Ukessays: Industry leading guarantees or big lots of bollox?

Decided to order your essay from UKessays? Read this first - you may reconsider your decision!

Ukessays claim to provide the highest industry guarantees however, in reality they do not! Want proof? Simply read their terms and conditions:

They promise:

"£5,000 no plagiarism guarantee
"Our writers never plagiarise, and we provide you with a comprehesive plagiarism scan for your peace of mind. If you detect plagiarism in your work, then you will be entitled to claim £5,000; plus a full refund and your work rewritten for free.""

However, their terms and conditions say:

"The Agency agrees that if any expert responsible for a confirmed Plagiarism offence fails to award the £5,000 compensation, that they will provide all reasonable assistance to the Customer including the provision of a copy of the Expert's contract with the Agency, and the Expert's name and address, for the Customer to bring a remedial action directly. THE AGENCY IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR REIMBURSING THE CUSTOMER WITH THE £5,000 COMPENSATION."

This means that if your paper is plagiarised YOU will have to run around to trace the expert and try to get the money from him. The Company will not pay you any money. Then why do they give it as their guarantee?!?!?!

But it may even not get to that point! They say:

"In all cases, where the alleged Plagiarism is minor, or it is reasonably obvious that the alleged Plagiarism is as a result of a MISTAKE, the £5,000 No Plagiarism Guarantee WILL NOT BE PAYABLE"

Well, obviously plagiarism is a mistake, so they can always turn it this way and you will not get anything. Is this what you expect from a company's guarantee???

They also claim:

"Where there is a discrepancy as to whether the Customer's findings constitute Plagiarism or not, the Agency will carefully review the Work and make a decision, having regard to all relevant circumstances and making reference to a qualified expert where they deem it necessary to do so. In such circumstances, the Agency's decision will be final"

So if you say something is plagiarism and they do not agree - as their word is final, then you won't be entitled to the claim.

In addition to that, their spelling of the word "comprehesive" is not correct. If they cannot spell on their website how can you rely on them to write a 1st standard paper for you?

Next one:

"The Agency undertakes that all Work will be completed by the Expert on time or they will refund the Customer's money in full and deliver their Work for free."

And immediately after that:

"The Customer agrees that this GUARANTEE DOES NOT APPLY IF THE AGENCY CAN DEMONSTRATE THAT THE WORK WAS COMPLETED AND SENT BY THE EXPERT ON TIME"

Which means that if the researcher has done the work but company did not send it to you - their guarantee do not apply. What kind of guarantee it is then? It is not protecting you, as a customer in any way! And by the way, they can also claim they were late due to technical problems (see 6.4) and this guarantee will not apply either. Nice one, right?

Next one:

2:1 first time -- or money back

They claim "The Agency guarantees that if the Customer orders 2.1 standard work then, on delivery, the Work will meet 2.1 standard.", however afterwards they state:

"If the Work is determined to be below the quality standard ordered, but the reason for this is that the Customer made requests in their Order specification that were open to interpretation due to ambiguity, then no refund will be given"

Well, anything can be considered as ambiguous to a certain extend, so they can just play this card for every paper that did not get a 2:1.....

This is my favourite:

Free 'try before you buy'!

They state: "We offer a free 500-word sample from our selected writer, for orders of 10,000 words or more in length. The sample is written just for you, relating to your order."

However in their terms and conditions we see:

"The 500 word sample will only be requested of the chosen Expert and provided to the Customer once the Customer has PAID FOR THEIR ORDER."

Pay them for your whole dissertation and then they will send you free 500-word sample. This is called "Free try before you buy" UKessays way!

And lastly:

The grade you want - Guaranteed!

Apparently to "get your mark guaranteed, simply:

Order your custom essay
Use it to write your own piece of work
Send it back to us to mark
Make any recommended changes
Hand it in and get the mark you ordered"

So not only have you got to pay them for an essay to be written, but also an additional £35 (minimum) for marking! And they can always claim you did not incorporate all recommended changes and not give you the money back!

Ukessays offer deceitful guarantees, so before you order from them ensure you are happy with their TERMS AND CONDITIONS, not only their industry leading guarantees.

Well, what do we have here? Say it ain't so! Verifiable evidence? Nice job.

