Shaoyu case | When the statute of limitations expires, how can Mr. Shao Yu successfully help the client win the lawsuit and realize the creditor's rights

Witnesses

    In the absence of documentary evidence, we recommend that the

company's employees who handle this dunning matter participate in the 

litigation as witnesses and provide witness statements to prove that the 

collection was carried out through on-site visits and phone calls in early 

2021 and 2022.

Although witness testimony alone cannot be used as evidence in a verdict, 

we cite Civil Procedure Law of The People's Republic 0f China Article 108 

of the Interpretation of the Supreme People's Court on Application:"Where, upon review and consideration of the relevant facts, the people's 

court is convinced that the existence of the facts to be proved is highly 

probable, the people's court shall find that the facts exist. ”

    In addition to the witness testimony itself, we also submitted two sets of supporting evidence to demonstrate a high probability of an on-site/telephone dunning:

1. Company A learned at the beginning of 2021 that the person in charge 

of the other party's payment passed away due to an accident. If Company 

A has not mentioned the collection of warranty money to the other party, 

Company A will not learn from the other party that the person in charge 

of the docking has passed away and that there is no one to collect the 

payment.

2. In 2021, in order to send a collection email, an employee of Company A asked the other employee for his work email address through WeChat. At that time, the payment period of the warranty money had expired, and there was only one transaction between Company A and Company B, and the only matter that the two parties needed to communicate through business email was to collect the warranty money. Therefore, it can also be proved that Company A claimed rights against the other party in 2021 for the payment of the warranty money, and the statute of limitations was interrupted.

The specific time point when the warranty period expires

 According to the contract involved in the case, the starting time of the 

warranty period is the time when the product is accepted, but because 

the time in this case is relatively long, Company A does not know the 

specific time when the product is qualified, and the product acceptance 

form is kept as Party A's Company B.

In the first instance, in order to refuse payment, Company B categorically 

denied receipt of all the goods, not to mention providing the receipt andproduct acceptance form to the court, in addition to the regular claim that 

the statute of limitations had expired.

In the absence of a clear time point for the expiration of the warranty 

period, and the time point of Company B's pre-payment is later than the 

time point agreed in the contract, can we use this point to infer the time 

of expiration of the warranty period?

 Therefore, we proposed, since there is no clear time point for acceptance, can we use the time when Company B pays the acceptance payment to 

infer the time to prove that the product is qualified (the contract stipulates 

that the time for payment of the acceptance payment is 30 days after the 

product is accepted) to derive the time when the warranty period expires?

If the time of expiration of the warranty period is calculated according to the above method, the time when the lawyer sends the lawyer's letter to the other party after receiving the entrustment is exactly within the limitation period, and the litigation claim in this case does not exceed the litigation claim.

      In the first instance, because neither party adduced evidence to prove the specific time of product acceptance, the expiration time of the quality assurance period could not be determined, so the judge adopted our second litigation plan: the expiration time of the warranty period was calculated according to the time when the other party paid the acceptance payment, so it was determined that our litigation claims did not exceed the limitation period, so all our litigation claims were also supported.

      After the judgment of the first instance, Company B appealed and submitted a product acceptance form, the date on which stated that our claim had exceeded the statute of limitations.