When someone breaches agreements or breaches contracts resulting in severe (or not) compensation, are you required to immediately notify him (who represents an organization?) that he is in breach? Or can you notify him at any time even months later?
Secondly, if you don't notify after a long time (due to some difficulty?) would your compensation get prejudiced?
Secondly, if you don't notify after a long time (due to some difficulty?) would your compensation get prejudiced?
For a written contract, you generally must file your lawsuit within 4 years of when the agreement is broken. For a verbal contract, you must file it within 2 years of when the agreement is broken. If you're defending yourself and the lawsuit was not filed within the deadline, you can ask the judge to dismiss the case.
Provided the contract's choice of law or venue clause is California, it doesn't appear that you need to inform the other party of the breach
You are required to use reasonable effort to mitigate your damages. If the other party's breach causes you ongoing damages, the judge is almost certainly going to find that notifying them of the breach promptly would be part of the reasonable effort you were expected to undertake. You'd only be able to recover the damages you would have suffered had you taken reasonable effort to mitigate those damages.
You are also required to cooperate in good faith with the other party to the contract. You'd almost certainly need to notify the other party that you believe they are in breach of their obligations to be seen as offering good faith cooperation. The other party may believe they are not in breach. They may agree they are in breach and take some action to come into compliance. Judges are going to want to see that you took reasonable actions to resolve the problem with the other party to the contract before you filed suit.
If you unmitigated damages are $20/ day, you can't silently accumulate that damage for a year and then suddenly spring a lawsuit for $20*365 and hope to prevail. The judge would almost certainly find that you had an obligation to notify the other party so that they could minimize your losses. And the judge would almost certainly find that you had an obligation to take steps to minimize your own losses which, presumably, would include notifying the counterparty.
If you did not notify the counterparty because of "some difficulty" but wanted to prevail anyway, you'd need to show that you made a reasonable effort to make notification but that the counterparty took steps to make that unreasonably difficult for you. If you had a contract with another person and that person suddenly fled the state, you could show that you took the reasonable effort of sending a letter that was returned and sending an email to the address you had. On the other hand, it generally wouldn't be reasonable to have to hire a private investigator to do a skip trace to find out where the other party might have fled to. It is highly unlikely a judge would find you made a reasonable effort to notify someone who "represents an organization" without successfully notifying that organization of the breach since business organizations generally have many ways to contact them and, at a minimum, have an address registered with the state for things like legal service.
It is possible to have a time bar clause in a contract that limits or eliminates seeking damages if action is not taken within a specified time. Such clauses are commonplace in large contracts (e.g. construction and engineering, shipping, etc.) but may fall foul of consumer protection law in consumer contracts.
However, if the contract is silent, the law expects each party to be reasonably diligent in protecting their rights. In many, but by no means all, jurisdictions, there is an obligation of good faith on all parties in executing the contract - allowing a breach to continue so you can accumulate a damages claim smacks of not being in good faith. Even in jurisdictions with no obligation of good faith, there is an obligation not to act in bad faith.
Notwithstanding, you must mitigate damages so that any claim will be prejudiced to the extent that you contributed or failed to mitigate the damage.
In addition, with a breach that they know you know about, you open the door to arguments of waiver and estoppel:
Estoppel is a legal mechanism which prevents a party from departing from a promise or representation they have made to another party where to do so would cause that other party to suffer detriment. The concept embraces notions of fairness and reasonableness, as it is geared towards protecting a person who has relied upon an assumption or representation to either exist, or to come into existence. This is significant given that it provides an avenue for a party to seek relief outside the contract.
Estoppel can create new rights and be used as a cause of action in proceedings. It is also commonly used as a defence in the form of a ‘shield’.
Waiver by election involves the unilateral abandonment of a right or claim, and may occur where one party elects between two alternatives and inconsistent rights. Where one of those rights are satisfied, the other becomes no longer available for the party to assert. For waiver in this context to occur, there needs to be unequivocal words or conduct and knowledge of the right that is being waived.
Finally, we have statutes of limitations that preclude the bringing of any claim (without leave of the court) when a stutorially determined amount of time has passed since the cause of action arose.
