| The problem here is that it is not actually clear they had a contract. The timeline, as reported in the original post, appears to be this: 1. They email each other for a while. 2. They talk on the phone, and agree that he will do the work for $65/hour, and can start right away. 3. He emails them a contract, and they mail back that they will run it by their lawyers. 4. They contact him to say they have hired someone else. We are told that #4 occurs after 3 days of work, which puts it 3 days after #2. The key question, I think, is when did #3 happen? If #3 happened very soon after #2, then depending on exactly what was said in the emails and on the phone, it might be interpreted that #2 was just the negotiation, and the contract he emailed was his offer of terms and the work would not actually start until they accepted it. To put it another way, I can easily imagine plausible fact situations where he is clearly in the right and they owe him for his work, and I can easily imagine plausible fact situations where they had no deal and he jumped the gun by starting work and they owe him nothing--and all of these fact situations would be consistent with the information we've been given. |