Legal advice needed

[treedawg]

This is business related and I'll give a brief background of my problem.

I run a tree care business and a local yellow pages company decided to publish an add with my name and number in it W/O my permisson or knowledge. I've never even spoke with a sales rep from this company that I'm aware of. That would be all fine and well but for a couple of problems.

1.The book they published covers and area that's probably 40 miles from my base of operation and over 70 miles at the furthest point.

2. My business is a small company and I don't have a person on staff to answer my phones. To save money I have a live answering service and they charge for all the calls they field. Then they text message all of my calls to my cell phone which also costs me money.

I've been down the small claims court route in the past and it worked very well. The time was with an auto insurance company that refused to pay a claim when thier insured "T" boned my at a traffic light. The second time was when a home owner refused to pay for services rendered. He owed me several thousand dollars and I got a judgement on him but he file chapter 11 and I didn't collect squat. I was shocked when I saw his list of debtors.

These were both very clear cases, but I don't know where to start on this one. How do I establish current and more important future damages? Some people will keep this book and it's possible that I'll be getting calls for the next 5-10 yrs from this listing.

How should I attempt to resovle this situation or is it even worth the effort?

TIA
TD

 

[Skipper]

I don't know how exactly to fix that problem, but I'll say this, the fact that there are now 4 phone books for this area and region is a royal pain in the hoo hoo to me.

That little picture ad in the Bell South book cost me 2Grand a year. Then they came out with the new "Regional" phone book that included 3 other towns around me as well as my area. The ad in that Telephone book costs $1800 per year.

Then All Tell come out with a "Regional Book" and their a was another $1000 (bought a smaller ad in this one).

Finally a 4th outfit came out with one, and I said, "elmoelmoelmoelmo NO" I'm not buying 4 ads in 4 different phone books in the same town, and it's probably cost me.

I have to agree that the first "Regional" phone book that came out is the best idea. It's the same format as the Bell Book but it combines 3 area Bell Books which is handy since we are located in 3 counties. The major problem with it is their phone numbers are not correct. They copy the numbers from a 2 year old Bell South Book, and if people have moved, built a new house, just moved to town in the last 2 years, etc, their number isn't in there. Then there are the typos in it that are pretty bad.

That Alltell book is awful. It serves the same region as that first region book but instead of breaking down the names by town it lumps them all together. You ever know someone's last name and address but not the first and phone number? With it broken down by town, its sometimes pretty simple to figure it out, but throw in names from 6 or 7 surrounding towns and it complicates things.


Skipper