When you are running a business, it’s essential to have a good lawyer and, despite the title, I have nothing against the legal profession. But, it’s incredibly important to be careful how you use their advice.
Lawyers want to insulate you against all the bad things that can happen and, fair enough, that’s what you pay them for. But they are less likely to consider what is best for your business in the long term. I’ll use two examples: Employee handbooks/contracts and terms and conditions for clients.
Employee Contracts
A massive hat tip is due to Glenn Elliott (founder of RewardGateway) for the employee handbooks point. He articulated something that I had been thinking for some time much better than I would have, which is if you read your employee contracts the chances are that they are written in a way that implies zero trust in your employees.
They are full of things you are not permitted to do, and lists of potential sanctions/disciplinary processes and so on. Your expenses policy may imply that all employees are out to defraud your company in some way. I remember wanting to rewrite our expenses policy from a fairly boilerplate thing we’d put together in about 2001. I wanted to create something that reflected the way things actually worked, with a lot more trust in people to do what they thought was right. Once it had been through ops and legal it was a 2-page document that implied we had very little trust in our team to make the right call. Very prescriptive. It took a lot of arguing to cut it back to what I originally had in mind.
Why would you want your employees’ first experiences of your company to be an overly bureaucratic document that practically accuses them of being a thief and a liar?
The Ts and the Cs
The same thing with terms and conditions – the lawyers will want to cover all the potential risks, and you might think, “who cares, no one reads those things anyway?”, but the same principle applies: some people will read them and you can risk alienating them. But you are also putting in writing how you expect to treat customers. As this might be the only written document relating to how you treat customers, it can take on a life of its own. Going back to the expenses issue I had, I hadn’t put much thought into the expenses policy in 2001, but in 2014 the same one was being used by HR – without any increases in per diems.
As another example, let’s say that you are a food delivery company. Your lawyers recommend that you have in your terms and conditions that customers must check their delivery before the delivery driver leaves. This might seem sensible. But in practice, few people will until they unpack the food and the driver is long gone. As a business person, you would be unlikely to refer them to the terms and conditions if they complained something was missing. You’d want to make it right. But as you grow and new people come in, they might refer to the T&Cs and refuse.
So, think carefully about what you let the lawyers persuade you to put in and make sure that your contracts reflect the way you actually want to operate as a company.