Breach of Contract Lawyers in Melbourne

The contract is broken and you want what you are owed

A supplier who never delivered, a builder who walked off the job, a customer sitting on a five-figure invoice. Whatever your version looks like, you want to know what you can recover and how long it takes. If the contract behind it is a home build or a renovation, the claim runs instead as a domestic building dispute, under a regime written for that fight and heard in a different forum.

MK Law runs breach of contract claims across Melbourne and Victoria. On a free first call we tell you whether the claim stacks up and roughly what it is worth. Call 1800 130 120.

The four things you must prove

Every breach claim comes down to the same four elements, whether the fight is over a $5,000 invoice or a seven-figure supply contract.

1. There is a binding contract. Written, verbal or a mix of both. Verbal contracts are enforceable in Victoria, they are just harder to prove.
2. A term was breached, meaning the other side failed to do what the contract required, did it late, or did it badly.
3. The breach caused your loss, so there is a straight line from their failure to your damage.
4. The loss can be quantified: a number a court can order, backed by invoices and records.

If one of the four is missing, the whole claim fails. That is why we test all four before any letter goes out. A demand the other side can pick holes in gets ignored, and you have shown them your hand for nothing.

There is one shortcut worth checking before you start. If you bought the goods or services as a consumer, you may not have to prove a breach of the written terms at all, because the law attaches consumer guarantees to the sale that no seller can exclude.

What you can recover

Damages are meant to put you in the position you would have occupied had the contract been performed, and that reaches further than most people expect. You can claim losses arising naturally from the breach, plus any further losses both parties could reasonably foresee when they signed. So lost profit on the broken deal is usually recoverable. Lost profit on a side arrangement the other party knew nothing about generally is not, because nobody could have foreseen it at signing.

Two things cut that down. You have to mitigate, which means you cannot sit back and let the losses pile up when a reasonable step would have reduced them. And you can only recover what you can prove, so keep every invoice, email and record from the moment things go wrong. On top of proven loss, Victorian courts can award interest, currently 10 percent a year, which adds up fast on a debt that has been outstanding for two years.

Where money is not an adequate answer, for instance where the contract concerns land or something genuinely unique, a court can order specific performance and make the other side actually do the deal. Our contract lawyers page covers the full range of remedies.

Most breach claims settle at the letter of demand

A letter of demand from a law firm reads very differently to a reminder email from you. It sets out the contract, the breach, the amount owed and the date you expect payment by, and it tells the other side that ignoring you now costs them something. A large share of the claims we run resolve right here, with no court filing. If the deadline passes and nothing arrives, the letter has still earned its place: it becomes the first exhibit in the proceeding.

Start with a letter of demand

You have six years, but do not use them

Victorian law gives you six years from the date of the breach to sue on a standard contract, and fifteen years if the agreement was signed as a deed. File a day late and the other side has a complete defence, however strong your case was.

Six years sounds like plenty. The catch is that a claim gets weaker long before it expires. Witnesses leave the business, emails disappear under retention policies, and a debtor who can see you coming for two years has time to move things around. Nearly every strong claim we run started with a letter sent within weeks of the breach.

Can you terminate as well?

Not every breach lets you walk away. You can terminate for breach of an essential term, for a serious breach of an important intermediate term, or where the other side’s conduct shows they no longer intend to perform at all. That last one is repudiation, which comes with its own rules and its own trap, and we cover it on our repudiation of contract page. Terminate without a valid ground and the whole thing flips: you become the party in breach. So send nothing until a lawyer has confirmed the ground is actually there.

Which court hears your claim

Claims up to $100,000 go to the Magistrates’ Court of Victoria. Above that, the County Court of Victoria, which has unlimited civil jurisdiction, or the Supreme Court for the largest and most complex matters. Some consumer and small business disputes sit at VCAT instead. The forum shapes the cost and the timetable, so we pick it deliberately. If the real problem is a broader commercial fight rather than a single broken promise, our contract disputes page covers the wider picture, and where recovery of a straight debt is the goal, see debt recovery.

Is the claim worth running?

The first call is free and you get a straight answer about whether the claim is strong enough to run and whether it is worth what it will take. If we act for you, you know what each stage involves before it starts, from the letter of demand through negotiation and, if it comes to that, filing. Call 1800 130 120 or use the form on this page.