What to Do If You’re Sued for Breach of Contract in Construction
The Cromeens Law Firm
May 14, 2026
You finished the job. The work passed inspection, the owner moved in, and your crew is already two projects ahead. The only thing missing is your check. Your supplier wants payment for materials, payroll hits Friday, and the general contractor stopped returning calls two weeks ago.
This story plays out on construction sites across Texas every day, and it is the reason most failed construction businesses go under. The contractors who go broke usually had plenty of work lined up for months. Unfortunately, they ran out of cash before the checks arrived.
Hiring another collections clerk will not fix this. What works is a system that runs every month, hits every state-specific lien deadline, and keeps your invoices moving from open to paid without you lifting a finger. That is what The Cromeens Law Firm built when we created The Cromeens Lien & Collection Subscription Plan.
We had a fire protection subcontractor come to us with $500,000 in overdue invoices. In 90 days, we cut that number in half. Over the next year, we collected everything but $20,000. That kind of result is what an outsourced collections department built around your state’s lien laws can do for your business.
The Cromeens Lien & Collection Subscription Plan is a flat-fee monthly service in which our firm becomes your collections department. You send us your open invoice report on the same day each month. We tell you which projects need notices, which need lien filings, and which need a phone call from an attorney. Then we go to work.
Our process covers every step that contractors skip when running a business. We research the property owner, pull the legal description, verify the general contractor’s mailing address, locate the bond on bonded jobs, and send the statutory notices that preserve your lien rights. We make collection calls to the parties you authorize us to contact. If those calls and notices do not result in payment, we file a mechanic’s lien for the full amount you are owed.
You get a dedicated account representative who answers the phone and an online portal with every call note, notice, and research file behind your account. The goal is to collect without ever filing. When that fails, we file.
If you are running 20, 50, or 100 active jobs at any given time, staying compliant with state notice laws becomes a full-time job all by itself. Texas subcontractors must send monthly notices by the 15th of the second month following the work month. Miss that date on a job, and the lien dies. Multiply that one deadline across every project, every state, and every payment month, and the calendar alone will bury an in-house team. The Cromeens Subscription Plan turns that calendar nightmare into one monthly upload of your aging report. Our team tracks every deadline and sends every notice on time, on every job.
Suppliers carry the worst end of construction credit. You ship the material on day one, the contractor uses it on day two, and you wait 60, 90, or 120 days for payment. Every state writes its own preliminary notice law.
California demands a 20-day preliminary notice. Georgia requires early notice with strict content rules. Louisiana ties a general contractor’s lien rights to filing a Notice of Contract on larger projects. Keeping all of that straight inside one accounts receivable department is a losing game. The Cromeens team handles the multi-state notice and lien work as part of the monthly subscription, so a supplier shipping into multiple states still has one team, one process, and one monthly fee.
You send the invoice the day the work is done, the GC sits on it, and 60 or 90 days later you are still waiting while the next project’s costs pile up. If you have invoices on your books that are over a year old, or you are writing off real money every quarter to bad debt, you are bleeding profit through accounts receivable. The Cromeens Subscription Plan flips that pattern. Notices go out before invoices age into the danger zone, lien rights stay alive on every job, and the general contractor knows a law firm is watching every dollar from week one.
The Cromeens Subscription Plan keeps you at the front of the payment line on every project from the first day of work, not after a dispute starts. Construction money flows in a chain. The owner pays the general contractor, the general contractor pays the subs, the subs pay the suppliers. When the chain tightens, the contractors who get paid first are the ones with valid liens, timely notices, and an attorney already on file. Everyone else becomes an unsecured creditor fighting over scraps.
With The Cromeens Lien & Collection Subscription Plan, you get an entire collections team and an experienced lien department for one predictable monthly fee. There are no surprise bills after a long collection effort. The price is the price, and it costs far less than a single uncollected invoice in the six figures. A full time collections specialist costs a salary, benefits, software, and management time. Even after all of that, you still need a construction attorney for the lien filings and any litigation that follows. The Subscription Plan covers both jobs under one fee.
The Cromeens Law Firm has over 20 years of experience in construction collections and over a 90 percent success rate of collecting before foreclosure becomes necessary.
A general contractor reacts differently when a notice arrives from your AR clerk versus one signed by an attorney from our firm. The first goes in the pile of “we will deal with it later.” The second gets paid. General contractors and owners across our markets know our name. That recognition does the work of three follow up calls before we ever pick up the phone.
The Cromeens Law Firm is licensed in Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, and California, with offices serving subcontractors, suppliers, and contractors across every market we cover. Our founder built this firm after running a material supply company, so the people writing the notices and filing the liens understand the cash flow pressure on the other end of the phone. The Cromeens Lien & Collection Subscription Plan is the only program of its kind, built by a construction law firm, run by construction attorneys, and priced for how construction businesses operate.
We also offer a 90-day trial at a discounted rate so you can see whether our Subscription Plan will solve your collection issues. You work hard, you do a good job, and you deserve to be paid. Quit giving your work away.
Call us at 713-715-7334 or reach out via the chat box on our website, and we can schedule a time to tell you more about how we ensure you get paid the full amount you are owed on every project.
Every month, on a date you choose, you upload your open invoice report through your client portal. Our team reviews the report and tells you which projects need notices, which need lien filings, and which are ready for a phone call from our office. You confirm, and we run the entire process from research to notice mailing to lien filing if it gets that far. You see every step inside the portal in real time.
Subscription pricing starts at $1,500 per month and is built around your invoice volume and the states you work in. The Cromeens Subscription comes in two tiers, Bronze and Silver, with the Silver tier adding bond claims and weekly file recaps on top of the Bronze coverage. The best way to get a real number for your business is to call our team at 713-715-7334 or contact us for a free consultation. We will look at your open invoice report and recommend the tier that fits.
Yes. The goal is to get you paid without ever filing anything. Our process leads with phone calls, intent letters, and statutory notices, and most of those efforts collect the money before a lien hits the county records. When that does not work, we file the lien for the full amount you are owed and keep collecting from there.
Karalynn Cromeens is the Owner and Managing Partner of The Cromeens Law Firm, PLLC, with over 17 years of experience in construction, real estate, and business law. A published author and passionate advocate for contractors, she has dedicated her career to protecting the businesses her clients have built. Karalynn is on a mission to educate subcontractors on their legal rights, which inspired her books Quit Getting Screwed and Quit Getting Stiffed, as well as her podcast and The Subcontractor Institute.