The jig is up on the Academic Answers "guarantee": google.com/search?q=%22AGENCY+IS+NOT+RESPONSIBLE+FOR+REIMBURSING+THE+CUSTOMER+WITH+THE%22

haha lets see what they have to say about this! This sooo PEES me off!!!

hmmmm how comes no one from UK Essays is addressing this issue? let me think...maybe because it's all true??? what people do for money!

I don't like deception. I don't like companies that take unfair advantage of wordy legalese to give consumers a false sense of security.

From where I'm standing, I see absolutely no way that Carly, Jennifer, Barclay, or anyone else at ukessays can justify this "small print" deception or deny that the criticisms are valid.

Hence the silence...(a kind of tacit approval)

Hello,

Curious the silence isn't a 'tactic'!

I can't really comment on the issue, because as I've said hundreds of times, I only help look after the website-side of things, not the day to day running of the company.

The people that could address this (Tony (our CEO) and Jen) are both exhibiting at a show in London this week, and are due back in the office on Tuesday.

I'm certain they'll both want to post something on here & get this sorted.

Thanks,
Carly
AA / UKEssays

False. You commented on the issue very recently, vehemently claiming that your company pays the compensation! Do I need to quote you?

Since your company just loves to contact reporters to shamelessly beg for media coverage, I think it only fitting that someone should contact the UK media to make them aware of your company's verifiable double-speak and misleading guarantees, don't you think?

I said TACIT approval not tactic, perhaps you have misread. It would be very interesting to see what your CEO or Jen has to say about this.

take your time UK Essays take your time....

Perhaps they decided to stay out of town?

Isn't it funny that they have not replied yet. Perhaps this is because they are in fact deceiving their customers...?

Yes, it is funny.


Maybe someone can go to their site(s), email them, and ask for them to step up to the plate in this thread.

Hi guys,

I'm sorry that it's taken a while for me to reply. I was on holiday in London for 10 days and a couple of those days included both myself and Tony (our CEO) attending a conference. As you've said, we're always dealing with the press and quite happy to answer questions if people phone up so if you do have a question in future and we're not around to answer it, you could just give us a call. The CE staff don't monitor these forums but they do monitor the phones! :-)

I understand that the essay industry is rife with people that are trying to rip off innocent students and it's natural to be suspicious of terms and conditions. I think you'll find most companies' terms are written in a similar way, not just in the essay industry but in every industry - always seeking to limit liability to the maximum possible extent. I'm working on revising our terms and conditions as this doesn't represent how as a company we want to be, or indeed how we act in practice. It's our view that if you put the customer first, the money will follow - the focus should always be the customer. I'm also trying to make the terms more user friendly and less 'legalistic'.

In the meantime, in terms of the issues raised by Asker above, I've tried to summarise these as Q and As below. If I've left anything out or misunderstood what is being asked, please do reply and let me know, and I'll try to help as much as I can. Otherwise, like I said, don't hesitate to just call us and ask the question!

Thanks guys,

Jen

Q = Is the expert or the company responsible for paying the £5k plagiarism guarantee?

A = The expert is directly responsible. The contract we have with the expert makes it really easy for the customer to claim the plagiarism bond, and this can be done via money claims online. However, if you read our terms, they state that if we have any money on account owing to the expert in a plagiarism case, we'll withhold this for the customer.

If an expert is found to have plagiarised, we contact them and give them the opportunity of paying up on the guarantee.

In practice, this has only happened a couple of times since we've offered this guarantee. In the first case, the expert refused even though it was clearly plagiarism - big chunks of text copied from a journal - in that case, the plagiarism scan had detected the plagiarism so ordinarily we'd have picked up on it before we sent the work to the customer but we didn't - the scan was sent on to the customer as usual, and the customer just pointed out that there was plagiarism based on the scan. We had about £1.8k of their fees on account and we paid those to the customer. We offered to help the customer recover the rest of the money in what was a relatively straightforward case, but they were happy with what they had. Obviously we refunded them too and had the work completely rewritten.

Another case was with a researcher, HR, who had been with us a long time. She submitted a dissertation which oddly plagiarised itself. As she'd been with us for ages and never made such a mistake before, we agreed to pay the client directly for her and deduct a small amount from her fees each month.

Both these instances were quite a while ago and I doubt with the expansion of our Customer and Quality team, improvements in policies and so on that we have now, and the improvements to our plagiarism scanner, that they would happen again.

