Minimizing Business Risk
A legal issue can happen to any business owner.
Your business may never be accused of negligence, malpractice, or wrongful employee termination. However, it’s important that you protect your company from these risks, because the financial impact can be huge.
Contents
What You Do
To protect your company from potential litigation, create a written employee handbook and a procedures manual.
Employee Handbook
An employee handbook provides your staff a guide to working for your business. The handbook includes company policies, such as guidelines for cell phone use, vacation policies, and employee benefits. Most important for litigation issues, the handbook explains how employees will be counseled and disciplined, if they violate company policies.
If you implement the guidelines explained in the handbook consistently, you’ll reduce your risk of litigation from a former employee who may sue you for wrongful termination.
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Procedures Manual
A procedures manual documents how each routine task is performed in your business, who does the task, and how often the task in performed. If you operate your company using a manual, you’ll reduce confusion about how a particular task is performed, and your business will operate more efficiently.
Your staff is less likely to make mistakes if you use a manual, and that strategy reduces your risk of legal liability.
Counsel
While you can reduce your legal risks, you can’t eliminate the risk completely, so you should have an attorney relationship, such as https://www.thedicksonfirm.com/practice-areas/legal-malpractice/.
Having qualified legal counsel can help you address a legal problem early, and reduce time and cost required to resolve the issue.
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Negligence and Malpractice
Every profession has a legal expectation related to a level of expertise.
If a customer buys a product or service from you, the product should work as intended, and the service should solve a particular problem. If the product or service does not perform as a reasonable person would expect, you may be exposed to legal liability from that customer.
Medical profession, in particular, requires a high level of professionalism.
Doctors spend years studying in higher education institutes, and they complete a whole lot of training before they are put to work independently
Doctors sometimes make mistakes, which can happen to a professional in any type of field. A patient may sue and recover funds to cover medical costs incurred through medical negligence or malpractice, and to replace earnings that are lose during recovery.
To reduce the risk of a legal issue, Doctors train for years, and take a large amount of continuing education. They document carefully and communicate expectations and risks to their patients. Finally, Doctors carry medical malpractice insurance, which provides a certain level of coverage if a physician is sued by a patient.
Your Business
To protect your business from legal risk, you need to take a comprehensive approach.
Put an employee handbook and a procedures manual in place, and follow your written guidelines consistently. Develop a relationship with an attorney, who can have you address potential legal issues when they come up.
Take these steps to grow your business and minimize your business legal risks.
This post is for educational purposes only.
Ken Boyd
Author: Cost Accounting for Dummies, Accounting All-In-One for Dummies, The CPA Exam for Dummies and 1,001 Accounting Questions for Dummies
Co-Founder: accountinged.com
(email) ken@stltest.net
(website and blog) https://www.accountingaccidentally.com/
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