Soar to Success August 2019

SOAR TO SUCCESS / Feature Article In each of those relationships, there are optimal and inappropriate procedures, plus a wide spectrum in between, that affect legal liability. Every business owner, manager, or supervisor can benefit from learning and fixing any problems in those six relationships before they become bet-the-company issues or problems that must be resolved in court. Gertsburg says that the employee-employer relationship is probably the most regulated of these six relationships. The Fair Labor Standards Act, Family Medical Leave Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, and all the other laws and regulations governing employee relationships must be closely monitored or a business opens itself up to a lawsuit that will cost seemingly unending time, energy and profit. The lawsuits are also extremely distracting and highly stressful. The customer relationship is usually contractual, which should help make any issues easier to resolve. Gertsburg crafts those documents in a way that make dispute resolution faster and less expensive for the company, relying on time-tested language that operates to keep disputes in the conference room and out of the courtroom. Although it is difficult to standardize any business legal issue, or make one plan to fit all, most legal issues that Gertsburg has seen as a business lawyer stem from one of these six areas. “Everything we do is highly customized. The only thing standard is that we always stick within those six areas. I firmly believe that that is where the most liability exists for a business. Our process is that we effectively sue our clients confidentially and constructively before someone else does for real, and very publicly.”