We will always help customers and researchers reach a satisfactory conclusion. But since all work is pre scanned, and a copy of the scan goes to the client, plagiarism is really rare.

Q = Do we always regard the plagiarism as minor and try to get out of the obligation?

A = Logically no - the expert is responsible for the plagiarism bond, not us, so why would we? Plagiarism really damages our reputation. We lose out - not just on profit but on repeat business and through negative word of mouth. Helping the customer get what they are owed actually helps restore our reputation so there's no reason why we'd try and side step the guarantee. However, we do need to protect genuine writers from accusations that are unfair, hence this clause.

Q = Do we pay up on the 'delivery on time guarantee'?

A = Yes - what you're not factoring in is, a huge percentage of our customers are repeat customers. If we made these promises and didn't pay up on them, those customers wouldn't come back to us. Our CE (customer experience) team is instructed to actively contact the customer if the work is late and process the refund. Sometimes the customer says they don't want it but we refund anyway. Believe me, this is far better for business than offering such a guarantee and not paying up on it.

Q = Why do we ask for payment up front if it's try before you buy?

A = To stop people wasting experts' time. I'm sure any of the writers who come in here would feel it unfair if they had to produce a 500 word proposal, only to be told that the customer had no intention of going ahead with the order. When a customer hands over the money, we know they're serious about placing the order. The expert has a decent chance to impress and win the order. If the customer doesn't like that expert, we'll take the time to find out why and then offer them another expert. If the customer doesn't like any of the experts, we'll refund the customer - but yes, this is to protect our writers, they are 'customers' too and we need to look after them.

Q = Why charge for marking on the guaranteed grade?

A = This is because we genuinely want people to write their own piece of work. We don't want to help people cheat. Having their work marked after they've used us gives them the best possible chance of getting that grade. If a change was recommended (for example, a customer made an error in their own work) why would they not incorporate that change? It makes no sense - if an expert tells you how to make something better, of course you'd take that advice on board.

Hoping this deals with all of the issues raised! :)

The bottom line here, folks, is that Academic Answers has admittedly misrepresented its "money-back guarantee" to the public by masking the all-important realities in small print.


Not even close . . . .

Jennifer, if you "genuinely" want customers to write their own papers, I challenge you to clearly edit your advertising to communicate the fact that your company does not and will not pay a CENT of the bond in the event that the writer plagiarizes. You must also clearly communicate that it is the customer's unfair, undeserved, unrealistic responsibility to track down and harass the writer for a 5,000-pound bounty that the writer will NEVER pay.

The people behind Academic Answers think that they have no legal obligation to pay the bond, despite misleading potential customers on their home page and elsewhere. In the United States, we have laws to protect consumers from such blatant misrepresentation. Since Academic Answers does significant business via US search engines, and would certainly prefer to continue doing so, Academic Answers had better stop the misrepresentation very quickly. If not, we'll find out what the FTC believes-my evidence and legal facts or Jennifer's after-the-fact spin an clean-up attempts.

"If you detect plagiarism in your work, then you will be entitled to claim £5,000"
SOURCE:
ukessays.com/guarantees.php
(Of course, not a single word from AA about the customer having to send bloodhounds after the completely unaccountable, freelance writer who almost certainly does NOT have remotely close to £5,000 stored with AA, especially if he/she had planned in advance to commit fraud.)


Now, the direct contradiction from Jennifer:


I await more spin.

Jennifer?

Jennifer, where are you?

Hello, hello, I'm here! Sorry, always so busy. I don't know where the quote from Carly is (I've searched for it but I can't see it anywhere ..)

But anyway, no, it's the expert who is responsible for the money. It's not a bother to 99.99999% of experts who don't plagiarise.

I'd welcome your suggestions here WB as we don't have any intention of misleading customers. Maybe we could write something like:

"If you detect plagiarism in your work, then you will be entitled to claim £5,000 from your expert"

What do you think? We could even link that through to a page with more guidance on the guarantee, like a >> more info link.

Jennifer, this is just pathetic! Please give us clear definition of what UKessays consider to be plagiarism and what is not.

If you advertise that you will give customer £5000 if the paper is plagiarized - YOU HAVE TO GIVE them the money. Not poor expert who is working for peanuts. Giving customer details of the expert will not solve anything - if customer has to go to small claims court to get his money back - then your guarantee "£5,000 no plagiarism guarantee" is pointless, don't you think?

