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How To Protect Your Business To Avoid Court By Lucy Wheeler

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Is your business legally protected? Research from Royal London found that many of the six million UK business don’t have the right business protection in place, leaving them vulnerable to a variety of risks, including administration. Lawyer Lucy Wheeler and founder of legal templates website, is on a mission to make legal protection simple, accessible and affordable for small businesses. Here, she has shared 4 simple steps on how you can get your business protected and avoid court. Clear & valid contracts Your contracts are the legal foundations of business relationships. It’s important to ensure that you have these in place right from the outset so that you and anyone you are working with knows where you stand from a legal perspective. That way, clients know what they can reasonably expect from working from you and equally your clients have confidence in the service they are receiving. It’s important that contracts are carefully drafted to ensure that they cover everything necessary to protect your unique business and so that you can actually deliver on what you promise. Whilst even with a contract you can’t guarantee that you won’t be taken to court, getting your legal contracts in place gives you a clear starting point so that you know the strengths of your position and whether it is worth investing time and money into defending any court action brought against you. Being in contract It’s one thing to have contracts in place and ensuring that you’re meeting each individual aspect of the contract, as well as the overall spirit of any agreement is another matter. Part of doing what you can to ensure you’re within the terms of contract starts with being realistic about what you can offer and ensuring you create a contract that you can fulfil on to begin with, as well as being conscientious and meeting the terms laid out. It’s often tempting when you’re starting out to offer too much. When you are setting out the detail of your contract, it could be worth under promising and over delivering. You will be legally obligated to deliver everything in the contract but that doesn’t stop you from delivering even more and setting a high level of customer service. Maintaining good communication is key. We recommend approaching providing your services with the mindset of being open to receiving feedback and making adjustments where appropriate. In addition, it’s beneficial to take the lead and have various check in points during the term of your contract so you can give clients the opportunity to provide any feedback and do everything you can to provide them with a great service. Depending on the service you offer, this check in might involve asking questions such as: “How do you feel things are going?” “Do you feel like you’re moving forward?” “Is there anything you like more support with, and if so, what?” Sometimes, just the check-ins that simply say that there are no updates on the project because you are still waiting for X to happen are the most helpful to clients so that they know that they haven’t been forgotten about. Coming to a solution outside of Court Whilst having clear contracts and ensuring you fulfil them is so important to do what you can to avoid being taken to court, it’s important to highlight again that you cannot guarantee that someone won’t take you to court. However, if this does happen to you, not all is lost, though how you respond to this is important. You can seek a solution outside of court. In some situations, this may look like simply giving a client either a percentage of or all of their money back. Whilst this is far from an ideal situation, it’s important to think about the bigger picture and weighing up the costs to you (in both time and money) to defend a legal claim and potentially your brand reputation of having a court case against you, which is open for the public to see. Going to court is expensive and takes up a lot of time and energy ,and when you’re running a business your time and energy is precious. Giving someone their money back may actually be much less expensive than going through court proceedings. In addition, going to court may also affect how much time and energy you can give to your business and therefore may affect your sales and income potential. Another way of coming to a solution outside of court is through Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), which relates to a variety of ways of solving a consumer problem without the parties having to go to court and includes conciliation, mediation and arbitration. Depending on the sums involved ADR may be cheaper, more flexible, faster and less stressful. Be on the mark from the start & get your trade mark So far we’ve discussed what you can do to avoid being taken to court by clients or customers, but it’s also important to discuss how you can reduce the likelihood being taken to court by other business owners. In the online space innovation and creation of new ideas is at an all time high. Protection of those ideas is key and one place where new business owners get caught out is by failing to adequately check the availability of the name or logo they wish to use. Checking Companies House will not provide all of the information required. The key place to check is with the Intellectual Property Office so that you can avoid using someone else’s trademark by mistake. It’s easy to believe that this won’t happen to you, but sadly we see many business owners who receive letters requesting that they cease and desist from trading under the relevant name from other businesses- sometimes in the middle of a launch. Whether you’re just starting out in business or you're a while in and you’ve been putting it off, it’s important to get your trade mark sorted from the beginning so that you can rest assured that your brand is legally protected and so that you can ensure that you are not illegally infringing on anyone else’s intellectual property.

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