John Linton
.....it depends entirely on how determined you are to achieve it, how much of your time you are prepared to invest and how good your legal advice and advocacy competence are........and whether you can afford to pursue it......and this is only when you are 100% right.
Some time ago, and unknown to us, Telstra Retail (a company we have never had any dealings with and certainly have no contract with which would require us to pay them for anything as we purchased no services from them) listed three small payment defaults on Veda Advantage which is the corporate version of the individual Credit Reference Association which is the 'public record' that is referenced by companies when they assess the credit worthiness of other companies. We were unaware of this until one of our banks advised us of the fact during a routine check they did when we applied for a corporate credit card for our F and A personnel. This was some many months after the entries were created.
When we found out about this 'mistake' we contacted Telstra who effectively advised us to "get lost". When we eventually found someone within Telstra who appreciated the gravity of the situation the entries were removed but our request for a public 'apology' was met with silence (our requests were not replied to). So we presented the facts of the matter to our solicitors who in turn got advice from an appropriate barrister. Our solicitors wrote to Telstra's solicitors and received a 'not going to happen in our life time' reply/more than one reply. So our solicitors issued a letter of demand and when no response was received began court proceedings. At this point Telstra's appointed solicitors began a derisory attempt to address the issue but began with the premise that nothing wrong had been done and a public apology was out of the question and why don't we just go away and stop bothering them.
As the initial hearing date got closer they began to attempt to take the issue more seriously but it wasn't until the hearing date that they made any genuine attempt to do as had been requested. Even then they couched their approach along the lines of "your client will want to avoid the costs that our disputing this matter will cost you so why don't you just go away". Finally they agreed to post the mealy mouthed apology published in the Australian yesterday but only on the basis that "each party paid its own costs". They also stated that if we didn't agree to this they would counter-sue Exetel etc, etc. They were told that they had clearly damaged Exetel, they had damaged Exetel with absolutely no reason or excuse and that they had incurred costs for Exetel in trying to redress the blatantly obviously illegal actions of Telstra.
The judge agreed and ordered Telstra to pay Exetel's costs.
So there you have it. A giant corporation does something they know is totally illegal and then use as much money as it takes to try and prevent suffering the consequences of that action. Not a scruple, moral or ethic associated with the initial action that I can see and that attitude was continued from then onwards. Any person can form their own opinion of what the 'culture' inside such a company must be and what sort of people are employed in 'decision making' positions for this situation to have existed and then not be redressed. Is Telstra any different in this aspect of doing business than any other large corporation? I don't know. What I do know is that Telstra has always acted in this way when we have had a legitimate dispute with that company.
We have another issue, involving 'incorrect' billing that we will be pursuing over the next week or so and doubtless Telstra will display the same attitude and tactics as they have done in the issue just concluded. We are also pursuing a similar issue against the TIO, an organisation that displays identical attitudes and tactics as Telstra does - perhaps that results from the TIO being controlled by Telstra?
No sensible company and no sensible individual within any company wishes to spend the time it consumes to become involved in 'legal issues'. However it is an inevitability that these issues will occur from time to time. The 'golden rules' of becoming involved in 'legal issues' are set out in the opening sentence of this blog entry.
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3.....