As business owners it’s our responsibility to make sure we protect our companies from risk and ensure that our businesses thrive and flourish. There is no one factor in a business more damaging and threatening than a lawsuit so today we look into ensuring how you can protect your business from that ever happening.
Be Responsible With Your Content
Libelous or potentially slanderous statements are one of the easiest ways that companies can find themselves up against a big legal case. So when it comes to your business make sure you and all your staff are responsible with any public announcements, publications or any general business activity that could be considered damaging to another company’s reputation.
The same applies to any areas that may be considered as a ‘conflict of interests’ case. All members of your workforce, yourself included, must be very aware of any situation that may damage your integrity and land you in trouble with the law. For example becoming involved in a charity that will directly benefit your business financially could be considered as a conflict of interest even if you weren’t aware of any direct benefit that this could have on your business. So be very aware of these potential threatening situations.
Hire a Top Attorney
You should always have a top attorney for your business that is only ever a quick call away. This should always be someone that you trust and someone that knows your company. You should look for an attorney that is fully competent in the local customs and laws in which your business operates. Where possible, try to find a lawyer that specialises in your area of business and understands the ins and outs of your sector.
Injury Surveillance
If you have a member of staff that is claiming to have become injured as a direct result of your company then you your company could be liable to pay $1,000’s in injury costs. So first of all you need to have the correct liability insurance in place to ensure that should this ever happen you are covered for every eventuality. You will also want to look into building this into contracts with your employees, so discuss the possible legal clauses available to you with your attorney.
There are an increasing number of insurance fraud cases so if you are suspicious that this is the case we advise you to seek out a private investigator for lawyer services that will help you unearth whether it is a legitimate case that you need to take seriously or whether it can be dismissed as a fraudulent case.
Create Distance Between You and Your Business
Owning and running your business as a sole proprietor could be a risky move as if your company is sued your own personal assets could be on the line, in the court of law. Therefore by separating yourself from your business, in a legal sense, could be a good idea to ensure that you don’t lose everything. One way to do this is by organising for a trust to own your business instead. A trust can own property, cash, businesses and is a legal entity that files its own taxes. So this is definitely an option that is deserving of a little research.
File Protection
As most of our files nowadays are kept on a computer server it has never been more important to secure the safety of our important documents and files. All business owners should invest in top-tier antivirus and software security programmes and these should be updated regularly. Viruses within a company can chaos absolute disaster for work flow and important files can be stolen or lost completely if not properly protected, so this is incredibly important.
You should also be making sure that you are creating backups of all your most important files in case your server suffers any sort of breakdown or malfunction. So you should be aiming to do a backup on a regular basis. Some companies do this on a bi-weekly basis, some do it on a daily basis. Therefore you should consider the importance and sensitivity of your files and then decide how regularly you feel you should be doing your backups.
As a business owner you have a huge responsibility to look after the safety of your company, staff and personal assets. With the above in mind you will be making sure you are already a long way down the road of ensuring the security of your business.
