When you own a small business, legal issues are bound to happen if you don’t take care of them beforehand. It’s a fact that every legal headache that you face will negatively cripple or hurt your small business’ bottom line. If your legal fund is low you may be pushed to seek help from one of your family lawyers.
In the following article we will be discussing some of the most common yet avoidable legal issues that your small business can face…
Dissatisfied Employees
In the United States, employees happen to have much more rights when compared to other countries. These come in the form of reasons for ‘wrongful terminations’ and unions.
If you plan to terminate an employee who is not performing well, have him or her sign documents that have been drafted by an attorney at the termination time. This will help make the dismissal terms clear. If you let your employee leave without a final termination form, you make it easy for him or her to take legal action.
Copyright and Patent Issues
Businesses that operate in the tech industry know what it’s like to face strong patent litigations. There are companies that issue patents and sit on them for long periods of time, just in the hope of some other company violating them, since it earns them easy money through copyright and patent lawsuits.
So what’s the solution for this problem? When you’re in the product development phase, see to it that your research/development team digs deep when researching the patents/copyrights of your product. This helps you avoid any legal tussles with another competitor who already has a patent registered.
Disgruntled Customers
It’s a fact that customers that are dissatisfied (for any reason), can go ahead and file ‘class action’ lawsuits against you. What’s exactly a class action lawsuit? It’s when large consumer groups get together and strategically attack your company on things such as faulty services/products or unfulfilled promises. If there are a good number of dissatisfied customers, huge irreparable damage can happen to your brand due to the class action lawsuit.
The only way you can avoid such lawsuits is by being proactive and by keeping a tab on your customers through email, social media, online forums and tech support. This makes it easy for you address any customer issues more promptly, before things go out of hand.
The above legal issues that we discussed are only a handful ones of those that small businesses face in today’s times. So ensure that you are proactive in your approach when solving these issues beforehand. Also, have a legal team backing you up in case your company gets sued.
Vijayraj Reddy
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