Once again I am picking the collective brains of everyone in Mudcat land.

The issue is that a client engaged a consultant to set up a database which has 2000+ records. The database itself is on a remote server, but the client only seems to have access to the user interface that was set up by the consultant, but not the database itself.

because the consultant was (allegedly becoming increasingly unreliable, the client decided to transfer the data onto a spreadsheet based system on there own network.

However the exported data only included 80% of the fields.

Since January, the consultant has been asked for an export of all the records that includes all the fields, but he has done nothing so far in spite of several calls.

The client needs to do a major mailout in the next couple of weeks, and the only way to get all the information in the new system is to go through each individual record in the old database and enter the missing information longhand.

The size of the task would entail maybe 50-60 hours work, for which somebody would have to be paid.

Does anyone know what legal recourse the client has to either:

(a) Enforce the consultant to provide the required information in the next few days

or

(b) Recover the costs of reentering the required information.

A bit of back ground - the client is a small-medium charity, and the consultant has been employed full time by a IT company.