Customer Won't Pay For Service And Is Now Threatening To Get Lawyers Involved.

Hello everyone, I'll just jump straight to the point. My apologies if this is not the correct subreddit as I do not use reddit often.

I own a small business with my husband. Our primary focus is digital marketing and website design and we have been in business for a little over a year now. My husband is the one who runs everything but I am the owner of the company due to his legal status here in the states. Right now we are having a bit of an issue and I was hoping someone might be able to tell me what we can do in this situation and if we should be worried.

We have a client that has been working with us since the beginning of our business. We unfortunately had to stop working with him a few months ago because he was not paying his invoices in a timely manner. There was an issue with his bank (which we were understanding of) but the lack of payments were beginning to negatively affect our business.

Well, this client recently reached out to us, claiming that his bank issue had been fixed. My husband likes this guy so he agreed to start working with him again. Things have been going pretty well up until recently after my husband finished a website for him. Our prices for website design are typically around $1,300 and they can easily take 2-3 weeks to make considering my husband is the only one working on them. He finished the website a few weeks ago, made the invoice for it around December 28th, and it's been up and running since then. Our client still has yet to pay for the website and my husband was getting irritated so he decided to shut it down until they are able to pay for it.

Our client messaged him asking what happened to the website. My husband explained the situation and now it has blown up into a big mess. Client says they haven't paid because the invoice isn't due until January 27th and that they will pay on that date, so my husband essentially said "cool, then you'll get your website on the 27th". They are now threatening to get lawyers involved and my husband is ready to just give them the website for free because he doesn't want to deal with a whole legal battle over something like this.

I disagree with his decision. I do not think we should just give the website away for free because that just proves to the client that he can walk over small businesses without any consequence, but I don't know what will happen if he actually gets lawyers involved. His business is much larger than ours and he makes significantly more money. We cannot even afford lawyers of our own (my husband just had to pick up another job because we have dealt with too many clients like this). What would he tell his lawyer? That he didn't pay for a service and is now being denied access to the service he didn't pay for? Would it end badly for us if he got lawyers involved?

I just feel terrible for my husband because he puts in so much time and effort into this business just for everyone to constantly walk all over him. We are young, in our early to mid twenties, and I just want him to have a successful business without worrying about people like this all the time.