In short: a claim that has prescribed under Dutch law (verjaring) does not disappear, but it can no longer be enforced in court once the debtor invokes the limitation period. Five years is the standard period for performance of a contractual obligation and for damages, twenty years is the residual period and the period for enforcing a judgment, and a claim arising from a sale prescribes two years after the buyer has notified the seller of the defect. A creditor keeps a claim alive by interrupting the period (stuiting), for example with a written demand in which the right to performance is unambiguously reserved.
The statute of limitations in Dutch law is called verjaring and is governed by Title 11 of Book 3 of the Burgerlijk Wetboek (Civil Code). The residual period is twenty years (art. 3:306 BW), but the periods that decide most disputes are far shorter: five years for the performance of a contractual obligation (art. 3:307 BW), five years for damages counted from the day the injured party knows both the damage and the person responsible (art. 3:310 BW), and two years for a claim arising from a sale once the buyer has complained about the defect (art. 7:23 BW). Prescription does not extinguish the debt. It takes away the power to enforce it, and only if the debtor actually raises the defence.
That last sentence is the one most creditors and debtors get wrong, and it has consequences in both directions. A debtor who fails to invoke the limitation period in time can be ordered to pay a claim from a decade ago. A creditor who assumes a friendly reminder keeps the clock in check may find that a perfectly sound invoice has become unenforceable. This article sets out which period applies to which claim, when the clock starts, how it can be interrupted or extended, and what remains of a claim once the period has run. For the underlying concept of a claim itself, see our article on what is a claim.
What verjaring means, and how it differs from a vervaltermijn
Verjaring is the lapse of the right to bring a claim before the court after a period fixed by law has run. The obligation itself survives as a natural obligation (natuurlijke verbintenis, art. 6:3 BW), which is why a debtor who pays a prescribed debt voluntarily cannot reclaim the money afterwards. The purpose of the rules is legal certainty on both sides: a debtor should not be exposed indefinitely to claims about facts that have become impossible to reconstruct, and a creditor is given a clear incentive to act while the evidence still exists.
Two features of Dutch prescription law shape everything that follows. First, the court may not apply prescription of its own motion (art. 3:322 BW). The debtor has to invoke it, in correspondence or in the statement of defence, and a debtor who says nothing simply loses the point. Second, prescription can be interrupted, which resets the clock. A claim from 2015 can therefore still be perfectly enforceable today, and a claim from last year can already be dead if a shorter period applies.
Verjaring should not be confused with a vervaltermijn, a forfeiture period. The difference is not academic. A forfeiture period cannot be interrupted, it is not subject to the extension grounds discussed below, and the court does apply it of its own motion. Dutch employment law is full of them: an employee who wants to challenge a dismissal or claim the statutory transition payment must file the petition within three months (art. 7:686a lid 4 BW), and once that period has passed the right is gone, whatever correspondence took place in the meantime. When you assess an old claim, the first question is therefore not how long the period is, but whether you are looking at a limitation period at all.
A third mechanism sits alongside both: the duty to complain. Under art. 6:89 BW a creditor loses the right to rely on a defect in performance if it does not protest within a reasonable time after discovering it, or after it should reasonably have discovered it. That duty bites long before any limitation period expires and is a standard defence in professional liability and delivery disputes. Our glossary entry on the limitation period sets out the terminology in short form.
Which limitation period applies to your claim
Dutch law does not work with one general period but with a series of specific ones, and the residual twenty-year period of art. 3:306 BW applies only where no shorter rule fits. Identifying the right provision is the whole exercise, because the difference between two, five and twenty years usually decides the case before any argument about the merits begins.
Five years for contractual performance and periodic payments
The workhorse of Dutch prescription law is art. 3:307 BW: a claim to performance of an obligation to give or to do arising from an agreement prescribes five years after the day on which the claim became due and payable (opeisbaar). Unpaid invoices, undelivered goods, an unpaid purchase price and an unperformed service all fall under it. Alongside it sits art. 3:308 BW, which gives the same five-year period to interest, annuities, dividends, rent and other payments that fall due periodically. This matters more than it looks: each monthly rent instalment or interest term has its own starting date, so a landlord chasing four years of arrears is dealing with dozens of separate periods, the oldest of which may already have run.
