You bid a $4.2 million mixed-use renovation in Bushwick on a tight nine-month schedule. Three months in, the owner stops processing permits, fires the architect, and adds two stories to the design. Your crews sit idle for eleven weeks. When you finally finish — four months late — you submit a $620,000 delay claim. The owner's lawyer responds with one sentence: “Please review Article 14.8 of the contract.” That's a no-damages-for-delay clause. And in Ne

You're a commercial broker who spent eight months walking a hedge fund through every available Class A floor in Midtown. You introduced them to your client's Park Avenue tower, ran the tours, drafted the term sheet — and then the landlord cut you out and closed the lease through an in-house leasing agent. The commission you were counting on, somewhere north of $400,000, isn't coming. Broker commission disputes in New York commercial real estate happen exactly like this, and t

You signed a three-year SaaS contract with a vendor whose website advertised 99.99% uptime, SOC 2 compliance, and dedicated NYC-based support. Six months in, your Midtown firm is down for hours at a time, the SOC 2 audit was never completed, and the 'dedicated support' is a chatbot. You start asking around and discover dozens of other small businesses across Manhattan and Brooklyn signed the same contract based on the same marketing. Your lawyer mentions a GBL § 349 deceptive

You spent five years building relationships with the dozen wholesale accounts that keep your Garment District apparel business alive. Your former sales director leaves for a competitor across the river in Jersey City, and within sixty days, eight of those accounts have quietly moved their orders. You learn she walked out with a copy of your customer list and your pricing matrix, and her new employer has been undercutting your bids by exactly the margin she knew you needed to

You started a $1.2 million brownstone gut renovation in Cobble Hill last spring. Four months in, your contractor hands you a $340,000 invoice for " extra work" — added structural beams, rerouted plumbing, premium tile you never picked. You ask where the change orders are. He shrugs and says you verbally approved everything over coffee on the job site. Welcome to a change order dispute — the single most common fight in New York residential and commercial

You opened a wine bar in Williamsburg three years ago at a base rent of $9,200 a month. Last week, your landlord sent a year-end "reconciliation" demanding $47,000 in back operating expenses, porter wage increases, and a real estate tax pass-through you don't remember agreeing to. The cover letter says pay within thirty days or face default. You read your lease for the first time since signing and realize you understand maybe sixty percent of what it says. You're not alone. C

You moved into your renovated Forest Hills colonial last spring. Eight months later, water is staining the dining room ceiling, the basement floor has hairline cracks running wall to wall, and the new bathroom tile is lifting. Your contractor stopped returning calls in October. Now you're staring at repair estimates that approach what you paid for the original work, and you're wondering whether a construction defect claim in New York is worth pursuing. It usually is — if you

You wired $750,000 to a Brooklyn developer to buy out a co-investor's stake in a Bushwick warehouse project. The closing fell apart. The developer kept your money for nine months and used it to pay off unrelated debts. There's no signed purchase agreement — just emails, a term sheet, and a wire confirmation. Can you still get your money back? Yes. That's exactly what unjust enrichment claims in New York are designed to address. When someone holds onto value that belongs to yo

You finished framing a brownstone gut renovation in Carroll Gardens four months ago. The general contractor keeps promising a check, the homeowner says they've already paid the GC in full, and your $340,000 invoice is gathering dust. A mechanic's lien in New York may be the single most powerful tool you have left — but only if you file it correctly, on time, and for the right amount. Get any of those three wrong and the lien becomes worthless, or worse, it becomes a malpracti

You and your business partner bought a Long Island City warehouse five years ago to expand your distribution operation. You put up half the down payment — $400,000 — but to streamline financing, the deed went into your partner's name alone. He promised it would be transferred to the LLC once the loan seasoned. Last week, he sold the building to a third party and pocketed the proceeds. New York gives you a remedy designed for exactly this situation: constructive trust claims i

You're a drywall subcontractor on a hotel renovation in Long Island City. You submitted your fourth requisition 47 days ago. The general contractor keeps saying the owner hasn't released funds. Meanwhile, your crew is still showing up, your supplier is calling about a $180,000 invoice, and your line of credit is maxed out. You don't need a lawsuit two years from now — you need to get paid this month. That's exactly the problem the New York Prompt Payment Act was designed to s

Your bookkeeper just disappeared with $850,000 from your construction company's operating account. Your former partner emptied a joint Manhattan brokerage account and bought a beach house in the Hamptons. The bank tells you it's a civil matter, the police tell you to hire a lawyer, and the money is moving fast. In New York, the legal vehicle for getting that money back isn't a breach of contract claim — it's a tort claim called conversion, often paired with a constructive tru

You wired a $400,000 progress payment to your general contractor for the gut renovation of your Upper West Side condo. Two weeks later, three subcontractors file mechanic's liens against your unit. They say they haven't been paid. The GC won't return your calls — and you're learning, painfully, that money you thought went to your project may have gone somewhere else entirely. That's exactly the problem New York's Lien Law Article 3-A trust fund regime was designed to solve. T

Your top sales engineer resigned on a Tuesday. By Friday, three of your largest accounts have called to say she's pitching them from a competitor a few miles away in Garden City. Then your IT director sends you a forensic report: the week before she quit, she forwarded fifty-eight customer files from her work email to a Gmail address and plugged a USB drive into her laptop. You're staring at trade secret misappropriation in New York — and the clock is already running. This gu

You sign a stock purchase agreement based on financials your seller swore were audited. Six months later, you discover the receivables were fabricated, the customer list was inflated, and the auditor's signature was forged. You want to sue for fraud — not just breach of contract — because fraud opens the door to punitive damages, a longer statute of limitations, and personal liability for the officers who lied to you. But to plead fraud in New York, you'll need to clear a hig

You hired a contractor to gut-renovate your Park Slope brownstone. Six months in, the kitchen is a plywood shell, your $180,000 deposit is gone, and the contractor has stopped returning calls. Or you're a small Long Island City general contractor who just finished a build-out, only to have the owner withhold $400,000 of your final draw over a punch list neither side can agree on. New York home improvement contract disputes don't look like ordinary breach-of-contract cases — t

You sued a Long Island distributor for $2.5 million in unpaid invoices. Your investigator tells you he's moving money to a Florida account and has quietly listed his Suffolk County warehouse for sale. By the time you get a judgment eighteen months from now, there may be nothing left to collect. This is exactly the problem prejudgment attachment in New York was designed to solve — and it's one of the most underused tools in commercial litigation. At Yassi Law PC, we handle sev

Your former operations director resigned on Friday. By Monday morning, she's set up shop two miles away and already calling your top clients — using contact information that clearly came from your company's CRM. You have a signed non-solicitation agreement and a clear breach of fiduciary duty claim. But a lawsuit that plays out over 18 months won't stop this week's damage. That's where emergency injunctive relief comes in. In New York commercial disputes, courts can issue a t

You signed a personal guarantee to lock in your Tribeca restaurant space. Three years later, revenue is down, the landlord keeps tacking on CAM charges you didn't anticipate, and the math no longer works. You want to exit. But handing back the keys isn't enough — and if you do it wrong, you could remain personally liable for rent through a lease that still has six years left on it. This is the world of the Good Guy Guarantee. It's one of the most misunderstood documents in Ne

You signed a two-year exclusive distribution agreement for your Queens-based food import business. Buried in the contract was a clause saying that if either party breached, they'd owe the other $500,000 in liquidated damages — no questions asked. Six months later, your distributor walked away and signed with a competitor. You're thinking that clause just handed you half a million dollars. But here's the problem: New York courts don't automatically enforce liquidated damages c