The Situation

An industrial engineering consultancy had completed a large-scale machinery relocation and installation project for a packaging manufacturer. The work involved dismantling, transporting, reinstalling, and commissioning several pieces of heavy industrial equipment, along with significant electrical work. The project was delivered successfully and the factory was fully operational.

Our client was owed £149,072 for the work. The debtor was refusing to pay.

The dispute was heavily contested. The debtor challenged the number of engineer days worked, despite hotel receipts, service reports, and timesheets confirming attendance. They disputed line items that had been reviewed in regular project meetings without issue at the time. They contacted our client's suppliers directly seeking commercially sensitive invoices, and hired one of our client's subcontractors behind their back. Every figure was contested, reinterpreted, or used as grounds for further delay.

The debtor instructed a solicitor, who adopted a strategy of systematic obstruction. Weeks passed between responses. Promises of a substantive reply were made and broken repeatedly. Pre-action protocol was cited to buy more time, while nothing of substance was produced. A barrister was eventually brought in, and the debtor's legal team began raising the threat of ADR sanctions and cost consequences to pressure our client into settling for less.

By the time the engineering consultancy instructed Turner Clifford, they had been chasing payment for months and were facing a debtor who had made clear they would fight every penny.

Our Approach

We started by going through everything. Every email, every invoice, every version of the project cost sheet, every service report, every hotel receipt. The documentation was extensive but disorganised, and we needed to understand the full picture before we could build a case that would withstand the level of scrutiny the other side was applying.

The core of the dispute came down to engineer attendance and whether the days invoiced matched the days worked. The debtor was claiming significant discrepancies. Our client had the evidence to prove the charges were accurate, but it had never been presented in a way that made it straightforward to follow. The debtor's solicitor had been exploiting this, claiming to misunderstand the cost sheets and using that confusion to justify weeks of additional delay each time.

We restructured the entire body of evidence into a Scott Schedule: a formal item-by-item breakdown of every element of the project, cross-referenced against hotel receipts, service reports, and invoice numbers. Each line item was supported with a clear explanation of the work delivered, the evidence confirming attendance, and the amount outstanding. Where the debtor had raised specific objections, we addressed each one directly with documentary proof.

This was painstaking work. There were dozens of individual line items spanning multiple phases of the project, involving several different subcontractor engineers across months of site work. But it was necessary. Once the evidence was laid out in a format that left no room for misinterpretation, the debtor's strategy of manufactured confusion became untenable.

We then ran the correspondence with sustained pressure over several months. We issued a formal letter before action, responded in detail to every point raised by the debtor's solicitor, set and enforced deadlines, and escalated at each stage. When the solicitor tried to slow things down, we made clear that our client had already complied with every reasonable request and that further delay would be treated as evidence of bad faith when it came to costs.

We also built a detailed record of the debtor's conduct throughout the dispute: the direct approaches to suppliers, the poaching of a subcontractor, the withholding of funds that were acknowledged as due in order to use them as a bargaining chip. All of this was documented and woven into the correspondence as evidence of a party that was not engaging in good faith. We made it clear that if this reached a courtroom, the debtor's behaviour would be front and centre.

When the barrister was brought in and the debtor's side began raising the threat of ADR sanctions, we did not flinch. We had already made reasonable settlement offers. We had complied with every request for documentation, multiple times over, and in every format demanded. The correspondence trail showed clearly which side had been working towards resolution and which had been running the clock.

The Results

£90,209 recovered in settlement of the outstanding balance.

This was achieved without issuing proceedings, on a contingency basis, against a debtor who had instructed both a solicitor and a barrister, whose opening position was outright refusal to pay.

The engineering consultancy had spent months trying to recover what they were owed before Turner Clifford was instructed. The figures were highly contested, the debtor was legally represented throughout, and every line item on every invoice had been challenged. The difference was not the strength of the underlying evidence. It was the way that evidence was organised, presented, and deployed to systematically dismantle every argument the other side put forward, while making clear that the cost of continued resistance would be far greater than the cost of settlement.

What This Demonstrates

Disputed debts in the trades and engineering sectors are rarely simple. The work gets done, the scope changes, the figures get complicated, and the debtor finds reasons not to pay. When a solicitor gets involved on the other side, the dispute often turns into a war of attrition. The debtor banks on the fact that most small businesses will eventually walk away from what they are owed rather than face the cost, complexity, and disruption of fighting it through the courts.

This case had all of those features. The debtor was legally represented from the outset, brought in a barrister, contested every figure, and outright refused to pay. Their strategy was built on delay, obstruction, and the assumption that our client would eventually fold.

They were wrong. The evidence was there. It just needed to be assembled properly, presented in a way that could not be ignored, and backed by a process that made clear the next step was litigation, not capitulation.

Over £90k recovered. No litigation. No upfront costs. From outright refusal to full settlement, without setting foot in a courtroom.