Fired Our Architect Due To Inability To Meet Timelines And Got Bill For Work We Never Saw
Location: California.
We hired an architect earlier this year. Two months later, they had some sort of personal emergency, and became very unresponsive. At some point we said to pause all work on the project as it seemed unlikely we would meet the timelines that we wanted. After a 3 week period of no responses they responded (this was back in June), and we cut them loose and said that we would pay them for the work that they did.
Fast forward to today almost 6 months later, we got an invoice. I have a few questions regarding how much we owe them if this were to go to small claims court:
They billed us for completing stage 2 of our project as defined in our contract, even though we did not see the output from that at all. I would think the reasonable thing is that even if they put in the hours, we don't owe them the money if we never got to see the deliverable?
They billed us for completing stage 1 of our project, and reading over the contract again they technically did complete it, except they probably did very very little work for how much work this was. They essentially regurgitated a design that we gave them, did a quick plan of where all the lights were gonna go (which needed major revisions from us), and picked out some materials. I feel like from a legal standpoint we're screwed and would need to pay this? Could we possibly argue that the work was of insufficient quality or effort to justify the cost in the contract?
Does the fact that they became unresponsive and were fired play a role in all of this? Like we got basically zero useful work from them, and also it meant that we couldn't get our renovations done this year and needed to delay till next year. As a result we don't really want to pay them any money...
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