Taking legal action, or defending yourself against claims, is notoriously complex, time-consuming, and costly. For businesses, a commercial dispute and subsequent litigation can have a major impact on their financial performance and long-term success. In fact, it isn’t unusual for litigation to force the closure of many enterprises.
Due to this, it’s vital to prevent litigation wherever possible and minimize the risk of anyone taking legal action against your company. To ensure you’re well-protected, take a look at these top business litigation prevention tips:
1. Keep Everything in Writing
Contracts can be made verbally but it’s hard for both parties to remember the exact terms of a contract that’s been made in conversation. Additionally, it’s possible that parties may have misinterpreted the other’s stance, which could lead to future legal action.
To reduce the risk of litigation, be sure to verify everything in writing. By following up a phone conversation with an email to recap the content, for example, you can ensure that everything is documented and iron out any miscommunication at an early stage.
2. Act with Precision
When you incorporate precision into your business processes, you reduce the risk of anyone being dissatisfied, which, in turn, makes legal action less likely. If you use industrial scales from Arlyn Scales when preparing an order, for example, there will be no discrepancies or disagreements about the weight of goods supplied. Alternatively, a precise approach to your contracts reduces the risk of future disputes and contentious legal battles. When you act with precision, you reduce the room for error or ambiguity, which helps to ensure your business won’t face legal action.
3. Manage Employees Fairly
Business owners often forget that litigation can arise because of in-house disputes until they face legal action that is. As an employer, you’re required to adhere to a range of employment laws, in addition to health and safety regulations. Making sure you’re aware of your obligations is the first step to creating a safe, fair, and productive workplace.
In order to protect your company from litigation, you’ll need to have in-depth knowledge of employment law and keep up to date with changes that are made to regulations. If you want to ensure you’re acting appropriately and reduce the risk of an employee making a claim against you, you could outsource your HR functions to a specialist firm. This reduces your costs while still enabling you to protect your business.
Insuring Your Business
Taking steps to reduce the risk of litigation is always advisable but you can’t always prevent someone from taking legal action against you. A vexatious client might decide to take you to court, even if their case is futile, for example.
Due to this, it’s important to have the right insurance cover in place. Some insurance policies include the cost of defending your company against certain claims or will pay out if compensation needs to be paid to an employee or a member of the public. By choosing the right range of insurance policies, you can safeguard your business and minimize the impact potential legal action could have on your operations.
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