We Audit, Too

As those of you who know me well enough to listen to me prattle on about my practice, I am trying to steer away from the days of highly specialized practices and focus on being able to render a full range of services to clients both near and far. Basically, I am going back in time to the days when people would say, "I need to have my lawyer look at this" instead of "I need to have my i.p. lawyer, business attorney and tax counsel look at this." Miami is just not the sort of place that needs to be rife with thousands of specialized practitioners.

Also, as those of you who know me well are aware, I have a lecture/presentation I put on about things you, the client, can do to save yourself a lot of potential exposure, litigation and attorneys' fees. By the way, I'm happy to come to your organization or place of business and put it on at any time (for free, of course). It's become my constantly repeated theme to clients: spend a little bit of money now to put your house in order and one of two things will happen. First, you will never need me again or, second, when things go wrong, you will save yourself a fortune.

With that idea in mind, a like-minded friend has suggested that I start conducting legal audits. Brilliant. For a free hour, I will come to you and we can review your business' legal seaworthiness. Are your contracts up to speed? Is your employee manual compliant with the current law? Do you have sufficient safeguards to protect confidential and customer list information? There's about a dozen more areas of exposure and liability we will cover. Once I have a picture of where and how things stand for you, we can devise a strategy to shore up weak defenses and bring things current.

Does this cost money? Yes. Do you hate paying lawyers? Absolutely. Will engaging in an ounce of prevention be exponentially cheaper than paying for a pound of cure when the litigation starts? No doubt.

You want an example? Ok. Not long ago, a company sued its former employee for "stealing" the company's customer list and taking it to the competition for just slightly better pay. The former employer sued for theft of trade secrets, arguing that the list was proprietary and confidential. This company knew that, without this list and the revenue generated by the sales to these customers, it's business was in big trouble. You can only imagine what it must have felt like for the company when the federal judge entered judgment in favor of the departing salesman. You could probably hear the air rushing out of the room.

Why did the salesman win? Well, he was free to work for whomever he liked whenever he wanted to? In a competitive field, this issue could have been addressed by having the salesman sign a non-compete and non-solicitation agreement. As for the customer list, the court found that it must not have been a trade secret or proprietary if the employer did not do any of the things the law regards as ordinary practices to protect proprietary information. By the way, this little venture cost the losing employer over $90,000.00 in attorneys' fees. Had he spent $4,000.00 to protect his interests at the beginning, he could have avoided all this and stayed in business.

The legal audit. It's not just for the IRS and accounting firms, anymore.