Hey everyone, this is attorney Brian Russ coming at you with another 60 second Law Bite. This one will probably go over 60 seconds because it’s a topic I feel very strongly about and I’m probably going to improvise a little bit. But really what I want to focus on is whether pain and suffering damages are available to an injured party as a result of breach of contract. Now when I refer to it, when I say injured party, I’m not meaning physically injured. I mean, the party who did not receive the benefit of the bargain, the party who was the performing party. So say I make a contract where I’m going to go and buy a plane ticket from you to go to Hawaii for $500. I give you $500 and then the plane never leaves for Hawaii. The issue is is how much how much damage can I get? Essentially the damages are capped at whatever, the value of that plane ticket was, it was $500 well, first you get my $500 back. You know, that’s pretty much going to be it, the other party is not entitled to keep your money. Now a lot of people come to me they say, well, we’ll use the same situation they’ll say, hey, I bought this plane ticket and they never did the flight and they gave me my money back, but I’m really angry. I should get money for all the time I spent on this. I should get money for the stress I went through and that’s just not available in California as a contract damage for breach of contract. So again, the award of damages for breach of contract, the whole idea is that it’s giving the injured party the benefit of the bargain. So again, I intended to go to Hawaii, I didn’t, you give me the money back. So I can go to Hawaii and and the idea is that the injured party should be put in as good of a position as it would have been if the performance was actually rendered, Again, you’re giving me money, you’re giving me compensation so I can go to Hawaii, if it was canceled. There’s other things you can do, you can get a rescission of contract, there are different types of remedies available, but the pain and suffering, it just isn’t available. I swear I have this conversation like five times a week where people call in my office and they want to get consultation. You know, we set them up with a consult and they say well, you know, they breached the contract. So they owe me a million dollars because you know, I’m a very important person, my time was wasted and I just tell them, no, unless the contract was for $4 million or something like that, and they backed out and the benefit to you was a million bucks, like maybe you know maybe that’s what we can do, but if it’s just a pure breach of contract, you’re not getting it for your time and your emotions and anything like that. It is not available as damages. I feel so strongly about this because again, like I said, I talk to people literally multiple times a week. Pain and suffering are for physical injuries only. If you’re physically injured, if you are in a car accident, you have had pain and suffering. Pain and suffering is not available in contract actions. If you have a breach of contract, if you have a case where you have a breach of contract and you want help you want litigation, give us a call.