Are your contracts legal? Are you involved in a coaching or other program that you had to sign a contract for? Or, are you trying to get out of a contract and you’re being told you must pay the full amount of your contract even though you will no longer have access to the program and coaching? There has been a lot of contract abuse by people in the coaching community and it is hurting a lot of people. If this is affecting your life listen up because I am going to give you some tools to fight back and keep your money. We need to work together to stop contract abuse by unscrupulous, unethical, and dishonest coaches and business owners.
I have been wanting to talk about this topic for a while because of a troubling practice I see with many coaches and business owners in the online space regarding how they are using contracts as an extortion tool to force their clients to pay.
A few months ago I received an email from a group called ‘Team Irvine’. This is the company of Dr. Shannon Irvine, who practices neuroscience. The email demanded payment in full for a contract I was a signator to, claiming I was in arrears and if I did not pay up immediately I would be subject to collections which means that would be reflected on my credit report.
Here’s the problem. I am not a client or a customer of Dr. Irvine. I have never purchased anything from her and I never signed a contract. I replied to the email demanding proof of this transaction and letting her know that it was illegal to send harassing demand letters and if I learned that they accessed my credit report or reported me to a collections agency I would be seeing them in court. I also let her team know that her demand letter was illegal and violated the tenants of contract law.
Her team replied saying it was a glitch in their email system, that they were trying to fix the problem and that I should ignore the email. Ignore it? Without finding out if they were reporting me to a collections agency and accessing my credit report? I don’t think so.
And I could ignore it but what about those people who were being harassed by Dr. Irvine’s team, who were in arrears on their contract payments and who faced collections? What were they going to do? What was their defense against this illegal demand for payment, even if they did sign a contract.
Why should you listen to my opinion about this? Because I was a paralegal for 10 years, 3 of them for a prominent contract lawyer who is the best in the field. I learned a lot in that job and it has saved me a lot of headache, time, and money. I know an illegal contract when I see it and further, I know an illegal collections attempt, which this email from Dr. Irvine represented.
read the rest of the article on the GPS Business Academy blog at gpsbusinessacademy.com