[J.A.Sucker]

You can't have an attorney present at small claims court in any state that I'm aware of. You can have one help you with your case, but they'd be of no use here.

What should you sue him for? At best, you will have the new guy come out and fix his work. He'll give you a bill and you can sue for that. If the new guy wants to tear everything out and start over, you might have a bit of a problem establishing what the damages are, but something along the lines of labor minus materials/markups is probably right. The labor should be similar to what the original guy quoted you for.

At this point, all you need to do is write up a complaint on the small claims court (which you can get online). If you have any questions, ask the court clerks - they are ALWAYS super useful. Once you finalize your complaint, you pay the clerk filing fee (probably 30 bucks) and you will get a courtdate or range of dates at this point (a month in the future, or so). Make sure to have a clerk check out your complaint to make sure everything is OK.

Then you're going to have to serve him the papers for your court date. If you don't know where to find him, you're SOL. You'll have to pay a process server something like 50 bucks, but many of them are really clever at finding people.

Then you go to court and Judge Whopner comes out and you make your case. You better have lots of receipts, photos, and quotes for the new work. Also, if you can get another contractor to give a signed, notarized statement about the previous guy's work being terrible, this might help establish a poor line of work (along with your pictures). Better yet, maybe this guy will come to court with you.

That's all you need to do. It's not that hard, but you have to have your stuff together to stand a chance. It's a lot of aggrevation so you need to ask yourself whether it's worth suing for. Unless you really want to do it out of principle or are hard up for the money, I wouldn't go for less than a grand.