Texas business or property owners like you make a lot of contracts in your time. Unfortunately, this means you may run across breached contracts. This can damage you on a personal and financial level. It can also put your projects and endeavors at risk.
So how do you handle a breached contract? Is there any way to remedy it? Or do you get stuck in a sour situation that you cannot fully handle?
Questions judges may ask during a contract dispute
The Judicial Education Center talks about contract breaches in full. This includes discussing what constitutes a contract breach and how to prove it. That is the first way to remedy a breach. You must prove that one took place. The judge must answer questions like:
- Did the contract exist and what did it require of all parties?
- Was the contract ever modified?
- Did the breach actually happen and was it material?
- Were damages caused by this breach?
Remedies for proven contract breaches
If a breach in contract ends up proven in court, the party responsible for the breach must remedy it. They can do so in many ways. First is paying compensatory damages. These place you back into the position you were in before the breach.
Next, there are punitive damages. This goes above and beyond compensatory damages. Nominal damages may occur, which are token amounts. If you can prove that a breach of contract happened but cannot prove financial damage, you get this.
Finally, you have liquidated damages. This is a reasonable estimation of the amount of damages that happened in a breach. Any of these compensatory methods may see use, and you might even have more than one at once.