Sometimes I advise small businesses to use the small claims system even though their debt may exceed the $5000 jurisdictional limit. For example, say a client is owed $5700. It is cheaper and faster to right off that $700 and proceed with a case in small claims court.

Right now I have a contested collections case between two business. The amount is approximately $20,000. The case was filed in July of 2010.  Pleadings were closed in early December of 2010. A pretrial was held yesterday and the matter was set down for trial in March of 2012. The case is simple. It’s at best a morning bench trial. It’s the kind of issue that’s resolved in small claims court in short order.  The delay and the uncertainty are bad for my client’s business.

The benefits of small claims court is that it’s usually fast. Trials are held months after a complaint is filed.  Pleadings and discovery are condensed. Win or lose the matter is usually resolved within about 6 months. My client would love nothing more than to have his day in court.

For many Connecticut small businesses problems can arise when debts are between $10,000 and $25,000. Those amounts are too high to write off and two low to engage in full scale litigation.

My proposal is to create a docket for claims arising out of breach of contract – a collections docket for disputes under $25,000.  More time could be saved by creating mandatory discovery and disclosure provisions in the practice book similar to those used in divorces and car accidents. Limiting pleadings or at least the time to file them would also help speed the process up. The judicial branch should guarantee bench trials within six months of the return date or at least target such a goal.

Providing businesses with certainty both in terms of process and time will help drive down the cost of doing business in the state. The judicial branch should consider creating a “medium claims” docket. Such a docket would help Connecticut small business.

Denise Merrill

I listened to you on the campaign trail and I know you have ideas for the office. I’m asking you to start small.

Connecticut is widely considered to be unfriendly to business. Objective data indicates this has nothing to do with tax rates but you know that from your time in the legislature.

I accept the assertion that Connecticut is unfriendly to business.

Your office is on the frontlines of Connecticut’s business problem.

Here’s an example of what I’m writing about. I represent a client. Connecticut’s economy could use a million more people as industrious as my client.

He’s opening a hair salon in Vernon. He came to see me and we formed a LLC. We paid the expedited filing fee at the Secretary of the State’s office. Somehow the expedited filing ended up being mixed with the routine filings. It came back to me with a note on it.

The note informed me that because I had paid for expedited filing and the filing was not expedited that my money would be refunded. Instead of mailing me a refund check for $50 I was mailed a form.

The form, mind you, was not that complicated but I had to fill it out and mail it in with a copy of the cashed check (which I have to wait for).

In the private sector a refund check would have issued and that would have been that.

Please Ms. Merrill, in most cases your office will be the first office that business people deal with in our state. Use your tenure to improve the pace at which business is done in the state.

I have some more thoughts that I’ll post later this week on how you can do that.

Last year, I was indifferent while the CT Legislature debated requiring restaurants to disclose nutritional information to patrons.  Lazily, I bought the argument that people know that a bacon double cheeseburger is bad for them.

I figured the issue was worth revisiting here now that Congress has stepped in and passed federal legislation requiring restaurants with over 20 or more outlets to disclose calorie counts on menus. I’ve come around to fully supporting the measure and here’s why:

Everyone knows the Big Mac isn’t health food. It contains 576 calories without cheese. But it’s unfair to the Big Mac that it has become the poster food for the calorie disclosure debate. It’s nowhere close to Friendly’s Caramel Cinnamon Swirl French toast (hereinafter referred to as the “Friendly’s French Tort.”

The Friendly’s French Tort contains 2090 calories, 57 grams of fat, 374 grams of carbs, and 214 grams of sugar. That information comes right from Friendly’s website. Add another 110 calories if you’d like syrup with that.

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Before reading that I knew the Friendly’s French Tort wasn’t a healthy option, but I had no idea just how bad it was. I exercise and watch what I eat. Nancy Clark’s  ”Nutrition for Marathoners” is on my coffee table. If I were ordering at Friendly’s, I would have guessed the French Tort was somewhere around 900 calories — an unhealthy choice at that — but under the right circumstances, I could fit it into my diet as a “treat.”

To put things in some perspective, I’m training for a marathon.  I’ll need lots of fuel that comes in the form of calories to complete my 26.2-mile goal. Running  a marathon, however, would barely (if at all) burn the number of calories in the French Tort with some syrup and a glass of orange juice.

Another way of looking at it:  a stick of butter contains about 810 calories. The French Tort is more or less equal the calorie equivalent of 2.5 sticks of butter.  I never would have guessed that.

With the new legislation, having the calorie information will allow me to make a healthier choice at the point of sale and I think that’s a good thing.

I’ve had two contractors at my home that have fully complied with the existing Connecticut Home Improvement Act. That’s two out of many.

The truth is that the Connecticut Home Improvement Act requires full compliance by contractors with its many provisions.

This past session, the legislature passed and Governor Rell has signed a law that requires contractors to provide homeowners with a written disclosure of any corporation, limited liability company, partnership, sole proprietorship or other legal entity, which is or has been a new home construction contractor under the provisions of this chapter or a home improvement contractor under the provisions of chapter 400, in which the owner or owners of the new home construction contractor providing the written notice required by this section are or have been a shareholder, member, partner or owner during the previous five years….Link.

Contractors can no longer go from Ryan’s Painting to Ryan’s Painting & Gutters, LLC, to Ryan’s AAA Painting, Inc. to Ryan’s Paint, LLC in a span of a few years without informing consumers.