Two further five-year periods complete the picture for everyday commercial disputes. A claim to recover an undue payment prescribes five years after the day the creditor became aware of both the claim and the recipient, and in any event twenty years after the claim arose (art. 3:309 BW). A claim to rescind an agreement for non-performance, or to have defective performance put right, prescribes five years after the creditor became aware of the breach, with the same twenty-year outer limit (art. 3:311 BW). In practice this means a buyer who discovers a serious defect cannot simply sit on the right to rescind, even where the underlying claim for damages is still alive.
Two years after a complaint in a sale
Where goods or immovable property have been sold, art. 7:23 BW imposes a two-stage regime that is frequently misread. The buyer must first notify the seller within a reasonable time (bekwame tijd) after discovering that what was delivered does not conform to the contract. In a consumer sale of a movable item, notification within two months of discovery is deemed timely; outside consumer sales of movables, including the purchase of a house, there is no fixed two-month rule and the reasonable-time test applies in full, judged against the circumstances. Only then does the second stage begin: the legal claim itself prescribes two years after that notification.
So the two-year period is not counted from delivery and not from the discovery of the defect, but from the complaint. A buyer who complains promptly and then negotiates for two and a half years without interrupting the period will find the claim barred, however well founded it was. Consumers do have a separate advantage on proof: where a defect in a consumer sale appears within one year of delivery, it is presumed to have existed at delivery, so the seller must show otherwise (art. 7:18 BW).
Twenty years as the residual period
Where no shorter period is prescribed, art. 3:306 BW gives twenty years. That residual rule catches more than people expect. A claim to end an unlawful situation, for instance an encroaching structure or a continuing nuisance, runs for twenty years from the day the situation could immediately have been ended (art. 3:314 BW), and the same twenty-year rule governs the recovery of possession of property. Claims that do not arise from an agreement and do not seek damages therefore often carry the long period rather than the familiar five years.
Enforcing a judgment
A judgment does not create an unlimited licence to collect. Under art. 3:324 BW the power to enforce a court decision prescribes twenty years after the day following the decision, so a creditor with a title has a long but finite window. The exception is important: amounts that only fall due more than six months after the decision, such as periodic instalments or maintenance payable under the judgment, are subject to a five-year period. A creditor who has obtained a judgment for future periodic payments and then lets years pass without enforcement can lose the older instalments while the judgment as such remains valid.
Enforcement prescription is interrupted in its own way, among other things by an act of enforcement, by service of the judgment on the debtor and by acknowledgement (art. 3:325 BW). Bailiffs generally serve the judgment again at intervals for precisely this reason. Anyone preparing to litigate should understand how a title is obtained in the first place; our article on Dutch law and preliminary hearings explained covers the route to a judgment, and the practical steps that follow are set out in our guide to debt collection in the Netherlands.
Specialist periods outside the Civil Code
Several fields work with their own, often much shorter, periods, and the general rules of Book 3 give way to them. Claims under an insurance policy have a separate regime in art. 7:942 BW, with a period that starts once the insured knows the loss is covered and that is interrupted by notification of the claim to the insurer. Claims against the government are governed by administrative law rather than the Civil Code: the assessment and collection of tax follow the Algemene wet inzake rijksbelastingen and the Invorderingswet 1990, with their own periods and their own interruption rules. Never transpose a civil period onto a public-law debt without checking the applicable statute.
When does the limitation clock actually start
The clock starts the day after the claim becomes due and payable. That single sentence resolves the majority of commercial files: an invoice payable on 31 March starts running on 1 April, and the five-year period of art. 3:307 BW expires at the end of 31 March five years later. Where a contract fixes a delivery date or a completion date, the day after that date is the starting point for a claim based on the failure to perform.
Two situations depart from that simple rule, and both produce expensive mistakes.
Obligations without a fixed date
Where the parties have agreed that performance is due after an indefinite period, typically a loan repayable on demand or when the borrower is able to pay, the five-year period does not start when the money changes hands. Under art. 3:307 lid 2 BW it starts only the day after the date against which the creditor has announced that it is calling in the claim. An overall ceiling applies: the claim prescribes in any event twenty years after the day on which repayment could first have been demanded, if necessary after notice of termination. A lender who never calls in the loan therefore does not lose the claim after five years, but does lose it after twenty.
