The Claim Was Worth $600,000. Suing for It Wasn't.

The situation

Taras, a pharmacist, and Oksana, a physiotherapist, ran a small multidisciplinary clinic together in Leamington, combining a pharmacy counter with physiotherapy and referral services under one roof. Building the clinic had taken years — establishing relationships with family doctors who would refer patients, building a loyal patient base, and hiring staff who understood both the clinical and administrative sides of the practice. For nearly six years, their clinic manager, Amalia, had handled scheduling, billing and much of the day-to-day patient relationship work. She was trusted with the clinic's patient list, its billing software, and its referral network, and by the time she left, she probably understood the referral relationships better than Taras and Oksana did themselves.

Amalia resigned with two weeks' notice, citing a family move. Within a month, several long-time patients had transferred their files to a newly opened competing clinic a short drive away. Within three months, referral volume from two family practices that had sent patients to Taras and Oksana for years had dropped by more than half. It did not take long to learn that Amalia was the office manager at the new clinic, and that several of the departing patients had been contacted directly and invited to switch.

Taras and Oksana were angry, and understandably so. They had built something over years that was now visibly being taken apart in months. Their first instinct, like most business owners in that position, was to sue for everything the departure had cost them.

What the numbers actually showed

Taras and Oksana came to Treadstone Law wanting to sue for what they believed the departure had cost them — projecting lost revenue, lost goodwill and the cost of rebuilding referral relationships forward several years. Their own rough estimate, worked out with their accountant, put the damage somewhere between roughly $350,000 and $800,000, depending on how many patients would have stayed and how long the referral slowdown would last. It was a real number in the sense that the clinic's revenue had genuinely dropped by something in that range. It was not, however, a number a court could simply be asked to award.

Courts compensate losses that can be proven on a balance of probabilities, not losses that are projected forward from a bad few months. A patient who leaves a clinic might have left anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with a departing manager — a move out of the area, a referral from a new family doctor, a simple change of preference. Future referral volume that never materializes is inherently speculative, and a defendant's lawyer will spend considerable effort at trial picking apart exactly how speculative it is. A court asked to award six figures on that basis will typically discount the number heavily, if it awards anything close to it at all, and getting to that point would take years of examinations for discovery, expert reports on lost profits, and trial preparation, all billed by the hour.

There was a second, separate problem that mattered just as much: even a full, unchallenged judgment for $600,000 is worth exactly nothing if the person who owes it cannot pay it. Amalia was an individual, not a well-capitalized business. Nothing about her financial situation suggested she had anywhere near that kind of money, or was likely to in the years it would take to collect a judgment even if one were won.

Digging into the clinic's own billing and scheduling records turned up something more useful than the speculative loss estimate: a documented pattern, in the weeks before Amalia's resignation, of appointments being rebooked and billing codes altered in ways that routed a specific, identifiable set of clinic billings to accounts Amalia controlled personally. That activity breached both her duties as an employee and the confidentiality terms in her employment contract. It was also, unlike the projected future losses, a number that could be added up directly from records that already existed in the clinic's own system — coming to a little under $30,000.

What we did

1. Separated the provable loss from the speculative one. Rather than build a single claim around the full $350,000–$800,000 estimate, our team isolated the documented billing diversion — the piece Taras and Oksana could actually prove with records — as its own distinct claim, and treated the larger lost-referral figure as context rather than something to litigate. Splitting the two apart early meant the strength of the provable piece was never diluted by having to defend the speculative one alongside it.
2. Gave honest advice about litigation economics, even though it was not what the clients wanted to hear. Pursuing the larger figure in the Superior Court would have meant years of discovery and expert evidence to establish speculative future losses, against a defendant with no indication she could pay a six-figure judgment even if one were won. We were direct that the legal costs and time involved would likely exceed anything ever collected, and that a judgment against someone without the means to pay it is paper, not money.
3. Filed the documented claim in Small Claims Court. Because the provable diversion came in under Small Claims Court's monetary limit, we filed there instead of the Superior Court — a faster, simpler, and far less expensive process using a simplified procedure without the discovery and motion machinery of a full civil action. Staying inside that limit was deliberate: chasing a bigger number would have meant giving up that speed and simplicity for no real gain, since the extra amount was never provable anyway.
4. Built the claim around records, not accusations. The claim was supported by the clinic's own scheduling logs and billing history, laid out chronologically so the pattern of rebooked appointments and altered billing codes was clear on its face, rather than resting on Taras and Oksana's word against Amalia's. A claim that reads as a dispute over credibility invites a fight; one built entirely from the defendant's own contemporaneous business records leaves much less room to argue, which is exactly what made settlement realistic before a hearing was ever needed.
5. Sent a detailed demand before the hearing date. The documentation was shared with Amalia and her own advisor ahead of the hearing, laid out clearly enough that the underlying math was hard to dispute. Giving the other side a clear picture of the evidence before a hearing, rather than saving it as a surprise, is usually the faster route to a settlement — most people would rather negotiate a number they can see coming than gamble on a hearing they are likely to lose.
6. Negotiated a resolution that included non-monetary terms. Alongside the settlement payment, we sought a written acknowledgment from Amalia that she would not solicit the clinic's remaining patients going forward, addressing the ongoing harm to the practice, not just the past one. A cheque for the diverted billings would have compensated Taras and Oksana for what had already happened, but it would have done nothing to stop the same pattern continuing after the settlement was signed — the non-solicitation term was aimed squarely at that gap.

The outcome

Amalia settled the Small Claims Court matter before it reached a hearing, agreeing to pay roughly $28,000 — close to the full amount of the documented diversion — along with a written commitment not to solicit the clinic's existing patients. The matter resolved within a few months of filing, at a fraction of the cost and time a Superior Court action would have required, and without either side needing to sit through a trial.

The larger loss Taras and Oksana had first come in wanting to recover — the $350,000 to $800,000 range representing lost referrals and future revenue — was never pursued as a claim, and was never recovered. That was the hard part of the advice to deliver, and the harder part for Taras and Oksana to accept: the clinic had genuinely lost business, but most of that loss could not be proven to a court's satisfaction, and pursuing it anyway would have cost more in legal fees over several years than it stood any real chance of returning, against a defendant who likely could not have paid a large judgment regardless. What could be proven was pursued efficiently and recovered in full. What could not be proven was left alone, and the clinic's energy went instead into rebuilding referral relationships directly with the family practices that had pulled back, rather than into a lawsuit unlikely to ever pay for itself.

Within a year, several of those referral relationships had recovered, helped along by direct outreach to the referring family practices and by the non-solicitation commitment, which stopped the bleeding of remaining patients even if it could not bring back the ones already gone. It was not the outcome Taras and Oksana had originally wanted. It was, however, an outcome that left them better off than a multi-year lawsuit for an unrecoverable sum would have.

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