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Originally Posted by cblandin
Sadly, here are the ways this ends:
1. Your friend hires a lawyer and begins litigation. Lawyers are expensive (I dropped $5K last year on one related to child custody items). At best your friend "wins" which means he gets a judgement against shop. This "judgement" is a piece of paper that tells the shop to give your friend his car, or money, or something along those lines. The shop then "ignores" the piece of paper - it is JUST A PIECE OF PAPER (albeit a nice official pretty one). At which point your friend has to pursue the issue which means more work, more litigaiton, etc. Ultimately he MAY see some level of restitution out of the deal, but my guess is that it is unlikely, and in the meantime...his lawyer gets to buy a big new boat with all the money he has received.
2. Your friend comes to an agreement (in writing) with the shop owner declaring they are essentially "even". Neither party litigates, and your friend walks away with a hard lessoned learned...and half a Trans Am.
3. Both parties sue/countersue each other. Ultimately, neither one pays the other, and both parties' lawyers get to buy boats.
In my experience, it doesn't matter if you hire a high dollar lawyer or a cheap lawyer. The law is generally pretty clear on these things and most of the "work" they do is nothing more than secretarial in nature (which is why their legal assistants/secretaries do most of it anyway).
Have your friend go with option 2....
Just my .02...
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We tried #2 on saturday, the shop owner refused since he put a ton of money into the car he want's some of it back. He was pretty pissy about the whole thing. I've never heard of a shop putting any of its own money into a car in such a large quantity without owner approval. This whole thing is crazy.