Claims where the damage or the debtor is unknown
For claims for damages or a contractual penalty, art. 3:310 BW replaces the objective starting point with a subjective one. The five-year period begins the day after the injured party has become actually aware of both the damage and the identity of the person liable for it. Actual awareness is required: a suspicion or a reason to investigate is not enough, although a party that deliberately closes its eyes cannot rely on its own ignorance. The Hoge Raad has consistently held that the period starts once the injured party is in fact able to bring a claim, which presupposes sufficient certainty that the damage was caused by the other party.
That subjective start is balanced by an absolute long-stop: the claim prescribes in any event twenty years after the event that caused the damage, whether or not the injured party knew anything. Two exceptions to the long-stop deserve to be known. Damage caused by environmental pollution or by dangerous substances is subject to a thirty-year outer limit. More importantly, for personal injury and death the twenty-year long-stop does not apply against the person liable at all; there only the five-year knowledge period runs, which is why occupational disease claims surfacing decades after exposure can still succeed. Our article on when a claim expires under Dutch law works through those starting points in more detail.
Damage caused by a criminal offence
Where the damage results from a criminal offence, art. 3:310 BW ties the civil period to the criminal one: as long as the right to prosecute the offence has not itself prescribed, the civil claim for damages does not prescribe either. The criminal periods are set out in art. 70 Sr and depend on the maximum sentence, running from three years for minor offences (overtredingen) up to twenty years for serious crimes, while the gravest offences no longer prescribe at all. A victim of fraud or embezzlement may therefore still have an enforceable civil claim long after the ordinary five-year period would have run, and the practical route is often to join the criminal proceedings as an injured party rather than to start a separate civil action.
How to interrupt the clock with a stuiting
Interruption, stuiting, wipes out the time already elapsed and starts a fresh period. Dutch law recognises three routes, and each has its own formal requirements.
The first is an act of legal recourse: issuing a writ, filing an application, or taking another step in proceedings aimed at obtaining a decision on the claim (art. 3:316 BW). The interruption is conditional on the proceedings actually leading somewhere. If the claim is withdrawn or the proceedings end without a decision on the merits, the interruption lapses unless the creditor brings a new claim within six months. Attachment before judgment and arbitration proceedings can have the same effect, which is one reason to consider securing your position with a pre-judgment attachment in the Netherlands at the same time as interrupting the period.
The second, and by far the most used, is the written interruption of art. 3:317 BW. For a claim to performance, the period is interrupted by a written demand (aanmaning) or by a written communication in which the creditor unambiguously reserves the right to performance. The wording carries the whole weight here. A payment reminder that merely notes an outstanding balance and asks the debtor to settle it is not enough; the letter must make clear, without room for doubt, that the creditor continues to claim performance and keeps the right to enforce it. For claims other than performance, for example a claim to end an unlawful situation, a written warning only interrupts the period if it is followed within six months by an act of legal recourse.
The third route lies with the debtor. Acknowledgement of the claim interrupts the period (art. 3:318 BW), and acknowledgement requires no formality at all. A partial payment, a request for a payment arrangement, a proposal to settle for a lower amount or an email confirming that the invoice will be dealt with can each amount to an acknowledgement. Debtors regularly revive a claim they could have defeated simply by trying to be reasonable in writing, and that risk should be weighed before any answer is sent.
What the new period looks like
Interruption does not always hand the creditor a full new term of the original length. Under art. 3:319 BW a new period starts on the day after the interruption, equal to the original period but never longer than five years, and the claim never prescribes earlier than it would have without the interruption. A twenty-year period that is interrupted is therefore followed by five years, not by another twenty. Enforcement of a judgment follows the same logic through art. 3:325 BW, which is why serving the judgment every few years is standard practice rather than an optional courtesy.
Drafting a stuitingsbrief that works
An effective interruption letter identifies the claim precisely, states the amount or the performance demanded, refers to the underlying agreement or invoice, and closes with an express reservation of the right to performance and to legal action. Send it in a way that can be proved: registered post, or email with a delivery confirmation and a copy in the file. That evidentiary point is decisive, because a creditor who relies on an interruption bears the burden of proving that it took place and that it reached the debtor (art. 150 Rv). A letter that cannot be shown to have arrived is, for these purposes, a letter that was never sent. Diary the next interruption immediately after sending the previous one.