Of course contractors who engage in this practice probably don’t comply with other provisions of the home improvement act in the first place. In essence, this is just one more provision that contractors who didn’t comply won’t comply with.

A contractor performs services. Several months later, a homeowner notices a defect and calls the contractor to repair the work that was done months ago. The contractor comes out and performs the work and there’s a billing dispute.

Under Connecticut law, a contractor must file a mechanic’s lien within 90 days of the last day he performed work on the job site or the contractor loses his lien rights.

In Cianci v. Original Works, LLC., Judge Shaban held that any services performed at the property owner’s request, even trivial services, restarts the 90 day time limit for filing a lien.

Prior to this holding, this issue was one of some debate between contractor’s and homeowners.

What does this mean?

I don’t think it means much. It’s always been my interpretation of the statute that this is the law. Of course, my interpretation doesn’t make for law and a judge’s opinion does. In my opinion, this is nothing more than a clarification of existing rights.

The Hartford Courant Alumni blog covers the carnage.

The reason is that our state needs professional journalists. We need them to investigate, to expose, to inform, and to challenge us.

The blogosphere can’t replace professional journalism – it can only help to keep them honest.

Our founding generation understood the significance of a free and vibrant press. The constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts reads: “The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a state….”

I don’t know what the solution is but the dwindling numbers of professional journalists in Hartford is troubling.

Rates are rising all over the place even for customers with good credit.

Reading about rates increasing over 300%.

These rate increases will significantly impact your CT small business clients who finance some of their business through the use of cards. 

Something, you may want to consider making your clients aware of.

Yet even that number, economists said, may be just a cloud. The total number of businesses to start in Connecticut last year — 27,483 — is still 11 percent lower than the number of those that started up in 2007. The data were released Wednesday by Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz. Hartford Courtant, 1/29/2009

The article quoted above details how unemployment doesn’t track business openings and closings data in Connecticut. If it did, we’d be in more trouble than we are now.

The increase in closures of businesses and the lack of new business filings is likely directly related to the real estate market.

For a number of reasons, investors incorporate when they purchase investment properties. These companies often do little other than hold title to real property.

Prior to the real estate bubble bursting,  a number of those investors borrowed heavily to purchase investment properties. When they couldn’t make payments, the properties were foreclosed and the company that was formed to hold the property no longer had a reason for existing. Hence, an increase in the number of dissolutions filed with the Secretary of State. Better to dissolve than pay the annual entity tax.

Why the decrease in the number of companies being created in Connecticut? Real estate investment has slowed. If investors aren’t buy properties then there’s no need to form a company related to the purchase of a property.

At least in part, the reason job losses don’t track corporate filings is that a lot of companies both created and dissolved in Connecticut do not have any employees.

It is no surprise that the candidate who mastered the internet ended up being elected president. The internet is the most powerful medium and it’s becoming more powerful. At no point in human history is it easier to connect and communicate with each other.

For the under 30 demographic, if you aren’t online you don’t exist.

In terms of web traffic, this site does well or at least better than I thought possible. However, my traffic to call ratio is low. Ideally traffic should result in calls and calls should result clients. I’m working to change this.

My goal for the next year is to get more clients from clicks. In part I hope to continue to improve my content and keep upgrading this site.

It’s my assertion that one can spend all day on twitter, blogging, facebook, linked in, digg, myspace and do nothing but spend time on twitter, blogging, facebook, digg and myspace.

Now back to Barry. If you notice, Obama didn’t stop on the internet. He also had ground game.

The Obama forumla is: web presence + groundgame = votes clients.

Tomorrow, I’ll share my thoughts on ground game.

The situation is sickening. I represented a 100 year old woman who lived alone in an apartment for close to 20 years and always paid her rent on time. She lived on the same street for over 40 years. Even at age 100, she was living by herself in Hartford.

Her landlord failed to pay his mortgage and as a result the bank foreclosed and filed eviction paper work against my client.

She was distraught that she was being evicted and within weeks of being served a notice to quit found herself in the hospital for the first time in her life. She died several weeks later.  Her official cause of death was ”natural causes” but the doctor could have written “eviction.”

I’m very sympathetic to tenants who wind up in this situation.

Our legislature should act and afford these tenants greater protection under the law.

That being said,  I was appalled at what I was hearing on CNN radio while driving into work this morning.

Cook County, Illinois, Sheriff, Tom Dart was explaining that he is refusing to evict tenants whose landlords were foreclosed on.

Residents of foreclosed properties in Chicago and other parts of Cook County don’t have to worry about deputies forcing them out. Sheriff Tom Dart says that starting Thursday his office won’t take part in evictions.

Dart says he’s concerned that many of the people being evicted are renters who were unaware that their landlords have been failing to pay their mortgages. He says his deputies have no way of knowing whether they’re removing someone who has defaulted on a loan or someone who has been faithfully paying rent. AP Story.

As much as I agree with Sheriff Dart that something should be done to protect tenants in this situation, I strongly disagree with his refusal to carry out court orders.

Dear Sheriff Dart, we are a nation of laws, not of men.

This is a case where the “cure” is worse than the disease. It is not a sheriff’s job to determine what laws he thinks should be enforced. It is a sheriff’s job to enforce the law.

It is the legislature’s job to protect its citizens. This is the way our system works.

Shame on the Connecticut legislature for not doing more to protect tenants who find themselves in this situation.

If our legislature can pass laws about monogramming dentures, it has the time to both examine and act on this problem.

What say you? I’ve made it much easier to comment and I always welcome discussion.