"In all cases, where the alleged Plagiarism is minor, or it is reasonably obvious that the alleged Plagiarism is as a result of a MISTAKE, the £5,000 No Plagiarism Guarantee WILL NOT BE PAYABLE"

"Where there is a discrepancy as to whether the Customer's findings constitute Plagiarism or not, the Agency will carefully review the Work and make a decision, having regard to all relevant circumstances and making reference to a qualified expert where they deem it necessary to do so. In such circumstances, the Agency's decision will be final"

So, even if the paper is plagiarized you leave a loophole for yourself to say that customer will not get anything! You MISLEAD customers on purpose therefore ukessays is scam!!!!

You say:

We now guarantee your grade!
Use our service and if you DON'T get the grade you want, we'll refund 100% of your money. This unique promise means you can use our service knowing that it's RISK FREE. No other essay writing company offers this - it's an industry first!

So I can order from you, submit this work to my university and if instead of 70% I will get 69% you will give me full refund, right? As this is all that is written on your homepage anyone will suppose this is the case!

You claim:
"Completed on time or your money back and your work for free!"
And immediately after that:

"The Customer agrees that this GUARANTEE DOES NOT APPLY IF THE AGENCY CAN DEMONSTRATE THAT THE WORK WAS COMPLETED AND SENT BY THE EXPERT ON TIME"

Interesting moment here: you do not say that work has been sent by AGENCY on time - you say sent by EXPERT - this clearly outlines that is the paper was not sent to the client due to MISTAKE OF THE COMPANY - customer will not get anything. What kind of guarantee is that!?

If customer has to pay for a whole dissertation before he gets 500-word sample from our selected writer - then this is NOT FREE TRY BEFORE YOU BUY!!!

Jennifer, as a company ukessays deceive customers by providing long list of fake guarantees which are contradicting company's terms and conditions. This is unethical business practices and in effect you are engaging your customers into contract on the terms different from those you advertise on your website. As a lawyer do you think its correct to do it????

Lastly, you promise your customers:
"Free help locating sources. If you can't find a journal the writer has used, we'll send it to you."
Please give us more details - would you send a hardcopy of the whole journal to the customer?
Would you send electronic copy of the article?
Are you allowed by law to do it? ;-)

WritersBeware,

What is the point of:

"ukessays is now illegally guaranteeing grades. If they do not promptly cease that blatantly illegal and unethical activity, I will be reporting them directly to one of the lead attorneys at Google."

"I'll give your company 72 hours to remove all advertising related to grade guarantees."

"I challenge you to clearly edit your advertising to communicate the fact that your company does not and will not pay a CENT of the bond in the event that the writer plagiarizes."

If you are not doing anything???

Sorry, but you don't get to ask me such a rude question. Check the attitude.

Sorry, I do not mean to offend you, but there is something strange about this. You threaten them (being completely right), they completely ignore you but you just seem to accept it.

So much not like you...

I'm not sure why you assume that I have done nothing. All in due time . . . .

"Q = Is the expert or the company responsible for paying the £5k plagiarism guarantee?

A = The expert is directly responsible. The contract we have with the expert makes it really easy for the customer to claim the plagiarism bond, and this can be done via money claims online. However, if you read our terms, they state that if we have any money on account owing to the expert in a plagiarism case, we'll withhold this for the customer.

If an expert is found to have plagiarised, we contact them and give them the opportunity of paying up on the guarantee.

In practice, this has only happened a couple of times since we've offered this guarantee. In the first case, the expert refused even though it was clearly plagiarism - big chunks of text copied from a journal - in that case, the plagiarism scan had detected the plagiarism so ordinarily we'd have picked up on it before we sent the work to the customer but we didn't - the scan was sent on to the customer as usual, and the customer just pointed out that there was plagiarism based on the scan. We had about £1.8k of their fees on account and we paid those to the customer. We offered to help the customer recover the rest of the money in what was a relatively straightforward case, but they were happy with what they had. Obviously we refunded them too and had the work completely rewritten.

Another case was with a researcher, HR, who had been with us a long time. She submitted a dissertation which oddly plagiarised itself. As she'd been with us for ages and never made such a mistake before, we agreed to pay the client directly for her and deduct a small amount from her fees each month.

Both these instances were quite a while ago and I doubt with the expansion of our Customer and Quality team, improvements in policies and so on that we have now, and the improvements to our plagiarism scanner, that they would happen again."