When the period is extended: verlenging
Extension, verlenging, is not the same as interruption and is far more limited than most commentary suggests. It does not pause the clock and then let it continue from where it stopped. Under art. 3:320 BW, if a limitation period would expire while a ground for extension exists, or within six months after that ground has ended, the period runs on until six months after the ground has disappeared. The effect is a guaranteed minimum window of six months, not an open-ended freeze.
The grounds themselves are listed exhaustively in art. 3:321 BW. They exist, among other situations, between spouses and registered partners who are not legally separated, between a legal person and its directors, between a person under guardianship or protective administration and the curator or administrator concerned, between a minor and their legal representative, and between a creditor and a debtor who deliberately conceals the existence of the debt or the fact that it has become due. An extension also applies where the creditor is prevented by force majeure from interrupting the period. The common thread is a relationship or a circumstance that makes it unreasonable to expect the creditor to take formal action.
What is emphatically not a ground for extension is settlement negotiation. In some neighbouring legal systems, talks between the parties suspend the limitation period by operation of law; Dutch law contains no such rule. A creditor who negotiates for eighteen months in the belief that the clock has stopped is simply eighteen months closer to losing the claim. The correct response is to send an interruption letter during the negotiations, or to agree in writing that the debtor will not invoke prescription for a defined period. That written standstill is a normal, uncontroversial request in Dutch commercial practice, and any counterparty negotiating in good faith should have no difficulty granting it.
What is left of a claim once it has prescribed
A prescribed claim becomes a natural obligation under art. 6:3 BW. The debt exists, but it cannot be enforced through the courts. Three consequences follow, and together they explain why an old claim is rarely completely worthless.
First, payment of a prescribed debt is a valid payment. A debtor who pays voluntarily cannot afterwards reclaim the money on the ground that the claim was unenforceable, because there was an obligation to perform, only not an enforceable one.
Second, the right to set off survives. Art. 6:131 BW provides that the power to set off does not end through prescription of the claim. If a supplier holds an invoice from six years ago that can no longer be sued upon, and the same counterparty later invoices the supplier for a new service, the old claim can still be used to extinguish the new debt as far as it reaches. The claim can no longer be used as a sword, but it remains a shield. This is the single most valuable point for a creditor sitting on old, unenforceable positions against a counterparty it still trades with.
Third, prescription can be waived. Art. 3:322 BW forbids waiving prescription before it has been completed, which is why a contract clause purporting to extend a statutory period is ineffective, but it permits waiver once the period has run. A debtor who, after expiry, unambiguously acknowledges the debt and states that it will not invoke prescription can restore the creditor to a position where the claim is enforceable again. This is a real risk for debtors who answer an old demand without taking advice, and a real opportunity for creditors who put the point carefully.
The mirror image of that flexibility is that contracting parties can shorten periods. In business-to-business contracts and general terms, a clause reducing the statutory period to, say, one year is generally valid. In consumer contracts it is not: a clause in general terms that cuts a statutory limitation or forfeiture period to less than one year appears on the blacklist of art. 6:236 BW and is voidable by the consumer. This is a standard point to check whenever you are handed a set of standard terms in a civil law dispute.
The mistakes that cost claims
Most prescription problems are not caused by exotic legal questions. They are caused by a handful of recurring assumptions, each of which is wrong.
The first is that a reminder is an interruption. Accounting systems send automated reminders at thirty, sixty and ninety days, and none of them reserves the right to performance in the terms art. 3:317 BW requires. A file full of reminders can still contain no valid interruption at all.
The second is that a running account is a single claim. Where a supplier delivers monthly and invoices monthly, each invoice has its own due date and its own five-year period. An arrears position built up over six years is a set of claims of which the oldest have already prescribed, and a demand for the total figure invites a partial defence that is easy to run and hard to answer.
The third is that talks stop the clock. They do not, as set out above. The fourth is that the claim disappears automatically once the period has run: it does not, and a debtor who fails to invoke prescription in the proceedings will be ordered to pay. The fifth, on the debtor side, is answering an old demand informally. A short message proposing to pay something to make the matter go away is an acknowledgement, and it revives a claim that was already dead.
A sixth, more technical trap concerns groups of companies and successive contracting parties. An interruption is effective only against the debtor to whom it is addressed. Where the contract has been transferred, the business has been sold as a going concern, or the counterparty is one company in a group, a letter sent to the wrong entity interrupts nothing. Check the debtor in the trade register before the letter goes out, not after the period has expired.
