First, this is not legal advice. I’m not your attorney. Zero attorney-client relationship is being formed here; just giving my general sense, based on relatively little experience (3 years of law school and thus far ~6 months of practice at a big law firm), but more experience than the avg person here and so I’m comfortable opining on this in very general terms bc I I’ve seen you already receive the opposite advice…
This is absolutely not worth litigating. I was curious, so I looked and CU (PSA’s parent company’s) general counsel is a litigator (with several years of big law litigation experience). This means two things:
- The contract you entered into when you submitted the card was almost certainly specifically tailored to avoid litigation.
- It’s pretty atypical for a corporation to have a litigator as GC. The fact that CU has a litigator as GC means that they must be threatened with a high enough volume of litigation that they don’t want to outsource it to a big law firm to deal with. The important point here is that they’re likely not going to settle the case despite the dollar amount being very small. They will litigate it, because they already have litigators on salary. That is, the marginal cost of litigating even small $ claims like this is basically zero.
Basically, were I in your situation, I wouldn’t even contemplate pursuing legal action. I would just try to negotiate as nimbly as you can, using whatever leverage you have (very little, unfortunately). Best of luck to you.