No, this is not going to be about Finnish hotels, many of which still have no locks on their "save rooms" (not everyone realises that theft happens everywhere), and it will not be a story in the style of film noir, full of psychological drama, horror and blood. It simply turned out that a hotel belonging to our client was left without locks. And that became a problem. No, a terrible problem. There will be psychological drama too. But it will all pass without any blood.
Edgar has been running a hotel business in Berlin for many years. The hotel has no restaurant that would make it into the Michelin guide, but it never lacks for guests. People say the balance of price and service quality is just right. Location plays no small part either — the hotel sits in Mitte, always full of tourists. And so, out of concern for its guests, the hotel’s management decided to replace the electronic locks in several rooms. In principle, the locks worked, but on several occasions the key cards had become demagnetised after being run through the reader. Situations like that always unsettle guests and put extra strain on staff. So the decision was made to install locks from the same manufacturer, just the latest model. The hotel had a long-standing business relationship with the lock manufacturer, and there was no reason to switch to a different, unproven partner.
Pre-trial dispute settlement
Most civil disputes in Germany can be resolved at the pre-trial stage — a well-drafted letter of claim often persuades the other side to reach a compromise without the cost of going to court.
Everyone knows of cases where someone turned to relatives or friends for a service, hoping that dealing with "one of their own" would be cheaper and better, only to end up with shoddy work and a lost friendship. The problem is not malicious intent, but the fact that a businessman is geared toward growing the business and is constantly drawn to new clients by entrepreneurial instinct. In this chase after the newest, and therefore seemingly most important, client, long-standing partners are often treated the way one would treat friends or relatives: they will not go anywhere, they will understand, they will forgive. Of course, that rule has its exceptions, but it holds true often enough, especially in businesses that cannot afford to spend money maintaining management standards. Edgar’s hotel had, it seems, ended up among the "relatives" in exactly this sense.
The hotel paid for the new locks to be manufactured. Once they were ready, a date was set for the specialists to arrive and install the electronics on the doors. Rooms were reserved for the workers so they could rest after the journey and before travelling back. The manufacturer is located several hundred kilometres from Berlin — not an enormous distance, but any trip is tiring unless it is a holiday journey. As it turned out, though, the workers were not destined to rest in Berlin. A call from the manufacturer’s manager revealed that all the workers had fallen ill and the installation would have to be postponed. A new date was set right there during the call. As for the hotel, it only learned of the installers’ illness the evening before. But these things happen — the virus never sleeps.
By the newly appointed date, the hotel had again prepared rooms for the workers, so they could rest both before and after installing the four electronic locks. But once again, trouble struck. It seemed an epidemic was raging inside the manufacturer’s company, and only the manager handling contact with Edgar’s hotel had survived it. That manager, valiantly fending off some infernal bacteria, called the evening before the installation date and announced that it was being postponed once more: there was no one left to do the work. Fine. A new time was set. The locksmith, whom the hotel calls in each time to remove the old locks and prepare the door leaf for the new ones, was told to stand down yet again. Weeks went by.
Evening falls. Do we even need to go on? Exactly. At the manufacturer, there was still no one to install the locks. By what miracle the manager kept surviving remained a mystery. The rooms prepared for the workers were rented out to guests. The locksmith was stood down again. A fourth attempt to replace the locks was set for March. The manager swore that this time everything would go smoothly. But it would have been strange if the fourth attempt had not run into trouble as well. This time, though, it was the locksmith who could not make it to the hotel on the appointed day — he had a holiday coming up. So it was agreed with the locksmith that, the day before he left, two days ahead of the installation date, he would get everything ready so the manufacturer’s staff could do their work quickly and easily. The locksmith came on the agreed day. He removed the old locks. He prepared the door leaf for the new dimensions of the electronic system. And then came the eve of the installation day. At seven in the evening, the phone rang at the hotel. It was the manufacturer’s manager on the line…
The hotel management’s patience finally ran out. Edgar turned to our law firm for help. Our attorneys drafted a letter of claim setting out the situation and demanding that the installation be carried out as soon as possible, together with payment for the lost profit for a week, calculated as the price of each room multiplied by seven days — that being the length of the standstill caused by the missing locks at that point. Our letter of claim was met with a vague reply, to the effect that the locks would be installed when it became possible, but that the lost profit would not be paid. In response to our follow-up letter, in which the amount for the standstill had grown, the counterparty company asked whether all the rooms were supposedly standing wide open. Having answered that question for themselves — that this was obviously not the case — the authors of the letter retorted that there was therefore nothing to pay: the hotel should simply rent the rooms out and earn its money.
Our third letter set out details of the temporary locks installed on the hotel room doors, noting that the technical specifications of the installed items did not meet security requirements and only served as a temporary obstacle against unauthorised entry. By that point, the lost profit amounted to five thousand six hundred euros. The letter also stated that, given the impossibility of resolving the matter through negotiation, our attorneys would file a lawsuit within a few days. The sheer weight of the facts, and the way they were presented, could not leave Edgar’s once-reliable partners indifferent. The claim was to be for the amount lost through the standstill of the lockless rooms, plus our law firm’s fee, plus court costs in the event of a loss — and a loss was all but certain. And suddenly, everyone at that company made a full recovery. The correspondence gave way to intensive telephone negotiations.
What sets the legal profession apart is not brilliant courtroom speeches, or not only brilliant courtroom speeches, but above all the professional protection of a client’s interests, ideally at minimum cost. And if a matter can be resolved before it reaches court, that is the best outcome one could hope for. Our attorneys began preparing a meeting between Edgar and the head of the company that, for half a year, had been unable to install the locks. Conducting negotiations of this kind involves certain particularities that must be taken into account, just as the psychology of the relationship and the conflict must be considered. And an attorney is not always a required presence at meetings of this sort.
After deliberation, we recommended that Edgar hold the meeting without witnesses present. After all, the two men had been business partners for years, and it made sense to show that Edgar still bore friendly feelings and that the conflict had not escalated into an uncompromising war. To reinforce that friendly footing, Edgar was prepared to reduce the amount of the claim by one and a half thousand euros. In any case, in court he would have had to prove that the hotel had been fully booked, at one hundred percent occupancy, every single day — unrealistic outside the tourist season. Our client, in other words, had nothing to lose here. Edgar’s counterparty, however, had a great deal to lose. Should the matter go to court, the company’s reputation would suffer serious damage. The case could become known to the press. And quite certainly, word would spread among customers about the company’s failures, prompting many of them to turn to a different manufacturer.
Numbers, after all, carry an almost religious weight for businesspeople. The negotiations were held behind closed doors, but our attorneys remained close at hand, ready to step in if needed. In the end, that was not necessary. The terms were accepted. The counterparty company undertook to install the electronic locks in Edgar’s hotel at its own expense, to pay our attorneys’ fee, and to pay the hotel one thousand euros in compensation for the lost profit.
This was a case in which every side came out ahead. But it was a win in the sense of a conflict resolved that might never have needed resolving at all, had the electronic lock manufacturer simply employed staff with sturdier immune systems. And this outcome might just as easily never have happened had Edgar not turned to our law firm for qualified legal assistance.
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THE LAW FIRM REPRESENTS CLIENTS' INTERESTS THROUGHOUT GERMANY
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