Protect Your Business With These Legal Measures
It’s essential that you put certain measures in place to protect your business if you get into legal trouble. Getting sued in business is very common - you may not even have to do anything wrong in order to get sued. On top of this, you need to consider how debts can affect your business. Below are just some of the main ways to legally protect your business.
Choose the right business structure
Many business owners start their journey into business as sole traders. However, it can be useful to set yourself up as a limited company as you start growing. Setting yourself up as a limited company ensures that your company is a separate entity - any business debts belong to your business, while any personal debts belong to you. If you get into personal debt, this means that your business funds and equipment cannot be used as collateral. Similarly, if your business gets into debt, bailiffs won’t be able to come to your home and seize your furniture or your personal car.
Get professional contracts written up
A contract helps to put an agreement in writing. If an employee, client or supplier fails to meet their side of the agreement, you can then hire a breach of contract attorney to argue your case in court. This could be vital if you’ve paid huge amounts of money to a supplier and they haven’t delivered or if you’ve carried out work for a client and they haven’t paid up.
Consider filing for a trademark or patent
A trademark can help to protect elements of your brand such as your logo, company name or slogan. If another company uses the exact same branding elements, you can then sue them for infringing on your trademark. Meanwhile, if you’ve designed a unique product, you might want to consider patenting it. If another company tries to replicate your product, you can then sue them for patent infringement.
Organize a health and safety audit
Some of the worst lawsuits are those involving injuries to employees, customers or other third parties. If you can be held responsible for this injury, it is likely you will be sued and it will have a significant impact on your reputation if word gets out. A health and safety audit could help to identify any hazards within your business so that you can fix them and reduce the risk of any injuries on your premises/involving your product. There are commercial health and safety advisors that can carry out these audits.
Insure yourself against lawsuits
Sometimes accidents happen that are hard to prevent. An employee may make an error in spite of thorough training and all the right tools to help them. This error could result in a costly lawsuit that you may not have the funds to pay for. To protect yourself against the possibility of such incidents, it’s worth taking out insurance schemes such as public liability or professional indemnity insurance. These insurance schemes will pay out compensation in a wide array of instances - sometimes even when you are not in the wrong, but don’t have the energy to contest the issue in court.
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The cost of opening up a physical store can be great. If you’re going to do so, we highly recommend keeping these three things in mind. They’re not the most obvious costs to account for, but before your first week of business gets underway, you’ll need to see about them.