What to do now
For a creditor, the work is administrative before it is legal. Record, for every outstanding claim, the date performance was due, the resulting starting date of the period, the applicable period and the resulting expiry date, and set a reminder at least six months before that date. Six months is not arbitrary: it leaves time to establish the correct legal entity, to draft an interruption letter that meets the statutory test, to prove delivery, and if necessary to issue proceedings. Where a claim is substantial and the debtor looks unstable, an interruption letter on its own may not be enough, and attachment before judgment is the tool that preserves recovery rather than merely the right to sue.
For a debtor faced with an old demand, work in the opposite direction. Establish when the obligation became due, identify the applicable period, and check the file for any interruption: a formal demand, an earlier writ, a payment, or written correspondence that could be read as an acknowledgement. If the period has run, invoke prescription explicitly and in writing, and say nothing that could be construed as recognising the debt. Because the court will not raise the point on your behalf, the defence has to be pleaded, and it has to be pleaded clearly.
In both roles, the decisive question is usually evidentiary rather than doctrinal. Who can prove what was sent, when it was received, and what it said. Files that are well kept survive prescription arguments; files that are not, do not.
One practical route deserves a mention because it is so often overlooked when a deadline is approaching. Issuing proceedings interrupts the period under art. 3:316 BW, and for money claims up to the statutory ceiling the subdistrict court (kantonrechter) offers a procedure in which a party may appear without a lawyer and the costs stay proportionate to the amount at stake. Where the debtor is established elsewhere in the European Union, the European Small Claims Procedure provides a comparable route across borders. Both are set out in our article on small claims in the Netherlands. Starting a modest claim is sometimes cheaper than a further round of correspondence, and it removes any argument about whether the period was validly interrupted.
Frequently asked questions
The questions below come up in almost every file about an old claim, from both sides of the dispute.
Does a partial payment restart the limitation period?
Yes, it almost always does. In the eyes of the law, making a partial payment is considered an ‘acknowledgement of the debt’ (erkenning van de schuld). This one action hits the reset button on the limitation period, starting a brand new, full period from the date of that payment.
Imagine a claim with a standard five-year deadline. If the debtor makes a small payment four years and eleven months in, that single transaction resets the entire clock. The creditor now has another full five years to legally pursue the rest of the money. For debtors, this is a crucial point to remember—even a tiny payment can breathe new life into an old, nearly unenforceable debt.
What is the difference between Interruption and suspension?
While both interruption (stuiting) and suspension (verlenging) affect the limitation clock, they do so in completely different ways. Getting this distinction right is key to correctly managing a claim’s timeline.
Here’s a simple way to think about it:
- Interruption (stuiting) is like hitting the reset button on a stopwatch. It stops the current countdown and immediately starts a new one of the same original length. This happens when you send a formal demand letter, start a lawsuit, or when the debtor acknowledges the debt.
- Suspension (verlenging) is like hitting the pause button. The period is extended for one of the grounds listed in art. 3:321 BW, such as a claim between spouses or a debt the debtor deliberately conceals. Settlement negotiations are not such a ground under Dutch law. Once that ground has ended, the period runs on and does not expire until six months after it has ended (art. 3:320 BW). It doesn’t start over.
For creditors looking to keep their claims alive, interruption is by far the more common and powerful tool.
Can I still collect a debt after the limitation period expires?
Once the limitation period is up, you lose your ability to use the courts to force a payment—as long as the debtor raises this as their defence. The claim doesn’t just disappear; it becomes what’s known as a ‘natural obligation’. It’s still owed in a moral sense, but your legal power to enforce it through a lawsuit is gone.
However, the claim isn’t entirely without value.
If the debtor decides to pay the expired debt anyway, they can’t turn around and demand a refund by arguing it was unenforceable. You may also be able to use the expired debt for ‘set-off’ (verrekening) against a different debt you happen to owe that same person. But your main weapon—a lawsuit—is off the table.
Do different rules apply for government or Tax debts?
Absolutely. It’s a common trap to assume that the standard civil deadlines apply to every type of debt. Debts owed to the government, like taxes or fines, fall under administrative law, not civil law. They have their own set of rules and often much shorter limitation periods.