Academic Knowledge said ...15-Jun-10 16:20:28
"Dear Researcher,

Recently we have had an instance of plagiarism, which has resulted in the client pursuing a claim of £5000 against the researcher. As such we felt it was important to contact every researcher in order to help you prevent plagiarism in the briefs that you submit, since we do not want you to be liable for any £5000 claim.

Firstly, remember when writing a brief that it has to be completely original; do not cut and paste from previously submitted work. This will be detected by Viper from our internal database and we will ask you to alter this so it is worth ensuring the piece is wholly original from the outset.

Secondly, our scanner may not have access to some paid-for journals so we'd ask you to bear this in mind. Plagiarising from journals can be picked up by the client and is a more serious instance of plagiarism, where a claim by the client will almost definitely occur and be successful.

Finally, make sure you reference adequately the second you use resources, no matter whether it is direct quotes or paraphrasing. It is extremely important as not only does this help you avoid plagiarism it also ensures the client knows exactly where the material comes from and increases the standard of the work.

If you would like to scan your work using Viper before you submit then please download this programme from scanmyessay.com. Please note you must select a researcher account.

If you have any concerns regarding plagiarism or need further clarification please don't hesitate to contact us. We wish you all the best with your work with us and hope that we can avoid all plagiarism issues.

Kind regards,
Danny

The Academic Knowledge Team"

Jennifer is not only ignorant, but too self-confident and it seems that the owners are admitting that Viper is crap!

Hey Asker, hey all,

I didn't know you were one of our writers Asker! :-)

We did have another plagiarism instance very recently and thought it necessary to remind our writers that they need to produce original work. Viper is a great resource but not foolproof, just like any other scanner. It scans masses of resources, including thousands upon thousands of past essays. But Viper doesn't scan against *all* journal databases so if a writer plagiarises from a particular journal database it might not detect it (this is what happened recently). All scanners have limitations - Turnitin won't scan against every database, and obviously writers can plagiarise from paper sources too when they aren't available in an electronic format.

WB, I was hoping for your feedback on our guarantees? (see my question above)

All the best,

Jen

Hi Jennifer

I belive you work for Ukessays? a friend has preiously ordered from your site for me and I have to say I was extremly happy with the work on both occasions however I have found that when the work comes back good all is good.... , but as soon as a complaint is made it is sooooo difficult to get anywhere, I made a complaint about a piece of work that was RUBBISH, DID NOT ANSWER THE QUESTION and I honestly belive a monkey could have done better.

My complaint has been back and forth with corrections attempted twice but all the writer has done each time is shuffle things about, I provided about 5-6 clear bullect points and still the writer did not complete these. Each time I asked for corrections I was told this was not in your original order (yes it blodly was)... IS THE WRITER BLIND OR DOES HE/SHE HAVE SELECTIVE READING?? everytime I responded saying please look back at the original instructions.

I finally had to request a full refund but even then the site would not budge.. but offered to have an independant Quality report done before they could look into a refund...

I AM SOOO TEMPTED TO PUT THE REPORT UP ON HERE.... I no sooo many of you would have a field day with it.. HERES A TASTER OF WHAT THE REPORT CAME BACK WITH THOUGH

"barely passable as UG work"
"I am reluctant to pass this work"

and bare in mind this quality report was done through Ukessays not me.

even with this in mind I am finding it hard to get a full refund... I have been told that even if that was possible they would widely publish the essay... - a clear way of disencouraging me from persuing a full refund.. tactful!! Oh and forget the 2.1 first time round as this report was given a 2.2-2.1 borderline by the indepdant quality assersor and even then the individual epressed his/her reluctance to pass this.

I am keen to here from Jennifer as I have had to result to joining various blogs to express my concerns as no one at Ukessays seems to care!!

Hunter

I don't want to beat a dead horse, but what they offer is wrong (and is likely to be perceived the wrong way by their prospective customers because it encourages cheating). Even the most 'fraudulent' websites don't have the cheek to offer something like that:

To get your mark guaranteed, simply: get your guaranteed grade

* Order your custom essay
* Use it to write your own piece of work
* Send it back to us to mark
* Make any recommended changes
* Hand it in and get the mark you ordered

ukessays.com/guarantee-final-mark.php

I tend to be very uncritical of AA but, Carly, Major does have an extremely valid point. It does sound as though the company is supporting plagiarism.

a company that promises grades is asking for trouble. watch out!

