Advice on Being Taken Advantage of By a Former Friend (Long Post)

[Rezzy]

Small claims court. End of story.

You're correct about different countries having different standards of law but there is not a single nation that views being unemployed as a positive. Judges will far more often than not rule in favour of the party that actually can hold a job (personal experience talking here).

In addition, my own settlement won me 58% of what I and my friends were claiming and did not include legal fees. But since it was small claims court, fees are low and you can represent yourself.

Your points sound great in theory but I've been through this in practice. It's not as much as a headache as you think, assuming that your side is solid and has evidence to back it up.

I knew full well that it would be small claims court, but my opinion is the same. Even though you can represent yourself, you still need to prepare for the case. That means either reading up on the pertinent law or having a paralegal look at your case, to make sure you're making the right points. If you just show up, you aren't doing your homework, and might lose, since it's simply a battle of who's better at convincing the judge, and if this woman convinced the OP to lend her money, she may very well be more charismatic than OP with the judge. We don't have an exact money amount to work with, but if you only got 58% of your money back, that's not a rousing victory. It sounds like we're working with a value of around $100. OP, correct me if it's significantly more than that. It changes the legal situation quite a bit.

When I said being unemployed was an advantage to the woman, I meant that she's not losing money by not working and going to court, whereas OP has to take time off. So she's losing nothing in that regard. I don't know what OP's wage is, but going by minimum wage in Michigan, that $8.50 an hour. If he gets a settlement similar to yours that would be the equivalent of 6-7 hours of work, assuming he wins. That amount of time is easily covered by the actual time spent at court and doing the necessary "homework" beforehand. A layman often just doesn't know how good of a case they have, because, as I mentioned, contracts must have certain clauses to be enforceable. If just goes into court blindly, he may be wasting his time.