For example, the Dutch tax authority (Belastingdienst) typically has three years to issue a tax assessment and five years to collect an established tax debt. These timelines can shift depending on the specific tax and circumstances. Never assume the usual 2, 5, or 20-year civil periods apply to government claims. Always double-check the specific regulations for the government body in question to avoid making a costly mistake.
When exactly does the limitation clock start ticking?
The starting point—the moment the clock officially begins to run—is all about the nature of the claim. It’s not always the day an agreement was signed. The general rule is that the clock starts ticking on the day after the claim becomes due and payable (opeisbaar).
Let’s look at a few real-world examples:
- For an Invoice: The clock starts the day after the payment due date printed on the invoice.
- For a Loan Without a Repayment Date: The five-year period starts only the day after the date against which the lender announces that it is calling in the loan (art. 3:307 lid 2 BW), and in any event twenty years after repayment could first have been demanded.
- For Damages: The five-year period kicks in once the injured person knows about both the damage and the identity of the person who caused it.
Pinpointing this start date is fundamental. If a creditor gets it wrong, they might think they have more time than they really do, which can be a disastrous miscalculation.
What if my claim arises from a criminal offence?
When a civil claim is linked to a criminal act, the standard verjaring van vorderingen rules can change dramatically. If your civil claim for damages stems from something that is also a crime—like theft or fraud that caused you financial loss—a special rule kicks in.
Your civil claim cannot expire before the time limit for prosecuting the criminal offence runs out. Under art. 70 Sr the criminal limitation period depends on the maximum sentence, running from three years for minor offences (overtredingen) up to twenty years for serious crimes, while the gravest offences no longer prescribe at all. A civil claim tied to a criminal offence can therefore stay enforceable well beyond 10 years. This means if your civil claim would normally expire in five years, but it’s tied to a crime with a twelve-year prosecution window, your deadline gets stretched to match that longer period. This gives victims of crime a much bigger window to seek financial justice in the civil courts.
Can a debtor acknowledge a debt after it has expired?
Yes, they can, but this comes with a very important catch. Once the limitation period is over, the claim doesn’t just disappear—it changes into what the law calls a “natural obligation” (natuurlijke verbintenis). What this means is that you can no longer go to court to force the debtor to pay.
So, if a debtor willingly makes a payment or acknowledges the debt after the claim has already expired, they can’t turn around and demand their money back. However, and this is the crucial part, that payment does not by itself revive the claim. A debtor can, however, waive a completed prescription under art. 3:322 BW, and an unambiguous acknowledgement after the period has run may amount to such a waiver, which does restore enforceability. You, as the creditor, still have no legal standing to sue for the rest of the balance.
In short: a voluntary payment on a time-barred debt is a done deal for the debtor, but it doesn’t reopen the door to legal action unless the debtor waives the completed prescription. Until that happens, the rest of the debt remains uncollectable through the courts.
Is sending a simple payment reminder enough to interrupt the limitation period?
No, not at all. A standard, friendly reminder that an invoice is overdue is almost certainly not enough to interrupt the limitation period. Dutch law is quite strict on this; a proper “stuiting” (interruption) requires a much more formal approach.
To legally reset the clock, you need to send an unambiguous written demand for payment. This communication must make it crystal clear that you, the creditor, reserve your right to pursue legal action if the debt isn’t settled. A generic reminder just doesn’t meet that standard. This is why sending a formal stuitingsbrief (a specific letter of interruption) is so essential.
Can businesses change limitation periods in their contracts?
This is possible, but only in certain scenarios and within tight legal boundaries. In business-to-business (B2B) contracts, parties generally have the freedom to negotiate and can often agree to shorten the standard statutory limitation period.
However, trying to extend the period is a different story. This is usually not allowed because it undermines the very purpose of these laws: to provide legal certainty. The rules are even stricter when it comes to consumer contracts. A clause in consumer general terms that cuts a statutory limitation or forfeiture period to less than one year appears on the blacklist of art. 6:236 BW and is voidable by the consumer.
How Law and More can help
Law and More advises creditors and debtors on limitation periods in commercial, contractual and liability disputes. We assess whether a claim is still enforceable, draft interruption letters that meet the requirements of art. 3:317 BW, secure positions with attachment before judgment where recovery is at risk, and run the prescription defence where a claim is brought too late. If you are holding an old claim, or facing one, contact our office to have the position reviewed before you reply.