Yeah, I have to agree with you here - that looks like we're saying hand our work in. I'll get it changed.

@Rusty. We're guaranteeing the grade because we're saying that if a student uses the work as intended, it's a very powerful study aid and they can get the grade they want. We want that point to come across. We want people to use the work legitimately, NOT to just hand it in - there's absolutely no benefit to handing in our work!

So after a few years the /guarantee-final-mark.php page is gone (probably because it was advised by a lawyer it was illegal).

Now this one appears: ukessays.com/guarantees.php

"To qualify for this guarantee you must encompass (but not necessarily limit yourself to) all the main arguments and points in your main submission. You must write in a coherent, well-presented manner, and do so entirely in your own words. The main references we use should also be referred to. It is unacceptable to copy and paste text directly, or to simply 'change the words' around. Your piece of work must be a 100% original creation derived from the information we provide you and your own independent research. Anything else is plagiarism, and is a breach of company rules and academic integrity."

It's so vague and written in a general tone that it would be almost impossible for a student to prove that:

The work is:

- written in a coherent manner (who decides if it is coherent or not?),
- 100% original creation (what if it is 99% original - how do you measure that?),
- written 'entirely' in your own words (what if 2 words are not entirely your own?).

Since these are the official Terms to get your money back, I'd say the chances of beating these terms / the system and actually getting your money back are close to zero. I wonder how many percent of students who requested a refund have actually received it.

Furthermore, '[the student] must do your own independent research' - so it means on top of paying $60 per page, students are required to do the job anyway. If not, the guarantee is null and void. At best, this guarantee should be hidden on the Terms page because advertising it seems to have the opposite effect to what it was hoped for.

I don't have anything about this company, but I wonder why they keep crossing the creepy line, which gives the whole academic research industry a bad name. In addition, some of their statements and slogans sound as if they were the first to provide custom academic paper services or certain solutions - which is obviously untrue.

Around March 2018, the proudly featured WORLD CLASS GUARANTEE to get the desired grade or get money back disappeared. It's gone. Anyone knows why? Perhaps because it was totally fraudulent and illegal?



Old "guarantee" gone:

It's a step in the right direction; you may notice this dishonest / illegal in most countries activity has been reported above several years ago. Now it's time to make it right with students who use their 'free' plagiarism scanning tool which publishes the scanned content in full on their own website.

Guarantees of any sort should not appear in these websites at all. Since all the papers written by the writers for these companies are deemed to be "model papers", meant to be the guideline for the student to follow in writing his own worded version of the essay, the guarantee of a grade should not be made. After all, how the student interprets the research paper will be different from that of the original writer. The new written version will be the one that gets the grade, supposedly, not the writer's work.

So, it stands to reason that the student cannot be assured of an actual grade. Since it is supposed to be "his original work", based on the model paper that will be handed in for a grade. No writer can ever guarantee an actual grade for a student. A writer can estimate a possible grade, but not say it is a "definite" grade to be achieved based on the writer's work. Any student who hands in the writer's work, rather than using it as a sample for his own writing, using only important citations from the model paper, is asking for trouble.

I am just wondering if any student actually fell for this hyperbole of a claim. No company in their right mind would make such a refund claim. Much less assign such a refund claim to the poor writer. It sounds to me like the company was simply daring the future client to sue the company first to prove the plagiarism claim. If any student actually fell for this scam and ended up with a bum paper, all I can say is "you asked for it". Never trust a company that makes super exaggerated refund claims. If it sounds too good to be true, you can that it is nothing more than a printed LIE !

I wonder how many students fell for this unenforceable agreement. The company made a promise then declared themselves non-liable for the plagiarism award claim. All they will do is help the student sue the writer in the writer's home country, which make the lawsuit more expensive than the paper that was plagiarized. That promise is total BS and students should have the common sense to not believe such promises.

In a practical sense, it's impossible to recoup your losses by trying to sue any essay company, but for totally different reasons: (1) The "unclean hands" doctrine will likely bar any recovery, especially for any claim about the grade on work submitted based on the company's product; and (2) Even a small claims case creates a searchable record forever linking the names of the parties to which future prospective employers will have access in connection with their pre-employment backround checks. In some court systems, details about cases are available, too.