Legal threats work for me about half the time, but I threaten small claims court only after getting escalated to a manager while collecting as much info as poss

Legal threats work for me about half the time, but I threaten small claims court only after getting escalated to a manager while collecting as much info as possible (it also helps if you're in a one party consent state and can play back parts of the phone call to the manager). It works for big companies better than small ones but it does take a little longer for the escalation to go through the legal department and I haven't really bothered trying it for small disputes (anything under a few hundred dollars). The few times I have followed through on the threat resulted in a settlement with one local business and default judgement against two big companies now.