related to an owner, then despite whatever is in the contract it's usually a matter of figuring out how to help them do their job.

This sounds like a case of AP putting off payment because someone knows about time value of money and doesn't view their relationship with the vendor as having value they can lose. Establish due diligence to collect first, then: A letter written by an attorney to their legal team is cheap and usually an effective nudge. Asking a court to compell payment consumes little time and is not expensive, despite their latency courts are impatient and want you to not burn hundreds of legal hours over this. Selling the invoice to collections is a thing, it's not so large a sum to make that hard. But most of all, hire a competent trained accountant who has zero relationship to anyone with equity, and listen to them.

The project was for a fixed term which has ended. All deliverables are delivered and accepted. "Enforcing the contract" would mean termination, which is meaningless in this context.

In theory we could sue for our money, but the imbalance of power between an enormous multinational company and our small agency makes that utterly nonviable.

Our mistake was made on the front end, when we didn't ensure the contract specified what to do if payment was late. Because of that, we simply have to wait out the bureaucracy.

Enforcing a contract means enforcing the terms, which is… payment. We use contracts because courts can enforce them. You don’t have to hire $1k/hour lawyers and fight a multinational in court. Pay $500 for a lawyer to write a letter containing a copy of the contract and a demand for payment. That’s it. They’ll pay up within a week.

The fact that your contract doesn’t contain anything about late payment is immaterial.

I think your underestimating the slowdown that will happen if we have to involve the client's legal team in addition to the accounts payable team.

I think this makes assumptions about the speed at which things are currently moving.

If you had reason to believe that the client was really, truly, about to pay you, then you wouldn't have written the blog post.

If you get legal involved, the speed at which you move towards getting paid may change to become nonzero. At some point the speed of the client's legal team is irrelevant, because a sufficiently slow legal response by the client translates to a court judgement against them.

It is impossible for things to get slower than nothing happening. There’s a very good chance that they’ve decided to just not pay you until you show you’re willing to get lawyers involved. That is a fairly routine thing that large companies do with smaller suppliers.

Your problem is that nobody cares enough to deal with paying you because maybe someone forgot a purchase order or something. Your solution is to make someone care. Sending a letter to their legal team will make someone care (and they will in turn kick the accounts payable team into action). They will receive letters like this constantly. Your situation is not unique, except for the fact that you’re not taking action.

I've been in this situation, a little bit of a legal threat does wonders

This is likely incompetence, not malice

> In theory we could sue for our money, but the imbalance of power between an enormous multinational company and our small agency makes that utterly nonviable.

Have you even talked to a lawyer? You had clear contract terms, you delivered, they are in breach. That's the easiest case a lawyer has ever seen.

The real question is if it's worth suing, giving the lawyers a cut and pissing off the client, vs hoping they pay eventually.

There are statutes of limitations though, check those out. If you wait too long you might be totally out of luck.

Yeah I don't understand that at all:

> But it doesn’t matter, all we can do is sit here and keep waiting.

You don't need your contract to say "we'll escalate if you breach contract", that's already how contracts work. What are they waiting for?

The escalation without specific terms is to terminate the contract — which has already ended.

The escalation (eventually) is to have a lawyer send a "FU, pay me" letter.

edit: as you've said elsewhere - the goal of this isn't to take them to court, it's so whoever is waiting for whatever to cut the check can go to their boss and say "look, we really need to pay this now".

Why do you believe that? That is so wild to me.