Why does a small business owner need a lawyer?

Many find out they need a lawyer when it’s too late. I constantly hear from our business clients, “I never saw it coming.” And what I always ask them is, “Are you sure you didn’t see it coming or could you have done something to make it where the thing that happened would have never happened?” The answer is almost always yes.

So many business owners just sign things without getting legal counsel. Even basic contracts that could affect the rest of their business careers’ without having a lawyer look at it. There are times when we look at the contract and say, “Don’t sign that. This will be bad and result in bad things.”

Business owners don’t call a lawyer because they’re trying to save money or they just think they can figure it out from reading the internet. Like Abraham Lincoln said, “You can’t believe everything you read on the internet.” But we do that, right?

At Gaudy Law, we train our clients on how to make sure that they’ve got the right employee agreements, that they are doing things from an HR standpoint, that they have cellphone policies, etc.

A lot of us have 1099 employees out and using their cellphones. What are the rules on that? What’s my liability? In fact, should someone be a W2 or 1099? The law just changed on that, by the way. We are here to educate our clients on everything from formation, to employee issues that means firing, separation and hiring, and then educating them on what they could easily be doing to make sure that– while you can’t protect every problem– you’ve protected the basic stuff.

Our clients start to call saying, “Hey! I have a question–” An example, “My employee is pregnant but we’re going to terminate her. What is the procedure? What do we do?” We were able to provide within an hour, “Here’s the law.”

We have seen a lot of peace of mind from our business clients, especially those on our business subscription plans. We know our clients. We don’t say, “Oh! Who is this? What are they calling about like the other legal service plans are.” We make sure that they can afford to call us and that they call us before something happens rather than after, or preventative medicine. It really is preventative law.

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